How to Film a Shoestring Sci-Fi Hit In a Rock Quarry

In Turbo Kid, masked psychos traverse a post-apocalyptic wasteland on BMX bikes (because it's 1997) and decapitate innocents along the way. A comics-obsessed kid finds a power suit belonging to his favourite superhero in a downed spacecraft, as well as the key to saving his robot girlfriend from the evil one-eyed warlord who killed his parents: a hand-mounted laser cannon.

The movie, which premiered at Sundance in January to positive reviews and kicked off a North American theatrical run last weekend, is the gory lovechild of 80s sci-fi classics like Mad Max and Escape from New York, and newer franchises like Kick Ass and Chobits. Blood spurts out of characters' necks like a firehose, and in one scene, a low-level crook's exposed guts get tied to the back wheel of a stationary bike and slowly yanked out.

It's a shit-ton of nostalgic, bloody fun. But here's what makes Turbo Kid really special: It's a Canadian indie flick shot almost entirely in a quarry in northern Quebec on a shoestring budget—and turning the quarry into a retro-future wasteland was just one of the many practical effects feats the film's writers and directors were able to pull off.

Siblings Anouk and Yoann Whissell, and Anouk's partner, Francois Simard—who call themselves the Roadkill Superstars when they're making movies—wouldn't tell me how small the budget was, exactly, citing ongoing negotiations to license the film in more countries. But they assured me it was very, very little.

"We had a budget that made us get really creative," Yoann added. "Money is time. When you run out of time, it's because you've run out of money." That they accomplished all they could within their tight constraints was due to the efforts of their crew, Francois said, who "made miracles with almost no money."

"We had to make sacrifices every day," Yoann said over Skype, sitting in a sunny room next to his two partners. "We probably had half the gore we wanted." One gag that was cut due to time constraints, according to Francois, would have involved dual streams of vomit and blood shooting out of a character's decapitated head as the film's villain knocked their head off with a golf club.

The Roadkill Superstars have a penchant for practical effects, and, for the most part, shun computer-generated images. This no doubt helped their bottom line, but presented some unique challenges for a sci-fi feature. That wrecked spacecraft I mentioned? It was made out of milk crates, wood, and parts of an old Russian plane that they got from a junk artist who goes by "Recu-Pier," who is apparently involved in the new X-Men film. No CGI was used.

"We initially had two weeks to build the spaceship, but we had to turn around and go, sorry guys, you have three days now," Yoann said. "And they made it happen, and it looks fantastic."

The impressive amount of squirting blood also caused issues, as the crew filmed in the frigid temperatures of a Quebecois spring. In the infamous gut-pulling scene, for instance, the slapdash rig the team was using—it involved a pump and tubes carrying the blood—kept freezing up. "The blood was almost ice," Anouk said. The system had to be continually warmed up in trailers. "It was so bad," Yoann added, laughing.

As surprisingly good as the movie looks, there are still some tiny details that betray its low budget. In one gruesome shot, when a baddie gets his jaw torn from his head, the actor's fake moustache can be seen ever-so-subtly falling off his face. In some of the busier scenes, which bring to mind the bustling Bartertown of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, some of the extras can be seen wearing unadorned football pads for armor.

These humorous touches are both a nod to the hokey sci-fi B-movie vibe Turbo Kid cultivates, and an acknowledgement of the real material limitations its directors faced while making the movie. This cheeky combination of calculated intent and a palpably freewheeling DIY spirit is exactly what makes Turbo Kid so damn charming, and why you should probably go see it tonight.