Morning in America

...What about Europe...

...Indeed, Jennifer Grey's character plants a bomb that detonates in the Soviet American Friendship Center that's been established in Calumet, and she's the first Wolverine to kill one of the occupiers...

...Indeed, guns (and a healthy dose of gumption) enable the Wolverines' heroic resistance, and the movie doesn't shy from going overboard to make the point: Shortly after the Commies have stormed Calumet, the camera spies a pickup truck bearing a bumper sticker with the NRA's unofficial slogan: "They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers...

...The camera immediately pans down to a Calumet citizen's corpse clutching a handgun before a Commie boot steps on it and the invader pries the gun away...

...Pause for a slug of whiskey.] They're sitting this one out...

...The scene's highlight comes when Boothe explains who is on our side: "600 million screamin' Chinamen...

...The film also targets politicians as sniveling bootlickers...

...Once you drink the blood, they tell him, "there's gonna be something different about you...

...He's more of a politician, like his father...

...They opened up the door down here, and the whole Cuban and Nicaraguan armies come walking right through, roll right up here through the Great Plains...

...A member of the Dutch resistance during World War II boasted on NPR that the film skillfully captured the spirit of an insurgent movement...

...Before the opening credits roll for Red Dawn, the film uses stark yellow lettering against the backdrop of an all-black screen and ominous music to set up its world thrown into turmoil, a scenario straight out of an early 1980s conservative nightmare: The Soviets are set on edge by poor crop harvests...

...This community is indeed fortunate to have a shepherd like him," the leader of the occupying forces chuckles to his assistant...

...Guns are another...

...Distrust of foreigners is just one ingredient in the film's apocalyptic stew...

...I think all of us in the military have seen Red Dawn...

...And in the telling of this story, what emerges is history's most fiercely anti-Communist movie (an admittedly small category...

...In short, America was undone by a combination of free-traders and illegal immigrants...

...It keeps me warm," snarls Howell in response...

...If Reagan was the smiling, optimistic face of the GOP, Red Dawn presented the party's apocalyptic, fear-mongering side, with grim glee and all the subtlety of an Al Sharpton speech...

...The review in Guns & Ammo described it as "one of the most potent pro-gun movies ever made...

...He's a leader, but not in a violent, physical way," the mayor explains...

...For that matter, there is undeniable appeal about a film layered with a rock-ribbed ideology that sends it happily careening between patriotism and pure camp...

...On a less uplifting note, Timothy McVeigh was also said to have been an avid fan of the film...

...While the film was widely (though not universally) panned, it remains more than the answer to a good trivia question about movie ratings...

...The film also endures in the military: When American troops were planning the mission that would ultimately lead them to Saddam Hussein, they called it "Operation Red Dawn"— and the two locations targeted in the raid were named "Wolverine One" and "Wolverine Two," in honor of the movie's band of teens-turned-freedom-fighters...

...I would say they are way off course," he understates...

...The United States, we are told, "stands alone...

...You're momma'd be real proud," a downed Air Force pilot (Powers Boothe) tells Wolverine leader Swayze...

...Robert Schlesinger is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C...

...But they're not weak sisters...

...If you didn't love anybody you'd never even be here," one Wolverine comforts Thompson after the death of a comrade...

...Predictably, the mayor's son—who is student body president at Calumet High—is the Wolverines' early voice favoring surrender and later turns traitor...

...asks one of the Wolverines...

...Infiltrators came up illegal from Mexico, Cubans mostly...

...Called Red Dawn, it was a near-future tale of teenage guerrillas defending their hometown after the Soviets had invaded...

...And there would, of course, have been only one appropriate response to such Kremlin-inspired belligerence: "Wolverines of the world, UNITE...

...When a Wolverine objects that the last he heard there were a billion screamin' Chinamen, Boothe throws his whisky onto the fire, igniting it, before observing, "There were...

...Those who aren't hit—one is left with his body hanging out the schoolroom window—try to flee as they are sprayed with gunfire...

...And much of the acting has the grace of Keanu Reeves at his most wooden...

