The other day I was reading an article about Jack Abramoff, the notorious republican lobbyist at the middle of a bribery scandal that’s dragging down Tom Delay and supposedly ties in to at least 30 other DC ho’s. The whole thing is real complicated and the charge right now is for wire fraud but the investigation has brought to light all kinds of payoffs, exploitation of Native Americans, embarassing racist emails and a supposedly coincidental death that anybody with at least one eye will notice appears to be a mafia style hit. We’re talking more corruption than even Senator Billy Jack probaly knew about.

Anyway, the particular article I read referred to Abramoff as a “former b-movie producer.” Holy shit! I thought. I guess I hadn’t been following this closely enough because I hadn’t heard that before. The trusty ol’ internet movie database explained that Abramoff had produced and wrote the story for the Dolph Lundgren picture RED SCORPION, not to be confused with RED SONJA, RED DAWN, RED SUN, RED EYE, THE RED VIOLIN, THE RED BALLOON, or Krysztof Kieslowski’s THREE COLORS: RED. He’s also credited as executive producer on RED SCORPION 2. That’s it although his brother Robert went on to produce a bunch of other movies I never heard of.

Further research brought me to this article from Salon all about Abramoff and RED SCORPION. It’s an interesting story, well worth clicking through the ads.

Now, I’ve always been real interested in action movies with a left wing subtext, because you don’t get it too much. There’s Billy Jack and there’s some Paul Verhoeven and John Carpenter movies. But mostly in this genre, especially in the ’80s, you had movies that bought into the Reaganite worldview, glorifying the blowing away of commies or inhuman street scum crooks. You got all the cop movies about those god damn liberals with their red tape, always going around and coddling serial killers, giving them a back rub and telling us we gotta be careful not to bruise their wrists when we cuff ‘em. I always figured these attitudes came from copying the undeniably great DIRTY HARRY and the freakishly popular RAMBO 2, not from an actual political bias among creators of action movies. But here is one documented case of a right wing political operative deliberately using a Dolph Lundgren movie as propaganda for one of his pet causes. (more…)

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