Film: The Cult Classic "Pump Up The Volume" Turns 35

Debuted on 22 August 1990, "Pump Up the Volume" the coming-of-age teen drama film written and directed by Allan Moyle. The film stars Christian Slater, Scott Paulin, Ellen Greene, and Samantha Mathis. Despite positive critical response, the movie topped out at $11 million at the box office at the time. 

The plot was this: high school student Mark Hunter lives in a sleepy suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, and broadcasts an FM pirate radio station from his parents' basement which functions as his sole outlet for his teenage angst and aggression. The station's theme song is "Everybody Knows" by Leonard Cohen and there are glimpses of cassettes by alternative musicians such as The Jesus and Mary Chain, Camper Van Beethoven, Primal Scream, Soundgarden, Ice-T, Bad Brains, Concrete Blonde, Henry Rollins, and Pixies. By day, Mark is a loner who has difficulty socializing. By night, he become Happy Harry Hard-on or simply "Hard Harry", he expounds outsider views about problems with US society, expresses teen angst, and exposes the underhanded actions of the faculty. His audience grows from a handful of loyal listeners to the entire student body.

Depressed teenager Malcolm Kaiser writes to Harry seeking advice about committing suicide. Harry flippantly expresses disbelief that Malcolm is sincere, saying "Maybe you'll feel better tomorrow." The next day it is discovered that Malcolm committed suicide.

Fellow student Nora De Niro deduces that Mark is Hard Harry, and attempts to assuage the guilt he feels over Malcolm. The radio show becomes increasingly popular after Harry apologizes to Malcolm for not telling him not to follow through, and exhorts his listeners to confront their problems instead of surrendering to them through suicide. At the climax of his speech, overachieving student and consistent listener Paige Woodward jams her medals and accolades into a microwave, causing an explosion which injures her face.

Unrest at the school increases as students share bootleg tapes re-playing Harry's show. A meeting of faculty and parents concludes that the pirate DJ is responsible for the problems at the school. The police investigate, first cutting off Mark's access to his P.O. Box, and then cutting off the wireless phone that Mark had surreptitiously hooked up at a neighboring house. The FCC begins an investigation.

Mark decides to make a final broadcast. He installs his radio station in his mother's Jeep, creating a mobile transmitter so the FCC will have difficulty triangulating the radio signal. Nora drives while Mark broadcasts pursued by the police and the FCC.

Harry's broadcast is heard by the entire school who have gathered at the athletics field. Mark's father, school board commissioner Brian Hunter, confronts Principal Loretta Cresswood demanding to know why she systematically expelled students with low test scores. Cresswood insists they were losers and troublemakers and that she did it for the good of the school. Brian immediately suspends Cresswood.

The harmonizer Mark uses to disguise his voice breaks, and Mark decides to broadcast his final message as himself. The Jeep drives up to the crowd of students, and Mark tells them that the world belongs to them and that they should make their own future. He encourages them to "steal the air" and begin their own shows to put their thoughts and feelings out into the world. The police arrest Mark and Nora. As they are taken away, students shout their appreciation of "Harry". Mark turns to the students and tells them to "Talk hard!" As the film ends, the voices of students, and even one of the teachers, are heard introducing their own pirate radio shows.

It was one of the most important roles in the career of Christian Slater, who a year after starring in cult favorite Heathers, made noise with another movie that has since earned a loyal following. This movie arrived decades before podcasters started using their medium for raw confessionals, writer-director Allan Moyle’s Pump Up the Volume featured Slater as a high school student and pirate radio DJ who causes a stir with candid commentary from his alter ego, "Hard Harry."

Moyle had written an unpublished novel that became the basis for Pump Up the Volume. John Cusack was considered for the role before it went to Slater. I’m quite surprised that it got greenlit when it did, but I doubt very much that it would get greenlit today,” says producer Rupert Harvey, who notes that New Line‘s later projects, including the Lord of the Rings franchise, were considerably more ambitious. Scott Paulin, Ellen Greene and Samantha Mathis rounded out the Pump Up cast, with Frank Zappa’s son Ahmet and Seth Green in supporting roles.

Harvey recalls a lengthy postproduction process to secure rights to songs from buzzy artists like Beastie Boys, Pixies, Ice-T and Soundgarden. The producer also remembers having to edit out some of the spicier language to achieve an R-rating for the film, which would later get attention for a scene involving Hard Harry simulating on-air masturbation.

"Pump Up the Volume" was a cult-movie that still resonates today, "Do you ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked-up?” as Christian Slater contemplates the fucked-up state of America in the Neighties. Now in 2025 when Donald Trump, a convicted felon, is president; people are being snatched off the streets and sent to foreign gulags; others are about to be kicked off of Medicaid. It’s easy to forget, prior to the internet, the feeling of being voiceless.

Is curiously to see how Pump Up The Volume predicted, and helped spark, a '90s teenage counterculture by simply depicting a shy teen with a ham radio who questions adult wisdom, challenges corruption at his school, blasts alternative music, and encourages his peers to “talk hard.”

Also contains one of the most enduring and influencer soundtracks. Leonard Cohen’s version of “Everybody Knows” which serves as the perfect song to open the movie with. Still the soundtrack does have a lot terrific tracks from The Pixies, Soundgarden, Cowboy Junkies and Sonic Youth highlighting alternative culture prior to the alternative breakout that Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991) would ignite.  Pump Up The Volume absolutely paved the way. “It felt like something was happening,” observes Samantha Mathis, who was 19 when she portrayed Mark’s poetry-writing love interest Nora in the film. “We were moving away from that synthesized sort of sound and moving into something edgier, and we had the dissonance of being around the ‘greed is good’ era of filmmaking and finance in the world. There was anger, and I thought Allan really tapped into that with this movie.”