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Movies We Love: "Red Dawn"

5/1/07

Having recently watched the Irish war drama "The Wind That Shakes the Barley", its obvious comparisons to one of my favorite action flicks ever made me realize that I haven't watched "Red Dawn", uncut and from start to finish, in a LONG time.  So, I recorded a recent screening on Encore and plopped my ass on the couch to watch this puppy all over again.

Thankfully, my experience watching "Red Dawn" again for the first time didn't have the sad effect that my re-watching of "Flash Gordon" did; man, when I watched "Flash Gordon" as an adult, I realized just what a piece of fucking shit "Flash Gordon" is, from the acting, to the sets, to the special effects, to that hilariously-bad soundtrack (come on, do it with me:  "[dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum...'FLASH!!!'...drum roll...'AAAYYYAAAA!!!!'").  "Red Dawn" and I damn near grew up together, showing on TV in either uncut or slightly-edited-for-TV versions well into my teens...and, watching the film again today brought back all the glory I had with it for so many years.

First appearing in theaters in 1984, "Red Dawn" has the unique distinction of being the first PG-13 film in history.  It also had that weird Guinness distinction of being the most consistently-violent film of all time when it was released; something violent is happening on screen at a rate of 2.23 acts of violence per minute...which, after watching this again today, makes sense, since there is about a 90-second stretch when the film opens where nothing is really going on, and from there, people are getting shot, blow'd up, about to get shot, about to get blow'd up, or dying almost all the way through to the end.

The set-up is still classic--it's World War III.  In a small town somewhere inside our borders (the film was shot in New Mexico, but as far as I could tell, the town is never named), Jed--heroically played by our man Pat Swayze--drops off his younger brother Matty (Charlie Sheen, in his first film role) and family friend Robert (C. Thomas Howell, then a huge star coming off of "E.T." and "The Outsiders") at their high school one lovely morning in September, 19XX...only to see foreign soldiers parachuting into town with the intent to kill!!  Jed rolls back into the school parking lot just in time to pick up Matty, Robert, and three other boys, and while evading gunfire and the first of dozens of RPGs (in what must be the most RPG-laden film ever made even today), they make their way out of town into the mountains, where the six men patiently train themselves in the ways of hunting, fishing, and not showering as they figure out a way to get back at their attackers...which, apparently, outnumber our good guys about 10,000 to six.

But, kind of like the recent action/fantasy "300", you know that this woefully-outnumbered gang can't possibly take down all of these baddies, so you revel in the camaraderie that the group has all the way to the last bullet.  In "Red Dawn", the group--which eventually calls itself "Wolverines", based on the high school mascot of the unnamed school--is fun because it only ever attempts to give personality to like two-thirds of the people in it.  We start out with Jed, the leader, the "old soul" who has left high school but still has that jock mentality; Matty, who looks nothing like Jed, who will stick with his bro to the bitter end; Robert, who loses his family in the initial assault, and after drinking deer's blood and gaining "The Spirit of the Deer"--still love this scene so much--goes absolutely apeshit and yells "WOLVERINES!!" every time the team goes to battle.  These three are our leads and, naturally, went on to successful careers later in life after "Red Dawn"; our backup singers here did not, in a big way.  Our backups include Aardvark (Doug Toby), who has no discernible character trait except to be a Spanish-speaking kid who watches his father get captured; Daryl (Darren Dalton), who was the class president in school before these terrorists showed up, and Danny (Brad Savage), who is the team's whiner until he toughens up and kills a few bad guys.

For a while, it's just these six guys against the baddies, who are a mix of Russian and Cuban soldiers who have banded together to take down the good ol' U.S. of A.  Why they have done this is never made completely clear (outside of the general fact that all foreigners hate us, popular in the 1980s and especially as an idea that the Russians want us all dead); what is also never made clear is how all of these soldiers can work together given the fact that they don't speak the same language.  Details, details, details.  This much we DO know--even though the Cuban commander, Colonel Bella (Ron O'Neal, the star of "Superfly", like Toby another guy who doesn't appear to have a Latin background but are playing foreigners nevertheless), has fought wars in at least six other countries and has generally not lost many men, his soldiers are completely useless against the un-military-trained six-man Wolverine squad.  This never seems to change, either...all the way until the very end of the movie, the Wolverines seem to be better fighting units than their Russo-Cuban counterparts.