...the Cuban and Nicaraguan armies sweep through Central America in a Latin domino effect that finally engulfs Mexico...

...Red Dawn was number one at the box office its opening weekend, displacing a somewhat less ideological film, Ghostbusters...

...When the teacher goes outside to investigate, a paratrooper berates him in Russian and then mows him down...

...Twenty years after the release of Red Dawn, the film takes on a slightly different hue: America's defenses have been brutally penetrated...

...But in the end, the story of Red Dawn is a story of the quest for freedom over totalitarian aggression— schlocky, but still powerful...

...But the movie's rhetoric is often overwrought: "All that hate's going to burn you up, kid," Powers Boothe tells C. Thomas Howell as the teen carves another notch in the stock of his AK-47...

...In short order, the invaders occupy the fictional Calumet, Colorado (Red Dawn was actually filmed in Las Vegas, New Mexico), and the rest of the movie is the story of how eight teenagers eke out an existence in the nearby mountain range and wage an implausible (though seemingly successful) five-month guerrilla war against the occupying forces...

...Western Europe (what we now call Old Europe) goes Green and nonnuclear, and NATO dissolves...

...Indeed, Howell ends up the most radicalized of the group, and dies in a blaze of gunfire while defiantly screaming at his enemies, "WOLVERINES...

...Hearts bleed figuratively as well as literally in Red Dawn...

...Precisely why director John Milius (who has also worked on Apocalypse Now, Dirty Harry, and Conan the Barbarian), chose to include two teenage girls in the band of brothers who make up the Wolverines remains a mystery...

...Later, a leader of the occupying forces orders a minion to go to the local sporting-goods store and retrieve "form 4473," which, he explains, has "descriptions of weapons and lists of private owners...

...In the film's opening scene, a high-school teacher lecturing on military strategy (that of Genghis Khan, no less) is interrupted when he sees dozens of parachutists landing just outside the classroom...

...There was clearly something to like about a movie that Pravda panned at the time as "a monstrous anti-Soviet concoction" that "poisons the audience's minds with the drug of anti-Communism...

...Opening shortly before the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, where Ronald Reagan would declare that it was "morning in America," Red Dawn painted a picture of a dark, stormy midnight in the nation...

...Shortly after a few of the Wolverines have fled Calumet and taken refuge in the nearby mountain range, they kill a buck for food, and then make Howell drink a cup of its blood...

...The number of scenes where various characters declare that no one should ever cry again is matched by the number of scenes where they blubber about lost family and friends...

...Some of the appeal is the cast, which Matthew Rees is a former staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...First wave of the attack came in disguise as commercial charter flights, same way they did in Afghanistan in '80, only they were crack airborne outfits," he tells the Wolverines, who are sitting around a campfire in the snowcovered mountains...

...It has endured the passing of the Cold War to occupy a niche of its own in American culture...

...Calumet's mayor (played by Lane Smith, who would later in the same year play nearly the same character in the short-lived television series V) does a first-rate impression of a quisling, collaborating with the invading forces, and standing idly by while about two dozen Ameri-cans—whom he presumably fingered as the troublemakers' families—are lined up and executed, as the Soviet national anthem plays in the background...

...Grey and Swayze apparently clashed during the making of Red Dawn, but that didn't prevent them from teaming up a few years later for the box office smash Dirty Dancing...

...BY MATTHEW REES AND ROBERT SCHLESINGER This week marks the twentieth anniversary of the first movie released with what was, at the time, the new rating of "PG-13...

...When Charlie Sheen tells Lea Thompson to "make yourself useful" by washing dishes, she angrily knocks them away and barks back, "Me and her are as good as any of you...

...They managed to infiltrate SAC bases in the Midwest, several down in Texas—it wreaked a helluva lot of havoc, I'm here to tell ya...

...Indeed, while the film spilled enough blood to be tagged by the National Coalition on Television Violence as the most violent ever made (134 acts of violence per hour), the machismo is offset by tears of fear...

...The Army captain who came up with the label, