“What do you get if you cross ‘Animal House’ with ‘Death Wish’? Young Warriors– a unique combination of fraternity hijinks, high-speed action, wildly imaginative animation, and hard-drivin’ rock!”

Obviously that’s what got me to watch the movie. I couldn’t really imagine a movie that fit that description – can you? Put the tape in and it’s even more confounding because it starts with this dedication:

THIS FILM IS DEDICATED TO
KING VIDOR
WITH DEEPEST APPRECIATION
FOR HIS INVALUABLE
CREATIVE ASSISTANCE.

King Vidor started directing with THE GRAND MILITARY PARADE in 1913. He has 77 directing credits on IMDb. He did the black and white parts of THE WIZARD OF OZ. He did DUEL IN THE SUN and WAR AND PEACE. He died in 1982, so this might’ve been the last movie he gave his invaluable creative assistance to. So he gets this dedication.

Then, the opening scene. Closeups on the bodies of a man and a woman on a beach who have just come from skinny dipping, now taking part in a RAMBO-suiting-up-style sequence of putting on their graduation gowns. The man puts on some giant headphones with a built-in radio, they get on a motorcycle and drive to their graduation ceremony where they show up just in time to drive up (scaring the shit out of everybody) and grab the guy’s diploma. He pulls up to his friends and yells “We are free! WHOOO HOOOO!!!” A slow motion overhead shot shows them throwing their hats (and headphones) in the air. It freezes on their smiles, happy music playing, and says:

THESE ARE
THE GRADUATES OF MALIBU HIGH
AND THIS IS THEIR STORY…

then some ominous keyboards and militaristic drums begin as the splattery YOUNG WARRIORS logo splashes across them.

It’s kinda too bad the cover gives it away, because the weirdest thing about this movie is the slide from wacky fraternity hijinks to violence and nihilism. The first part is about some dudes who live in an attic together at Pacific Coast College drinking beer, hazing new pledges, setting a herd of hogs loose at a party, etc. Then one character’s sister gets gang raped to death, they steal a bunch of weapons from the military and go around shooting criminals. At the end they all die. (SPOILER)

The main kid is Kevin (James Van Patten), who’s shown animating shirtless one morning in the frat house, which is decorated with bikini posters, a dart board, and a skeleton. There is a dispute involving a baseball bat and a clock radio. A dude says “Everyone, I’d like you to meet Ginger” and produces a naked woman in his bed. One of the other dudes is a medical student so he puts his stethoscope on her tits, says “she’s a 34 C”, chases her away naked, and they all laugh.

“How the hell is anybody supposed to get any work around this madhouse?” Kevin complains. One guy throws a beer to other guy, both of them wearing nothing but towels. So that’s the sort of vibe we got here, a bunch of dudes who get drunk and smarmily joke about getting laid and share women like they’re joints. But Kevin is emotionally troubled. As he explains to his animation professor who hates his trippy experimental piece, “Well, I guess the only thing I can really say is that I got alot of things going on inside me, and uh, it seems that the only way I can really express my true feelings is through my animation.”

“But Kevin,” the teacher says, “art is a creative endeavor, and that also has restrictions and end points and a reason to be. It’s just like life. If you haven’t got a direction you’re just playing with yourself. You have to make up your mind and take a stand.”

“But sir, I don’t know where I stand.”

The director and co-writer of the movie is Lawrence D. Foldes (DON’T GO NEAR THE PARK), and I think it’s fair to assume he was trying to take some kind of a stand with this movie. And he might not have known where to stand either. What’s interesting about the movie, even if I don’t know what it means, is the way it draws parallels between PORKY’S type horny-dude hijinks and straight up gang rape.

The first section is all about aggressive sex:  A guy goes to the library, says he’s looking for “The Joy of Sex,” ends up fucking a young librarian in the stacks while a nerd nearby says “Oh, good heavens!” The guys hit each other in the crotch, talk about “nympho nurses” and cowgirls for their party, joke about each other’s sex lives.

At home Kevin wants to come into the bathroom while his sister Tiffany (April Dawn) is naked in there. She comes out wrapped in a towel and he pins her up against the wall to joke around with her, then acts protective of her about the guy she’s going to the prom with.

While she’s out they have their frat party. A guy gets pantsed. There are shots of shaking butts on the dance floor. The guys force a pledge to drop his pants, cut a hole in his boxers, shave his butthole, make him sit on an olive and drop it into a martini, then drink it. They tie bricks to two guy’s dicks and make them throw them out the window. You know, just boys being boys, fun kind of Abu Ghraib type stuff.