The Wolverines help their cause a bit by adding two females to the mix just before they kick off the majority of their operations: Erica (Lea Thompson, who went on to make "Back to the Future" the following year), a nearly-mute woman who is just as apeshit as Robert, and Toni (Jennifer Grey, still one of the more shocking tail-off stars ever, who did this, then "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", then "Dirty Dancing", then...nothing), another wild woman who serves as the group's de-facto bomb-dropper-offer and errand runner for the remainder of her Wolverines career.  Then, later in the film (for about ten minutes of screen time), the group has the services of one Colonel Andy Tanner (Powers Boothe, much lighter than he is in "24" nowadays), an actual soldier who ironically seems less prepared for combat than the Wolverines are, in part because he flies jets and in part because he's the only character that has a real backstory...his death scene in "Red Dawn" is still fabulous because 1) he sacrifices himself to try to help the team get out of a bad spot, caught between dueling tanks, and 2) I still have NO FUCKING IDEA what he is saying as grenade smoke rises around him and he quietly dies a hero's death.  Classic.

There are so many other classic bits:

• Jed and Matty find their dad at one of the Russo-Cuban "re-education" camps in town, and in parting, Dad yells off to the boys "Avenge me...AVENGE ME!!!" in this crazy, blood-curdling scream that had me going for days after I first saw it; even now, it holds a bit of comedic/dramatic weight.

• In that same mold--when Bella and his men execute dozens of Americans (including Jed's pop, setting off every other violent act in the film) while they sing "Star-Spangled Banner"; wow.

• Two of the Russo-Cuban soldiers are talking (in what language, I haven't the slightest) and one says "What is a wolverine?" and the other responds with "A small animal...like a badger, but terribly ferocious."  First, I thought to myself that if you didn't know what a wolverine is, are you sure you are gonna know what a badger is?  Then, I thought, man, these two soldiers are really philosophical!  Then, I thought, could any line in the film be more "movie" than "A small animal...like a badger, but terribly ferocious"????

• The powerful bug-planting/sellout execution, where Daryl is shot by Robert after Jed found himself struggling over killing a guy that basically had sold out the entire group.  The scene is still quite epic, on a hilltop where the sunset is perfect and when Daryl is shot and falls into Robert's arms, he leaves a blood trail on Robert's white jumpsuit that makes you cringe.  Great stuff.

• The Robert blaze of glory death scene, where he faces down one of those ridiculously-huge and armed-to-the-teeth Russian helicopters in a canyon with just his AK-47 while yelling "WOLVERINES!!!!" at the top of his lungs...I still love that as he is facing the copter, he pulls that man-mask up over his mouth and then starts firing maniacally at the Russians.  This is also the last good thing C. Thomas Howell ever did, because as you may remember, he did "Soul Man" a couple of years after this, still one of the worst roles an actor has ever taken to kill a career...Howell worked often after this, but in mainly dogshit, foreign, or straight-to-tape flicks.

"Red Dawn" is far from perfect--which is probably why I like it so much--and there are strange things left out here which hurt it then and now.  In addition to the ridiculous fact that the Wolverines are just kids who had no formal military training who regularly outsmart, outflank and out-kill their trained soldier counterparts, it's awful that logical bits--like when the Wolverines blow up one of the re-education camps, give the detainees guns, then let them run free rather then use them to form one bigger group to fight together--don't ever occur to Jed & Co.  Wouldn't it make sense to try to find some other escapees/survivors to grow the group, instead of playing it lone wolf-style?  Also, it's cool that the group goes by "Wolverines", but it would have been cooler if the filmmakers had added maybe one scene over a campfire where the group decided to call themselves that...like, Robert looks over at Jed and says "So, what are we gonna call ourselves?" and Jed is like "Man, we don't have a nickname!" and Matty jumps in with "Every good team has a nickname!" and Jed responds with "Oh yeah?  You got any ideas?" and Aardvark jumps in with his only (new) line of the film: "[in bad Spanglish accent] How about de Wolverines, no?" and Robert looks back at him--with just the light of the fire crackling in front of his face--and says "Yeah...Wolverines...I like that...WOLVERINES!!" and then we cut into the first Wolverines skirmish, ending with someone finishing the spray-paint job of a blue Wolverines logo on the back of a bombed-out Russian tank.

Shit, I should be doing this for a living.

 

Random Bellview Ratings, courtesy of Bell & Longer Community Trust:

• Spring temperatures in spring:  Opening Weekend

• Entree of mashed potatoes; side dish--strawberry milkshake:  $9.50 Show

• Watching your team lose a pitcher one pitch into a game...then realizing that you really might get a phone call to pitch in the major leagues any day now:  Matinee

• $60 for a one-way train ticket from DC to NYC; then, the train ride takes LONGER than the bus ride over the same distance:  Rental

• Not being in Iceland:  Hard Vice

 

justin@bellviewmovies.com