It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Interesting to watch this movie 24 years after it was released. It really 'spoke' to me when I was a teenager. What I found interesting watching it as an adult was how much I agreed with Mark (Christian Slater) about how strange it is to live in Arizona. He keeps telling his parents: 'People are weird here, I can't talk to anyone, they don't understand me.' I'm sure it was only a way to make him seem at odds with his classmates. But so peculiar that I feel the same way as an adult living in Arizona and coming from the mid-west. People in Arizona are strange, and very different...definitely not easy to get along with. Nobody gets me here...this was an unexpected feeling as I watched this again and was able to connect to the main character on a different level than as a teenager.

Christian Slater plays Mark Hunter, a shy teenager who has just moved from the East coast to Arizona. His parents give him a short wave radio set that he turns into a pirate radio station where his shyness evaporates, and instead he uses the handle "Hard Harry", where he vents his frustrations and confusions to his fellow teenagers, who it turns out are very receptive to this message, and "Hard Harry" finds himself the most popular and influential person in town, much to his high school principal's consternation. Things take a dark turn when a troubled teenage listener commits suicide, and the authorities become eager to shut down his illegal broadcasts.Smart and appealing film has a fine performance from Christian Slater, that really speaks to the hearts and minds of teenagers, and still rings true. Dramatically uneven, but will resonate strongly with people who like to listen to talk radio.

In a career dotted with offbeat and quirky roles Christian Slater was at his most offbeat and quirky in Pump Up The Volume. Slater plays a young transfer student from an eastern high school to a new school in Arizona. His Clark Kent persona is a mild mannered wallflower type. But his father made the mistake of giving him a short wave radio set to keep in touch with friends back east who are presumably ham radio operators. What Slater does is create his own pirate radio station and starts with another whole personality of disc jockey Harry Hardon. Slater's other self isn't Superman, he's more like a teenage version of Howard Beale from Network.He's amusing at first until one of the students commits suicide after calling in and Slater does little to discourage his intentions. That's a hard call to make, even professionals miss telltale signs of that kind of serious depression.But when Slater starts disrupting the power structure in the person of principal Annie Ross, the hunt is on with even the Federal Communications Commission brought in to track down this broadcasting felon. Imagine Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest as a school principal and you've got Ross. The main weakness of Pump Up The Volume is that Slater and Ross create the only two memorable characters. All the rest are strictly in support, we get no insights into any of the rest of the cast. But these two are memorable characters. A teenage mad prophet of the air and a school principal from hell.Pump Up The Volume is a staple for Christian Slater fans.

To me, it's the perfect companion piece to Heathers. It has the same message, but this time Slater's character is the voice of reason who the audience can side with, instead of an agent of destruction...Many of the same themes are touched upon in the two films; how hard it is to be an adolescent when you feel like you're being disenfranchised, and the sense of feeling shepherded into the uniform lines of conformity that produce the obedient workers of the future. However, in contrast to the dark tone of "Heathers", "Pump up the Volume" strikes an optimistic note of people banding together to build something, rather than the savage nihilism that says to induce change, you have to completely obliterate things and start again.Ultimately, doing your best to get the message heard makes a heck of a lot more sense than simply putting a bomb under the problem, and then absolving yourself of the results.