URBAN VENGEANCE, not be confused with Seagal’s URBAN JUSTICE, is a D.I.Y. skateboard action movie I stumbled across on Tubi. The art looked old but the release year was listed as 2024, and I got curious. Sometimes these things you gotta watch for a bit to get an idea if they’re even gonna be watchable at all, but this one I knew pretty immediately I would keep watching because the hero, Jack Urban (Will Martin), is riding his skateboard through an L.A. River type cement ditch called “Skate River” when a guy wheelies in on a motorcycle firing an uzi at him. Jack ducks under a low tunnel, the motorcycle somehow explodes into a fireball behind him, there’s a distorted guitar strum, Jack turns to grimly survey the damage and then skates off into the title sequence powered by retro synth arpeggios (score by Derlis A. González). Off to a great start.

Jack is supposed to be a teenager, and Martin looks like he could actually be one, but he’s also the writer and director of the film. On his websight he calls the movie “an homage to cheesy skateboarding dramas of the ‘80s such as GLEAMING THE CUBE and THRASHIN’,” but thankfully there is no winking or parodying. It comes across as a serious attempt at a CLASS OF 1984 world-gone-insane youth movie, with a sprinkling of DEADBEAT AT DAWN rawness.

It’s made with resources that seem impressive for however young Martin actually was when he made it, but also exhibits a young person’s movie-based understanding of the world. Jack is prone to Snake Plisskenly grumbling tough guy lines like “I don’t give a shit about your school, or your funding problem,” and faux-hard-boiled musings about the state of the world:

“Violence is like a machine. You wanna stop it, you gotta jam a wrench in the gears,” he tells his sister.

“What are you trying to say?” she asks.

“Nothin’s worth sayin’ anymore.”

Some of these lines could pass for a production by the Max Fischer Players. He interrupts a passionate kiss to say, “I’m not cynical, I just never gave a damn.” I can’t claim these 78 minutes are all rip roaring, but their mix of sincerity, absurdity and a writer/director/star who knows how to ollie made it well worth my time.

It’s set in “Austin, two weeks in the future,” but there’s not much to suggest it’s futuristic besides out of control crime and the TERMINATOR-esque font on the opening credits. Though a man just tried to kill him (and then died!), Jack still goes to school, where he’s accosted in the cafeteria by adult gang members, and aided by a mysterious girl named Dorothy (Victoria Lydia Rodriguez), who has decided to turn on The King (Kelvin Girdy), the local crime boss who killed Jack’s idealistic younger sister Sam (Carson Goldsmith). That story will be (sort of) explained in flashbacks, in which Jack dismisses Sam’s plans to start a “Peace Club” at school, but later thinks she had the right idea to “stand for something.”

Since then he’s become some type of LEGEND OF BILLIE JEAN meets DEATH WISH folk hero on a mission of justice. Everyone keeps mentioning seeing him on TV (for killing gang members?), and later we see fuddy-duddy pundits and even the mayor denouncing him on the news, but the principal still treats him as a normal student who can be suspended for “rollerskating” in the hallway. He sleeps in a cluttered furnace room in the back of a skate shop, living off checks from his dad in L.A., “SUPPORT OF SON” typed into the memo line. At first The King isn’t as worried about “the skater kid” as some of his lieutenants are. But he should be: a Russian foreign exchange student (Seth Barton) has Jack’s back, brings him inside information and an arsenal of guns and grenades.

This is not like THRASHIN’ in the sense that they don’t have Tony Hawk catching air off of a half pipe or pool, it’s more basic skating. But it’s cool in that it’s made by an actual skater so he’s sure to get in some footage of his skills, some scenes at his local skate shop and a reference to his favorite Bones Brigade video. Also he’s painting himself as a badass anti-hero, so he invents a sort of skate-kata style of action. In fights he’ll skate across a table or between combatants, leap off to kick someone, pick up his board and hit people with it, or block a machete with it like he’s having a sword fight. He’ll be rolling and suddenly have a machine gun but still alternate between shooting and hitting people with his board. In one scene he throws his board down and says “Let’s do this the old fashioned way.” In another, he and King are both knocked down and weakened, King trying to reach for a gun on the ground, Jack trying to reach for his board.

Again, it’s very homemade, lots of not-so-convincing punches to faces and stuff, but the skateboard stuff is such a great gimmick that it kept me smiling to the end.

I probly try to describe this phenomenon more often than I need to, but this is a backyard, underdog type production where things that would make no impression at all in a Hollywood movie seem incredibly impressive just because you or I wouldn’t know how to do it if we were trying to make a movie. Like, they seem to have a real Homeland Security Border Patrol vehicle in one part? And an attack dog. And a cafeteria full of students. (Was he really still in high school?) And a few practical explosions. They use some great locations, including an automobile graveyard and very skate-able graffiti-covered ditches that I guess are part of an abandoned water park called Aqua Thrill Way. Also, a bunch of scenes where he’s being chased by or dragged behind motor vehicles.

There are slick camera moves and skateboard POVs and occasionally they’ll tint it to stylized colors, but more often they give it all a gloomy overcast look that reminds me of how glum so many movies looked when we watched them on VHS. I’m sure it’s not film but it looks gritty, never suffers from that overlit video look.

The acting is non-professional, but generally better than a random person off the street. Martin would’ve benefited from streamlining his own dialogue, but I guess the over-indulgence has a certain charm. Gabe Shebesta as his buddy Blind is clearly a non-actor but has a natural doofus-sidekick appeal. Girdy as The King gives a legit performance that made me wonder how they found an adult who knew how to act, and the fact that his shtick is a little more Huggy Bear than Cyrus is kind of different for a lead villain. I like it. Then he turns super villain and decides to blow up a dam to kill the whole city because “this town held me back all my life.” Take that, Austin.

I couldn’t find much information about the movie, and only one review, until I realized it had a separate listing on IMDb as a 2012 movie called ROUGHRIDER. Ah, so that explains why it doesn’t look like a movie made last year. In that incarnation it was apparently reviewed by Film Threat, but I couldn’t find the review online.

Martin still maintains a domain for “Earthly Expat,” which is credited as the production company for the movie, but is also his “travel and global politics blog trying to understand this beautiful, crazy world.” He refers to a decade of experience as an IATSE member working construction on film sets, but has since moved to Australia where he works as a carpenter and studies international relations while hoping to make a movie called SHOREBREAK that would be “a sci-fi allegory for international relations that will explore anarchy.” It’s a shame if someone who showed such youthful go-getter spirit couldn’t kickstart a career as a filmmaker if that’s what he wanted, but I don’t know how many American-Australian carpenters you’ll meet who once directed and starred in a low budget movie where they rode around on a skateboard with an uzi fighting cartels and corrupt Border Patrol agents and guys named Blade, Ice and Gator. That’s a cool brag and I would definitely hold my head high if I were him.