Young Warriors (1983) Reviews

• unique...

  beneteau2010-02-07

  Young Warriors (1983) While this is a deeply flawed (and in some ways idiotic) movie, the way it continually defies expectations makes it decent viewing for the adventurous sleaze fan. Meet yuppie college student Kevin and his gang of lovable frat boy buddies. In what starts out as a particularly egregious teen sex comedy, we follow this bunch of jerk-offs and their antics, which involve, among other things, making pledges tie bricks to their genitals. The movie abruptly shifts gears when Kevin's high school freshman sister is brutally raped and beaten into a coma by a gang of bikers who apparently have nothing better to do. When she dies in the hospital, Kevin vows revenge, much to the chagrin of his detective father. So far, we've gone from Porky's-lite, through Last House On The Left territory, into what is apparently shaping up to be your typical urban vigilante revenge flick. However, Kevin and his gang's portrayal goes from vaguely sympathetic until they become kill-crazed lunatics. It's to the film's credit that it doesn't glamorize the fascist anti-crime rhetoric that Kevin continually spouts, while still making it understandable that he would feel the way he does. The mood goes from lighthearted to grimy and downbeat very quickly, and by the end it's so over the top and exploitative that it'll leave you incredulous. And that's the strength of this film. You never know what to expect next. At over 100 minutes, it's a little lengthy for this kind of fare, but you won't get bored. Poorly acted for the most part, with cardboard cutouts for characters and some particularly ludicrous situations and rather stupid dialogue, this won't be topping anyone's list of forgotten classics anytime soon. I got a kick out of it though, and I'm sure anyone reading this knows if they're up for it.

  More

• Globus And Golan At Full Throttle

  Theo Robertson2003-07-07

  If you`re not old enough to remember Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan here`s the rundown : They`re a couple of film producers and finaciers from Israel who set up the Cannon film company in the early 1980s . The only Israeli to get a worse press than these two was Menachim Begin . Begin probably deserved the bad press but Globus and Golan were a god send to film makers because no matter how bad your script was they`d happily fund your movie and would normally employ directors who couldn`t direct and actors who couldn`t act . In fact you often got the impression that people would just walk up to Yoram and Menahem ask them for some money and they`d oblige without seeing the film maker`s resume . If only producers nowadays were so trusting. THE YOUNG WARRIORS isn`t a Cannon film but Globus and Golan did finance it and it has their signature all over it . It`s badly directed , badly acted , badly edited but it`s the script that jumps out and attacks you with its awfulness . It starts with a bunch of high school jocks getting involved in all sorts of zany pranks , in fact the first 20 minutes of the movie plays out like a sex comedy and it`s something of a shock when THE YOUNG WARRIORS turns into a vigilante movie . But it`s not just any type of vigilante movie like EXTERMINATOR 2 or DEATH WISH 3 ( Notice a connection ? They`re both sequels and they`re both vigilante movies made by Cannon films ) , no siree this is a laughably bad vigilante movie about pretty boy high school jocks and their poodle going on a mission to wipe out scumbags . This film is proof that Globus and Golan were giving money to people regardless of their film making abilities and you have to worry about people who seem to spend their entire reserves on making movies set entirely around vigilantes

  More

• Recommended, but for all the wrong reasons

  lazarillo2007-05-10

  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.

  More

• it was with dark colors and pretty strange

  eilonelikam2005-06-02

  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.

  More

• A deeply flawed, but still worthwhile watch.

  tarbosh220002011-01-18

  Kevin Carrigan (Van Patten) is a recent graduate of Malibu High and now is studying animation at Pacific Coast College. All he really wants to do is party down, drink beer, invite babes over to his Phi Delta Tai frat house, engage in quasi-homosexual frat initiations, and did we mention he also just wants to party down? His buddies Fred (Norris), Scott (Tom Reilly), and Jorge (John Alden) are all in on the carefree fun. But when a mysterious gang of bikers rapes and kills Kevin's sister Tiffany (April Dawn), Kevin changes. He realizes there's more to life than keggers and pranks, and he becomes sullen, distant and just plain weird. Tired of what he sees as too much police incompetence, signified by his own cop father, Lt. Bob Carrigan (Borgnine) and his partner Sgt. John Austin (Roundtree), these former frat-house knuckleheads go out on their own in a jeep with their beloved dog Butch (Casper the Wonder Dog) and try to solve the mystery of his sister's assault. But Kevin and his cronies get deeper and deeper into the seedy underbelly of the city - and its culture of extreme violence - and people like Kevin's mother Beverly (Day George), his girlfriend Lucy (Anne Lockhart) and his professor Hoover (Shawn) - worry Kevin has lost the plot, as well as his mind. Will Kevin's newfound obsession with violence consume him and everything he loves? In this pickup from Cannon, which infamously combines the 80's teen sex romp and violent revenge genres, we see a major flaw: the movie, despite all the action and shooting and such that we see, actually has an unpleasant, anti-revenge motif. Obviously director/co-writer Foldes didn't realize what audience he was making this film for. You can't make a relatively entertaining, if misguided and overlong, exploitation film catering to drive-ins and hounds of that genre, and then turn around and say "violence and revenge is wrong; don't do it". That's really lame and hypocritical. Just blow up the bad guys with a missile launcher and save your whiny treatises for your shrink (i.e., make a different, less confused, movie). Another flaw is that our "heroes" are unlikable and you don't care about their plight. The whole first half of the movie is carefully setting up our protagonists as frat-boy jerks. Would it have been so very hard to NOT have done that? So when Kevin flips out and becomes addicted to going out and "fighting crime", the transition isn't as dramatic as it could have been. You know he's really out of it when he wears his bandanna around in daily life. Also we don't know anything about the bad guys or even who they are. They are not established at all. So we don't really even know who Kevin and his buddies are fighting, which detracts from the conflict. So we have a rockin' title song by Lennie Gale, and the film is dedicated to legendary director King Vidor. I'm sure he's thrilled about that. For some reason, Kevin's father is elderly, and Dick Shawn plays the college professor Kevin talks to, where we get the annoying comment on violence the film puts out there. The theme "violence destroys us all" is just irritating for this type of film. But in the plus column we have Casper the Wonder Dog as Butch. He wears sunglasses and a hat, and, like we've seen so many times before (Killpoint, 1984, and Fist Fighter, 1989) come immediately to mind), he steals the movie. Here's what Young Warriors SHOULD have been: 1. Kevin and his friends are set up as nice, normal kids 2. The bad guys are established 3. They rape/kill Kevin's sister 4. Kevin and his friends become vigilantes 5. The bad guys kill/injure Kevin and his friends 5. Borgnine and Roundtree go rogue and get revenge for the deaths/injuries to their friends and family, and (OPTIONAL) 6. Ernest Borgnine shoots a missile launcher. THAT'S IT! If that was the movie, Young Warriors would be a classic for the ages. As it stands, we have a deeply flawed, but still worthwhile watch. Released in a big-box VHS in the U.S., for all its foibles, there's still some meat on the bone for 80's obsessives to enjoy with Young Warriors. For more insanity, please visit: comeuppancereviews.com.

  More