Shredder Orpheus

2025 remastered. Shredder Orpheus 1990 is a blast from the past, do what you can cult film that predicts many social media and AI with zombies scrolling their lives away similar to outcomes that we are now erringly troubled by today.

The film's message about big corporations using passive media to control people feels way too real. It's like 24 hour cable "breaking news" about the reality show we find ourselves living in.

Think of the dystopian world of Blade Runner meets Brazil and A Clockwork Orange in a post-apocalyptic punk rock world with social media zombies hooked to tic-tok or instagram to name a few and your getting the vision.

Corporate greed owns us and the director Robert McGinley foretells this dilemma way before the internet in his movie using sinister, soul sucking, brain-numbing TV network EBN (Euthanasia Broadcasting Network). It blends the Greek myth of Orpheus with a grungy, post-severe non-vaccinated pandemic punk vibe together with skateboarders and industrial sounds and music set in a desolate "Grey Zone" where people live in shipping containers. By the way, if anybody knows of a container available in LA, I could use one now. How did the director Robert McGinley know?

Utilizing the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, the movies hero, Orpheus, is a guitarist whose wife gets snapped up by EBN to be in their shows. So he literally skateboards into the corporate underworld to save her, armed with a guitar and a serious attitude.

The completed film is a grungy wild ride, that has a heart, a unique style, and a vision that's more important now than ever.

Bottom line, if you ever tried LSD or were crazy drunk, you'll love this tempestuous fun film!

It's now out on a 2025 remastered obscure DVD near you.

Shredder Orpheus feels like someone mashed Greek myth, skate culture and late-80s chaos into one gloriously weird fever dream. It reinvents the classic love story with a punk edge that somehow makes the whole legend feel brand new. Every character is offbeat in a way that keeps you glued to the screen, like you've stepped into a world where everyone truly commits to the bit. The film is unfiltered, unruly and that's exactly what gives it its magic.

Shredder Orpheus is a pure, gutsy blast of 90s cult energy that bleeds an authenticity you just don't see anymore. This raw, bizarre skate-rock opera from maverick Robert McGinley comes from a time when people grabbed a camera and made films just because they had to, not because it fit a marketing plan.

It's a gut-punch reminder of what filmmaking was before it got sanitized, focus-grouped, and bled dry by today's formulaic "Excel sheet" franchises - a far cry from the clean, boring, corporate slop we're fed today.

My review was written in May 1990 after watching the movie on AIP video cassette.

The Greek legend that produced arthouse faves "Orpheus" and "Black Orpheus" crashes to Earth in the idiotic punk sci-fi feature "Shredder Orpheus". It's for fans of in-jokes only.

Helmer Robert McGinley also toplines as Orpheus, a band leader (of the Shredders) in a post-apocalyptic world where hipsters live in shanty towns known as the Grey Zone. McGinley's underdeveloped script posits an easy enemy, the Euthanasia Broadcasting Network, which involves Cronenberg-style philosophizing) out of his "Videodrome") as weak satire.

Punk tv programmers want Eurydice (Megan Murphy) for their new show. The underworld in this sci-fi universe is a place where people's memories are shredded faster than you can say Oliver North.

Orpheus becomes a tv star playing an electronic lyre instrument supposedly invented by Jimi Hendrix. Heroine disappears after Orpheus violates the "Don't look back" warning and gazes at her; rest of the film is him searching for her. Finale involving skateboarders is stupid.

Apparently McGinley didn't watch Jean Cocteau's 1950 classic very closely since he leaves out the poignant role of Heurtebise (played eloquently in "Orphee" by Francois Perier). He also fails to find any equivalent to Cocteau's inspired anachronisms, and is instead content to littering the dialog with advertising slogans and catchphrases.

Acting is amateurish and technical quality, mixing film and video footage, subpar.

Shredder Orpheus. Shredder. Orpheus. Shhhhhhhhredder Orrrrrrrpheus. What is a shredder, you ask? One that shreds, I would reply. Shredding is the subtle art of using one's skateboard to tear a path of gnarly tricks and bodacious bust-a-moves wherever one would go, a parking garage for example. Orpheus, well, he's the mythical figure that went down to hell to retrieve his dead girlfriend, Eurydice, and failed to avoid looking back at her while leading her out, thereby losing her once again to Hades. What do you get when you combine these two seemingly unrelated topics?

The most flawless cinematic masterpiece ever created by the hands of man.

Robert McGinley's ingenious social commentary on the effect of television on the emerging generation X of the world through the medium of The Euthanasia Broadcast Network is one of the many things that makes this film worth lobbying to be released on DvD. I would be willing to shell out any amount of cash just to hear McGinley's commentary on what it was like to film such scenes as "Thrashing the Euthanasia Garage" and "Today's used cars are better than ever", not to mention the prolific, heart-wrenching introductory war-torn speech by the Janus-influenced character of Axel.

The music to this movie is amazing. The sound that Orpheus produces from his futuristic, Hendrix created magical axe has such an effect on the people around him that the very reality around them is distorted, which you can see by the special effects that far surpass any that ILM or any computer could whip up nowadays. Rash's inspirational drumming shows that McGinley really has his pulse on the youth of today, or of the future for that matter. One can only imagine what sort of gruelling preparation that actress had to go through to learn the complicated sixteenth-note triplets and paradiddles that grace our ears from the rusty metal orchestra.

The film ultimately questions about what it is to be human and experience real life and true emotions. From the tear-jerking meeting of Orpheus with his dead parents (who sadly did not get to see their son's beautiful wedding ceremony in the Grey Zone) to the jaw-dropping, majestic finale of Orpheus' orgasmic confrontation with the chainsaw-wielding Furies, this film is a must-see, if not a must-own as well.