Sometime in 1990, I walked up to the counter to buy the tickets for my date and myself and said to the cashier, “Boy, I sure am pumped to see Pump Up the Volume.” The girl I was with looked at me like I was insane. The resulting eyeroll from the woman behind the counter was epic, yet she still reached under the counter and retrieved a rubbery plastic keychain promoting the film, which my keys were on for the longest time. Turns out it paid to scrutinize the movie ads in the newspaper, even if it was just to turn myself into a walking advertisement for the film.
The keychain broke after a couple of years, but it lasted longer than any memories of the film. 35 years later, the best I could recall was it had the “UK Surf” version the Pixies’s “Wave of Mutilation”. I thought the plot involved a pirate radio station, but I wasn’t even sure about that.
Christian Slater indeed hijacks an unused FM band in suburban Arizona, courtesy of a short wave radio his dad bought him to talk to friends he left back on the east coast. But his friends don’t reply, which does seem unlikely unless dad sprung for setups for Slater’s friends as well. One thing that seems so surprising to me now is how the internet was right around the corner and how radically it would change communications. Also, I wondered where Slater got the device to disguise his voice, as that seems a tad creepy.
So, every night at 10 pm, he fires up the equipment and shares music and his rambling monologues with whomever is listening. Using a voice modulator and the alias “Happy Harry Hard-On”, his initial performance pieces are simulating jerking off. “Are you ready for the sound of Hard Harry coming on his own face?” I’m not but, inexplicably, a number of young women listening to him are very intrigued by this. That he openly admits he is a student of a particular high school makes it seem to me he’s begging to be caught.
For somebody who professes to hate the sixties so much, he sure seems to love Lenny Bruce. One of his key rants is that thoughts are like a virus, so I guess he has also been reading some Burroughs. For the most part, however, he rants about not having a car and, even if he did, there would only be lame places to drive to like the mall. Definitely something his high school peers can relate to, but not exactly trenchant insights. Still, kids start tagging walls of the school with some of his catchphrases. They also start trading tapes of his show.
Admittedly, the music is largely good, but not great. Joining the aforementioned Pixies track are ones by Sonic Youth, Cowboy Junkies, Soundgarden, Leonard Cohen, Was Not Was and Stan Ridgeway. He lays Richard Hell’s “Love Comes in Spurts”, which is no surprise given his key shtick. Near the end of the film, an Urban Dance Squad track is used as if it is something hardcore, which I found hilarious even though I was a fan of that group. Slater also raps over the Beastie Boys, ending that with, “I just love being the rap king of Arizona”. Come to think of it, I don’t think we see a single Black person on the screen until close to the one-hour mark.
Perhaps those students had been expelled from the school, as Slater exposes a scheme where the undesirable students are expelled. A smug guidance counselor who helped expel a pregnant girl says to Slater, “I run a comprehensive American values program”, something which made my skin crawl. It is exactly the kind of phrasing used currently to cloak racist, misogynist and homophobic beliefs today.
While I question Slater identifying a girl as pregnant on his broadcast, this is the point where he actually starts using his program to do so some good. He calls some of those who have sent letters to the P.O. box he’s rented. He thinks he has talked one kid out of committing suicide, only for the boy to shoot himself shortly after he hangs up. Well, you can’t win them all. At least Slater wasn’t encouraging the guy to off himself, which seems to be the standard operating procedure for how people behave on social media.
Then there’s the kid he calls up who wrote a letter about being gay and humiliated by a jock and his friends. In one of the more honest lines of the script, that kid says, “Sometimes I wonder why some people are born one way and some people another.” I’d be terrified to hear the speculation of many people today. Consider some of these likely questions: “Did your mom take Tylenol while she was pregnant with you?”, “Did you been receiving vaccinations?”, “Is the drinking water fluoridated in your town?”
Once others start rebroadcasting Slater’s show across state lines, he incurs the wrath of the FCC. Admittedly, that seems to be a more valid reason than the real-life FCC commissioner Brenda Carr had when threats he made on a podcaster’s show on September 17, 2025, resulted in ABC pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s show. Kimmel may have returned the next week, but it was a few days before broadcasters Nexstar and Sinclair stopped preempting the show on the local affiliates they own.
Something I find unlikely about the film is the broad and strong influence Slater has over his audience, though this does seem to foretell the rise of influencers. A prescient statement of his is, “Society is mutating so rapidly that nobody over the age of twenty has any idea.” I also thought it telling he can talk so freely on a microphone but can’t talk to Samantha Mathis face-to-face. Somebody shooting their mouth off anonymous to a crowd of followers but can’t talk to girls in person—that also seems awfully relevant today.
Like so many who have a following, Slater’s listeners start tearing shit up. I was especially curious how a group of students managed to obtain a six-foot-high cock. I was even more curious why the school library has a copy of Lenny Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty and Influence People when it is unlikely any school would have that today. For a film with so many alarmingly prescient elements, that’s the one thing it couldn’t foresee: rampant book bans in school libraries.
Dir: Allan Moyle
Starring Christian Slater, Samantha Mathis
Watched on Warner Archive blu-ray