No childhood is complete without a fantastically expensive and frivolous fad, and the BMX bike was one such item - and one which I could even take part in (skateboarding was definitely not for me, as I was incapable of standing on one). Who would have thought that Australia, and the king of ozploitation cinema Brian Trenchard-Smith, would produce the movie to capture the zeitgeist of the colourful bicycles. I first saw this film in 1984 at a film club (basically a small room with a projector and screen, filled with us poor kids, whose parents wanted us out of the house).Three kids, Goose (James Lugton), P.J. (Angelo D'Angelo), and Judy (Nicole Kidman), spend their summer holidays riding around on their bikes, attempting to get into mischief. They stumble across a box containing walkie-talkies (that's massive pre-mobile phone, communication boxes), that belong to a gang of bank robbers. Once the criminals (crims to use the colloquial term) discover that these pesky kids have "stolen" the items, a hapless pair (Whitey (David Argue) and Moustache (John Ley)), chase the trio around the seaside town, with comic effect.Of course this is a silly film, it is completely unadulterated fun, and doesn't have the ubiquitous saccharine kids of an American "kids" film, and do not fall prey to the kind of posh-kids found in Enid Blyton's Famous Five stories. The young cast never become annoying, and hold the film together throughout. This is how us kids spent our summer holidays back in the day. Nowadays, children miss out on this sense of freedom, and completely lose out on creating mischief, as parents fear "stranger danger" which has been perpetuated by our "objective" media (thanks for that!). I'm going to end on an appeal: Parents out there, let your kids run free, let them get into trouble whilst cycling with friends in a summer sense of autonomy - if you don't believe me when I state that this will enrich your children, then watch this film and see what happens.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Fond childhood memories of this film were strong enough for a re-watch. Now in my early 30's I can appreciate the nuances of BMX Bandits. The story is original and the setting of Australia is ideal. Nicole Kidman shows her early magical acting skills and the two young lead actors are equally engaging.The story follows Two teenage boys and one young girl (Kidman) trying to get enough money by any crazy scheme to fund their BMX passion. They get involved by accident with some bank robbers and the story unfolds. A reasonable family film with little to no bad language or nudity. SOme good Australian humour and a very early 80's feel. Do not expect a high budget film with fancy stunts and explosions as you will be very disappointed.

So I purchased this because it is early Kidman. I did not expect great acting or a great story and after reading some of the user comments here big chunks of the story actually were a whole lot better than I had expected. Some aspects of the story are blatantly weak, particularly how the police are portrayed, but much is not as weak as all that. It is different to early Sandra Bullock, but part of that might be the age difference. I did not know much about BMX when it was a fashion and this tells me a bit about what those bikes can do. Since watching this I have seen a mature guy, maybe in his twenties, with a pedal bike that seemed to have motor bike wheels and that seems a big step up to my city cycling tyred ATB, but maybe not for the stunt cycling that is in this film. Or normal city cycling. *** The big problem with this DVD, for me, is the image quality. I have a PAL region 2 on the Contender label, 2005, and the sunnier scenes are a bit washed out. I can put up with that. A bigger problem is that the aspect ratio is wrong. This is widescreen letterboxed in 1.78 and measures as 2.38 to 1, approx, but it looks squashed vertically. To get it to look right depends on one's player. On a computer with VLC 8.1 I set preferences/video/source aspect ratio to 16:10 and this played with the image looking about right. If I had a 1.78 screen I would need to use the 16:10 setting and also select the preferences/video/video filter module/crop module and use a manual crop to trim the top, bottom and maybe also the sides. preferences/ Modules/video filter/crop/crop geometry/720x476+0+50. Ie 'width'x'height'+'left offset'+'top offset'. Practical, but thankfully one does not need to do that sort of thing too often. March 2011, 'Woodyanders' posted a comment that a new DVD of this by Severin does show the aspect ratio properly.

I and my brother rented this movie for our birthdays for, I don't know, something like five years in a row. Even though it might not be a philosophical masterpiece, it's one of the dearest memories I have from my childhood. I gave it a 10. I'm renting it again for my brother's bachelor party. If he ever finds a woman to marry, that is.