But while that’s going on Tiffany and her prom date get run off the road and attacked. Her terrifying car crash is intercut with a wacky drunken car crash on the frathouse lawn. Shots of the laughing rapists cut to party-goers cheering on the JACKASS antics.

Tiffany’s ordeal is so traumatic she reverts to a little girl, screaming “Mommy! Mommy!” over and over again. Later, when Kevin finds out his sister is dead, he reacts differently to feeling helpless. He rages at his police officer dad (Ernest Borgnine) and partner (Richard Roundtree), thinking they’re too cowardly to solve the case or something. He rages at his professor (comedian Dick Shawn in a serious role), who’s one of those ’80s movie smarmy heartless upper class liberal prick professors: “Are you implying that things like rape and murder are no longer immoral?” And before long it’s “Oh, you think I’m crazy? I’ll show you what crazy is!” and he throws a chair out the window. He even rages at his buddies, who try to be supportive about his animation project (”Well, it’s still good. It’s just… a little unusual”) and cheer him up by talking about dicks and drinking beer. But Kevin yells “Screw the whole bunch of you!” and storms off.

That goes right into one of those romantic sex scenes with tons of candles but after that he’s in a really dark place and it’s time to go track down the rapists and get revenge. They investigate the crime scene and, let me just say, movie criminals need to learn not to always carry around matchbooks with the logos of the places that they spend most of their time, or at least not to drop those matchbooks at the scenes of their crimes. That would be one way for them to get away with alot more, in my opinion. Anyway, they go to this bar and start asking around trying to find some guys driving a black van (that really narrows it down).

The investigation is going slow (no shit, the professionals haven’t found the killers yet either) so they decide they should also just go after criminals in general, and they get a bunch of guns and hand grenades. You know how it is in a movie when somebody wants to be either a vigilante or a super hero, they just go around at night and spot people openly committing crimes all over the place. So our boys find some black guys stealing the wheels off a car, etc. They get more into it, they go too far, they kill some big time drug guys in a rickety van. They dump out their huge stash of coke but steal their arsenal of guns and grenades. (This is weird because they already explained that a frat brother who’s in the military stole their weapons from a base. It seems like they could use the military base excuse or the found-in-drug-dealer’s-van excuse, but they don’t really need both in one movie.)

The characters are kind of hard to tell apart because they’re all handsome jock dudes with similar early ’80s hair. The one character that stands out is Butch, because he’s a dog that’s always wearing sunglasses, a hat and a handkerchief. It will just randomly cut to him all the time to be, you know, funny. Even after the movie has turned serious it cuts from a dramatic scene where he breaks up with his girlfriend directly to the sunglasses-dog holding a beer in his mouth.

The weirdest part tonally is when the boys go out on patrol and bring Butch with them. In context it just does not seem possible that they’re trying to make a joke out of this scene. His sister has been raped and killed, he’s lost faith in his father and the system, he’s acting out in school and broken off his relationship with his girlfriend, he’s gotten one friend killed and dragged his others into a dangerous and illegal activity, he’s zeroing in on the rapists, the keyboard music is very dark and serious, they’re in a Jeep wearing camo and holding guns… and there’s a fuckin dog wearing sunglasses in the car with them. And (SPOILER) the dog gets killed in a shootout with drug dealers, and then shit gets even more personal.

During all this Kevin still has time for animation. They don’t show him working on it but he keeps debuting new pieces in his class. It’s weird spacescapes and killer snakes and shit. Simple but it would take a while to do, especially in those days. So I hope he got a good grade in that class, he must’ve been working his ass off.

How the fuck did this movie happen? Well, apparently it’s kind of a sequel to one from 1979 called MALIBU HIGH about a high school girl who becomes a prostitute. Foldes wrote that one and got his UCLA Low Budget Film Production teacher Irwin Berwick to direct it. When he made YOUNG WARRIORS it was originally released as THE GRADUATES OF MALIBU HIGH. There aren’t any connecting characters or anything but that high school graduation opening doesn’t seem to serve much purpose except to say “and then after Malibu High this is what those type of kids got up to.”

I went ahead and watched MALIBU HIGH to see how it compared. It’s kind of like a ’70s porn movie with the good parts cut out. This teenage girl gets dumped by her boyfriend and doesn’t get along with her mom, so she decides to ask her drug connection to pimp her out. From there she moves up to a higher class prostitute and then to a hit woman. When she leaves her first pimp she calls him and says “Hey Tony, this is Kim. Yeah, I got a message for you, pal. GET FUCKED.”

