Los jóvenes pandilleros

It begins with a couple of disgusting sex-comedy gags, but soon it reveals its true colors: it wants to be a "Death Wish" clone. I say "wants to" because the script gets so increasingly laughable by the minute that it ends up looking like an absurdist "Death Wish" spoof! From a love scene in a room inexplicably filled with candles, to "heroes" who dress up as commandoes and wave their machine guns because they don't want to attract attention to themselves(!), to bad guys who drive around the city in a black van long after it has been recognized as their vehicle, this film has too many ludicrous points to fit in a list. The other major problem is that you can't tell most of the characters apart; of course, you know who Borgnine and Roundtree and even James Van Patten are, but all the other roles could have been played by different actors in various scenes, and you wouldn't know the difference. (*1/2)

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.

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)

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.

Normally I hate 80's action movies, but this one was written and directed by anti-auteur Lawrence Foldes, so I knew that, although it would no doubt be completely incompetently made, it would also violate all the tedious clichés and formulas of the genre (not to mention all the boundaries of good taste), and I certainly wasn't disappointed. This starts out as a typical dumb frat comedy (with some surprisingly homoerotic pranks and hazing rituals). Then in a change of tone so sudden it might give you whiplash, the younger sister of one the fraternity guys is brutally and graphically raped and murdered by a gang of bikers. The cops won't do anything as usual, which is very odd since they are represented here by the father of the hero and the murdered girl (Ernest Borgnine)and his partner Shaft, I mean, Richard Roundtree. The brother becomes a vigilante and very implausibly gets his beer-drinking, good-time frat buddies to join him, even though he gets almost all of them killed. But you see they're all graduates of Foldes infamous "Malibu High" of which this movie is completely unrelated sequel.

Unlike most of the action movies made during the happy fascism of the Reagan era this movie definitely doesn't glorify "make-my-day" vigilantism, but is more in the spirit of harrowing 1970's rape-revenge movies like "Last House on the Left". But any message this movie might have about "digging two graves" when you go seeking revenge is lost in the jaw-droppingly incompetent narrative and film-making (my favorite scene is when the protagonist gets in an argument about violence with his philosophy professor and emphasizes his point by throwing his desk through a window).

Unlike in his previous films, Foldes has quite a cast on hand here. Besides Borgnine and Roundtree, Lynda Day George plays the protagonist's mother. Linnea Quigley also makes an appearance as one of several girls whose sole function seems to be to strip off and substantiate that the male characters are not actually gay. The lead is also interesting given that he is the son of Dick Van Patton from TV's "Eight is Enough". Recommended, but for all the wrong reasons.