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.

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 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.

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.

One line angrily spouted from an acting great, in this enjoyable typical 80's pic, is that 'Violence Only leads to more violence'. Words were never, any more true, than in Young Warriors, a film could be a great anti vengeance movie, as pretty much this message is telegraphed through the duration. Granted YW is a well made action film, but just seems very 80's cliched now, with some predictability, the main one from a character who provides one of the sickly bloody demises YW is very violent, and the bad guys are real dredgy scum here. But the standout is Van Pattern. Whose character is a repellant, hyped up teen psycho, and oxi moron, hellbent on avenging the brutal rape and murder of his younger sister, another violent scene. I hated his character so much, I'll never be able to get the name, Kevin out of my mind. And what is Ernest Borgnine doing in this, as Kevin's very wisen Dad, who is, get this, a Detective, where angry, adrenaline fueled Van Pattern and mates, are interrupting and sabotaging their case with their wild, and amateur antics, but the latter is who you would call, if you really wanted the job done. Borgnine ,must of really been desperate. Get this, the sexy Lynda Day George plays Borgnine's wife. Very 80's, but Kevin's non fetchng persona brings the film down a bit, and very much resembles the cop character, in the b movie, Deathflash.