Of course, she’s not putting as much effort into her courses as she ought to so she tries to seduce her teachers.

My favorite aspect of the movie is the funky library music. There’s alot of music that comes on with hilarious timing, like the upbeat tune that that plays right after the line “And maybe daddy wouldn’t have had to kill himself because he couldn’t get it up anymore!” and the “dun dun DUHHHHN” type dramatic cue that follows her giving her ex-boyfriend a double flip-off at his locker. It also uses what we now know as The People’s Court theme during the climactic slow foot chase down some stairs to a beach.

Unfortunately MALIBU HIGH isn’t nearly as interesting or weird as YOUNG WARRIORS. But if you insist on seeing it it’s on one of those “Welcome to the Grindhouse” drive-in double feature DVDs along with one called TRIP WITH THE TEACHER.

further reading:

Janet Maslin’s forgiving New York Times review of YOUNG WARRIORS

THE NEXT MISSION was made for TV in 1985. It’s supposed to take place about 6 months later, but Lee Marvin has aged 18 years. Somehow they got Marvin, Borgnine and Richard Jaeckel all to come back. They have a new mission with a new Dirty Dozen including Ken Wahl and Sonny Landham.

Alot of the movie, especially the first half hour or so, just made me sad. Marvin’s age is really showing (this was his next to last movie) and he just doesn’t seem like he’s into it at all. They make poor Lee and Ernest rehash the whole Borgnine-pitching-the-mission sequence and the Marvin-recruiting-the-convicts one and they even use whole chunks and paragraphs of the exact same dialogue as in the original. Then Marvin will say things like, “That sounds familiar.”

This was 1985, when plenty of people had VCRs, but I guess maybe they still figured you hadn’t seen THE DIRTY DOZEN in a long time, and by exactly redoing it but with worse acting and camerawork they would make you would think “ah, what a pleasant reminder of yesteryear!” But if you watch the two back-to-back like I did I’m pretty sure you’ll agree that there’s nothing pleasant about it.

Also there’s a part where they re-use an 18 year old shot of Marvin driving up to a building. It’s so obviously not from the same film stock it kind of reminds me of on a sitcom when they cut to an exterior shot of a city to pretend this isn’t all shot on video on a stage in front of an audience. Come on man, that footage is old enough to vote. Just rent a fuckin jeep and re-do it.

THE NEXT MISSION is maybe an hour shorter than THE PREVIOUS MISSION, so they skip over the rivalry and war games and go straight to the mission, which involves the takeover of a train and the shooting of a Nazi general who might be planning to assassinate Hitler. Once it gets more into the specific preparations and the mission itself it becomes more enjoyable because it’s not exactly the same as before, and that’s probaly why Marvin starts to get more lively and enthused. He does the numbering and rhyming for all the stages of his plan like in part 1, but otherwise it’s semi-new material. For example it introduces the idea of him getting the Dozen’s cooperation by telling them there’s gold on the train. I’m not sure what book or movie started that one. They used it in NAM ANGELS though.

The big moment is when the sniper gets the target in his sights, but Hitler is there too so he’s tempted to kill him instead. Lee Marvin has to talk him out of it. That’s a dilemma usually reserved for time travelers who have the chance to stop the Holocaust but don’t want to fuck up the future in some unforeseen butterfly effect type of way, like there was no WWII but super-intelligent Yetis now control all of Asia and Europe or that kind of thing. This has nothing to do with that. The thinking, as explained by Borgnine during a golf game, is that Hitler’s incompetence will end the war soon, but if he dies now this general would take command and the war would stretch on for years. And I mean how many more dozens is Lee Marvin gonna want to train?  Shit, just one year and he’ll be 99 years old at the rate he’s aging. This war needs over with.

Landham doesn’t have much to do, Wahl plays a racist dick, and whoever is playing the Savalas crazy type is a horrible actor. But by the end I was a little more involved in it, so I kind of liked seeing how it ended up. In fact, the highlight of the movie is the very end, when the survivors crash land a stolen Nazi plane, still wearing Nazi uniforms, and an English farmer tries to take them prisoner. Reisman uses his American accent to tell the farmer he’s done a good job, puts his arm around him and heads for the nearest pub to buy him a pint.

