Almost from the outset, I couldn't find very much that was credible about this movie. It starts with Christian Slater portraying a disaffected teen who has difficulty adjusting to high school in Arizona having moved from the East Coast. Okay, I'll grant some separation anxiety from his friends back home, but Slater's character is a good looking, fashionably dressed enough teen who shouldn't have had any trouble making new friends or introducing himself to girls in his class. That he couldn't even look one in the eye defied any kind of logic that I can come up with. Then there's the social milieu at Hubert Humphrey High School. It appeared that EVEYONE going to school was ready to plunge into anarchy after listening to Hard Harry's (Slater) pirate radio broadcasts. That's just not reality. I know the movie was trying to make a point about teenage angst and alienation, but even so, there would have been some responsible students somewhere in those corridors who wouldn't go along with Harry's broadcasts to defy all forms of authority. And finally, there was Mark/Harry's home life. Didn't his parents hear him screaming downstairs during his radio outbursts? And I won't even get into how easy it would have been to discover who was doing those shows if a fellow student like Nora (Samantha Mathis) was able to figure it out. Okay, so it's almost three decades since this movie came out, but I can't imagine how authorities would have been that clueless to scope out Harry's location and put an end to his nonsense sooner than they did. A recent incident at a local high school near me that threatened the safety of students resulted in three neighboring school lock-downs within a half hour.

I like the movie, "Pump Up the Volume", it's a good movie in the decade right now in 2011, this is my favorite film still, Christian Slater's brilliant performance in this 1990 comedy/drama, Slater played as Mark Hunter, a shy high school student who's a independent and quiet young student, but at night he became pirate radio VJ, Hard Harry, and Hard Harry had a voice sound like Jack Nicholson, Samantha Mathis in her film debut as Nora, Nora is sweet, but she is wild, the soundtrack in the movie is great, I like the songs in the film including Leonard Cohen's Everybody Knows, Ice-T, Beastie Boys, and Was Not Was' Dad, I'm in Jail, and the songs also was featured in the soundtrack album also including artists like Soundgraden, Liquid Jesus, Sonic Youth, Above The Law, Peter Murphy, and more, Plot is great, I like this movie a lot.

Pump Up The Volume stars Christian Slater as Mark, a shy high schooler who has an alter ego. In the evenings, he broadcasts from some equipment set up in his parents basement, creating a radio persona named "Hard Harry." He is wild and profane, but talks honestly about that things that bother him as a young adult. Eventally, his classmates begin to discover his broadcast, and the word spreads among them until he is a local phenomenon. Except that no one knows who it is saying all these things, because Mark is quiet and timid in class.He starts talking about some of the questionable practices going on at his school, which gets the attention of the administration and eventually the authorities. The pressure builds as more kids rely on "Harry" for direction, and more adults are trying to find him and shut him down. It eventually ends with the principal of the school being exposed and fired, just as Harry is discovered and apprehended. We are left to make our own assumptions as to how the student body will respond and move forward now that Harry is off the air.I was pretty apathetic about this story. I didn't find it all that memorable. I think the stuff I enjoyed most was the inspirational parts of Harry's broadcast (mixed in with scatological humor). I thought a lot of it was well written, although not really believable dialog for a high school student. If I had seen this movie when it came out, it might hold some nostalgic value. Watching it for the first time this year, it didn't do much for me.

So many movies echo of the days of youth such as Stand By Me, The Outsiders, and The Breakfast Club, but do they really speak to us? Is there one with such a strong, powerful voice that will pull us to our feet, open our eyes, and touch our soul? Is there one, who could talk on and talk hard, holding the world in the sway of his words and in the depth of his heart? What is it in a voice that captivates us? Is it the actor breathing life into fiction or the storyline filled with drama? Either way, we are listening, and the power of speech plays on in the movie, Pump Up The Volume.And Pink Floyd said it best, "For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk."