Avenge me! Avenge me!

Title: Red Dawn (1984)

Red Dawn is a movie filmed around the American mass consciousness in the 80's that the world is a dangerous place with the Soviet Union looking to conquer free society or, at the very least, the US of A. The movie genre centrally themed around US vs USSR conflict dissipated in the 90's and remained so today.

In Red Dawn, an alliance of Communist army parachuted into a mid-western town as part of a full-scale invasion. It was up to a band of high school teenagers who escaped the initial onslaught to stay alive and free their captured neighbors.

I seem to recall that the movie was ridiculed at the time as being too far fetched. So no one took it seriously. Seeing it at a theater here in California, I remember overhearing some dude saying something in the vein of "If the Russians were to land in East LA, they'd be gang banged." I don't know how kids who saw it in other parts of the US felt, but my friends and I thought this movie as a joke.

Over the years, I neither saw nor had any interest in seeing Red Dawn again. It wasn't all that interesting to me, but I caught plenty of references to it on some TV shows or radio programs such as Family Guy, The Adam Carolla Show, and Jericho. Of course, I'm baffled by why Red Dawn is being remade for a 2010 release. It doesn't seem likely to work, unless there's a large group of population in the US who are still afraid of a Soviet invasion.

I did manage to catch Red Dawn again a few weeks ago on This TV. I kept an open-mind. And I'm still unable to understand why there's a remake. I was, however, appreciative in seeing Charlie Sheen (Young Guns), C. Thomas Howell (Outsiders), Lea Thompson (Back to the Future), Jennifer Grey (Ferris Buehler's Day Off), Patrick Swayze (Road House), Harry Dean Stanton (Escape from New York), and Powers Boothe (Rapid Fire). All of them starred in some of my favorite movies. I still watch Charlie Sheen today in Two and a Half Men co-starring another 80s teen star, Jon Cryer (Duckie in Pretty in Pink).

Girls of Red Dawn

Lea Thompson and Jennifer Grey. Years after Red Dawn.

Memorable Quotes from Red Dawn

- "Wolverines!"
- "Boys! Avenge me! Avenge me!"
- "Two toughest kids on the block, I guess. Sooner or later, they're gonna fight."
- "Last I heard, there were a billion screaming Chinamen."

- "There will be no further reprisals against civilians. This was stupid. Impotence. Comrades... If a fox stole your chickens... Would you slaughter your pig because he saw the fox? No. You would hunt the fox... You would find where it lives and destroy it! And how do we do this? Become a fox."
- "C'mon! We're all going to die, die standing up!"
- "America is a whorehouse... where the revolutionary ideals of your forefathers... are corrupted and sold in alleys by vendors of capitalism..."
- "I never saw the Eckert Brothers again. In time, this war - like every other war - ended. But I never forgot. And I come to this place often, when no one else does."