Since this was made for TV you could compare it to DTV. They wanted a sequel but not enough to pay for a real one. But actually it was higher profile than DTV because back then there weren’t as many channels, so I’d bet more people saw this than picked up CARLITO’S WAY: RISE TO POWER. I don’t know if this was made because of all the Vietnam-related mission movies of the time. Same year as RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II, but I’d guess it was a coincidence. The director, Andrew V. McLaglen, actually did the men-on-a-mission movie THE DEVIL’S BRIGADE back in ‘68 and THE WILD GEESE in ‘78. He also did that Joe Don Baker movie MITCHELL that the Mystery Science nerds like to make fun of, and after this one he did another TV sequel, RETURN FROM THE RIVER KWAI. The writer, Michael Kane (no relation), wrote SOUTHERN COMFORT. And JAWS 3-D. And SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT II.

The completist in me enjoyed seeing this, but I gotta tell you the quality is somewhere between the original DIRTY DOZEN and the average A-TEAM episode. And it kind of bummed me out to see Marvin getting decrepit. He had grey hair for most (all?) of his acting career, so you always think of him as a capable old guy. Here he’s finally showing his age.

Luckily it’s made for TV so it doesn’t count. On second thought it’s admirably honest to use this as a mere bonus feature, and maybe even good marketing. Remember when they put Cronenberg’s THE FLY on DVD as a double feature with THE FLY II? Good value, but I think people were happy when they later released them separately. They’d rather pay more to not have THE FLY II written on the cover. Same goes for THE NEXT MISSION. Just check the bonus disc if you’re interested.

[ratings]

For the cons it’s a good deal too. They get to go outside. If it’s true they like killing, here’s their chance for more. They get to postpone their executions, or kill some time before their executions. And if they do a good job and survive they might get pardoned, maybe, if fuckin Ernest Borgnine sees it in his heart. If they die in the line of duty, well, maybe they’d rather die that way than on a rope.

Their major is the hated-by-the-brass Reisman (Lee G.D. Marvin). He has to train a crew of fuckups including Jim Brown (not fond of whites), John Cassavetes (adverse to authority), Telly Savalas (rapist who thinks he works for God), Donald Sutherland (young), Trini Lopez (on guitar) and Charles motherfuckin Bronson. If some of them gotta be murderers in order to bring a team like that together then, well, break a few eggs I guess. That’s a good lineup.

There are alot of sections to this movie: first he goes in and talks to them in their cells, convinces them to join. Then he starts training them, and has to get them to form bonds and work together as a unit, which isn’t easy. Then they form a rivalry with another squad and have to humiliate them in war games or their mission will be cancelled and they’ll go back to death row. Then they finally have the mission.

Of course, most of the dozen are sympathetic. Kind of a cheat. Almost all of them had honorable reasons for killing. Only Savalas is really despicable and dangerous. They put him on lookout duty when they have a party with prostitutes, because he can’t be trusted around women. He seems to think of any woman as a whore, who knows what he’s gonna think about an actual whore.

But they’re these scrappy outcasts who disdain authority, discipline and military order. So this is kind of like THE BAD NEWS BEARS as a WWII movie. You laugh as they fuck everything up, then the gruff major/coach who plays by his own rules (PBHOR) slowly whips them into shape. They bond, they have an underdog competition against another team who are so arrogant you want to see them lose bad and run home crying like babies. And the Dozen do beat them, they get to rub it in their faces. And even though the characterization isn’t all that deep you almost feel like you’re on their team too, becoming friends with them.

It’s also kind of like another movie by the same director, Robert Aldrich: THE LONGEST YARD. If you haven’t seen the original pre-Sandler one it’s a real broad comedy where inmates get to play (American) football against the screws. All these movies have an idea that we Americans like to think is very American, but that probaly transcends all cultures: the team of individuals. They’re all rebels who stand alone and PBTOR, but then after they hang around each other long enough they accidentally bond and next thing you know the loners are a team, united in one goal.

They’re also rebels that are part of the system, that’s another way they have their cake and yet also eat their cake. They reject the military and yet are military heroes. The Dirty Dozen are soldiers like Dirty Harry’s a cop.

THE DIRTY DOZEN is a fun movie, it’s not a gloomy war movie, but it also has some parts that were very graphic for the time. I mean, they really massacre those Nazis at the end. It was obviously an influence on Mr. Tarantino’s INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS and a reason why some people might think the Basterds are wimps. They’re all Donald Sutherlands with no Charles Bronsons or Jim Browns. That’s alot to live up to.

I love these types of premises, so I was surprised to learn from the extras that this was inspired by a real thing. It’s based on a book and the author of that book claims it came out of research and stories he heard about an actual group of condemned soldiers sent on a secret mission in WWII. The DVD also talks about some group called “The Filthy 13″ who were so dedicated to the art of war that they didn’t have time for grooming, so that’s where he got that idea.

Wouldn’t it be cool if when they were fighting the Nazis the Nazis kept looking like they were gonna puke and saying, “Holy God what is that smell!?” That’s one thing people tend to forget about the Dirty Dozen. They smell like ass.

Anyway I wouldn’t say this is a masterpiece, but I do consider it a classic, and I think if for some reason you haven’t seen it you should add that to your to-do list.

[ratings]

If you’re reading this in the future maybe every movie ever made is available for instant download, but in my day you had to be patient. You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting to see this thing. The closest I came before now was an old movie magazine I bought at an antique mall because it had Barbarella on the cover (wait a minute, is Roger Vadim the French Ted Turner?) So I bought it for the Barbarella, because a man has needs, but it turned out there was also an “article” – really just a plot summary – about THE SPLIT. I’d been meaning to read it and write a book-to-movie-summary comparison until they get off their ass and release it. But now thanks to French Ted Turner I don’t have to stoop to that.

Jim Brown plays McClane, a man of unspecified ill-repute who returns to his girl Ellie (Diahann Carroll) who’s pissed at him for leaving her and tries not to take him back. Meanwhile an old friend shows him an idea for a job- stealing all the gate and concessions money from a football stadium. He recruits a team and pulls off the job, but makes the mistake of leaving the whole score alone with Ellie before they can split it up. Next thing you know Ellie’s dead, the money’s gone, and everybody thinks McClane betrayed them. And he wants to get back his share.

For some reason I assumed this would be a weak one and not at all like the book. Actually it’s solid and although it’s alot different from the book it’s about as close as any of the other Parker movies. What surprised me most was the cast. His team is made up of a fighter (Ernest Borgnine), a driver (Jack Klugman), a safecracker (Warren Oates) and an assassin (Donald Sutherland). They also run into trouble with a pervert landlord (James Whitmore) and a police detective (Gene Hackman). Plus, the music is by Quincy Jones. So how the hell is this not on video?

One idea I really liked is how McClane picks his crew by testing them without their knowledge. My favorite scene is when he shows up in Borgnine’s office and just starts punching him. I never seen Borgnine look so tough, like an old school wrestling or boxing trainer. McClane takes some blows, gets a flying kick in, destroys some furniture. When he’s convinced this guy will do he just exits through the window, leaving Borgnine on the ground asking “What the hell was that about?”

The book The Seventh was the seventh Parker book, and the money was supposed to be split seven ways, so “the seventh” was what Parker was trying to get. If I remember right the heist was over much quicker in the book and the story was mostly about the aftermath. Also the way he lost the money made more sense because the girl he left it with was more familiar with his life and he just stepped out for a pack of cigarettes when it happened. In the movie he’s stupid and leaves it for a while with his uninvolved girlfriend. Like she’s gonna guard it.

For the most part though I think I understand why they felt they needed to Hollywood it up a little. It takes away some of what is unique about the Parker of the books, but it leaves a pretty solid heist movie that’s probaly a little more accessible. Parker in all the books (and none of the movies) is completely emotionless. He doesn’t even have a slight whiff of a soft side. Just a cold-blooded bastard concerned only with money. When his girl is killed he kind of figures well, shit happens. He only cares about getting his share back. But, you know, we expect that in Parker book #7. I can see why they’d worry that it would be too harsh in a standalone Jim Brown movie. He gets poor Diahann Carroll killed and doesn’t give a shit? No, they have to show that he wants vengeance (although to be fair the money does seem more important to him, since he knows he can get it back). Also unless I’m mixing it up with another one I think the book is one of the few where he loses at the end. But again, that’s in the context of a series, and you know he’ll get back on his feet in the next book. Might be more of a bummer in a movie.

A side note: I was telling some buddies about this movie and one of them heard me wrong, said “Jim Brown is in a parkour movie!?” And I thought damn, I would watch that. I don’t want poor Jim Brown to have to jump off buildings at his age, though. But how about a parkour Parker? The Luc Besson version of POINT BLANK. He could actually climb Alcatraz at the end. Think about it.

[ratings]