Young Warriors

this ain't no "regular" movie, i mean, there were some fu*ked up scenes in there.... a cannon release with the Golan/Globus on the production, that's have to be bad, in some strange good way. i think it's 30% fun and 70% torture/boring. still interesting though. plot is on a young and a bit high temper student called Kevin, who like to party a lot with his college boys friends, drinking beer, picking on the freshmen, getting drunk girls to bad, a typical 80's student.. everything is really nice but one day, his high school sister get raped sliced and killed, and then Kevin getting nuts. driven by revenge he decides that the gang (with the really cool van!) should be punished. slowly he's taking his friends and they all start playing - "justice league". the movie has early eighties colors and that means DARK, i saw it in complete darkness and still some of the scenes were pretty dark, it does some strange/o.k mood. i pretty much liked it.

This movie was just average. Some scenes were good and some were just plain stupid! A well supported cast though and some good action. The best actor in this movie is definetely Anne Lockhart from the T.V. series "Battlestar Galactica." Cast also features "Mission: Impossible's" Lynda Day George, Mike Norris (Chuck's brother) and a supporting role by cult actress Linnea Quigley as Ginger(lookin' good!), who only appears in a few, but good scenes. There's also a one violent rape scene by a vicious gang which was well done! Savage Streets did a movie like this a year later (which also featured Quigley, but the role was bigger and better), except it was alot better than this movie! Some of the scene's in this movie was filmed in my hometown.

My review was written in November 1983 after a Times Square screening.

"Young Warriors" is an overly-ambitious teen exploitation film that mixes the popular drive-in formulae of hijinks, violence and sex tease with an uncomfortable overlay of preachiness. Cannon pickup is likely to do fair off-season business.

Filmed last year in British Columbia and Southern California as "The Graduates of Malibu High", a title it retains by way of introduction, picture limns the effects of crime and violence on teens three years after graduation, now attending Pacific Coast College. After an opening reel devoted to fraternity initiation revelry and sight gags, pic becomes melodramatic with the gang-rape and murder of Tiffany Carrigan (April Dawn) by thugs in a black van sporting a death's head insignia.

While her father (Ernest Borgnine) follows normal procedures as a police officer, Tiffany's brother Kevin (James Van Patten) feels frustrated and organizes his frat members to hit the streets and root out the killers. They quickly extend their efforts towards violently confronting any crime encountered, building up an impressive arsenal of automatic weaponry in the process.

The comic-strip fantasy elements here, culminating in a cantina shootout in which Kevin wields a machine gun in emulation of the slow-motion blood pack finale of Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch", do not mix well with numerous debates by Kevin with his dad, girlfriend and teachers regarding the violent crime problem in the U. S. Filmmaker Lawrence Foldes' specific juxtapositions are very heavy-handed, as in cross-cutting between Kevin's girlfriend (Anne Lockhart) crying on his mom Lynda Day George's shoulder and footage of Kevin being serviced by a street hooker prior to the final shootout.

Acting is okay, with the starbilled trio in relatively brief roles and Van Patten stuck with an unplayable assignment of belligerent student by day/G. I. Joe by night. Other offspring talent Anne Lockhart and Mike Norris visually resemble their famous forebears June and Chuck, but have little to do. Comic actor Dick Shawn adds a welcome wry touch as Van Patten's equivocal philosophy prof. Tech credits, particularly the visuals and special effects, are good.

Where do I begin as I really don't know. I came out of this film as blindly as I went into it.

First we have comedy (I think that's what it was meant to be), then we have heinous crimes, then we have love and then vigilanteism. As I haven't a clue as to what genre this is really meant to be I've had to refer to the film page here to tell me. It says it's a crime/action. OK, crime I can go with as it was a crime to release it but where is the action? I've seen more action in a documentary about pot plants!

The fact that this sorry tale enlisted the help of Ernest Borgnine and Richard Roundtree made it even more painful to watch and knowing they were in it was the only reason I looked at it to start with. I came out of it almost bereft and spent the whole time looking for some decent acting.

Someone ought to tell the scriptwriter that you cannot put horrendous crime, no matter how badly acted, into what can only be classed as a farcical romp into the world of crime-fighting by young guys who fancy themselves as Charles Bronson wannabes.

My lasting impression on this will be my own disbelief at how I managed to sit through this. (1/10)

This is just plain bad, but not necessarily boring or un-entertaining. This movie has that genuine third class 80's action picture quality (dark, blurry, soft), and that genuine third class 80's music, and dito sound, and dito haircuts and dito shots and angels and so on. Everything about it is third class 80's. But I guess you could enjoy it anyway, just because of all it's genuine... bad nostalgia 80's. And supercast including Borgnine and "Shaft" Roundtree.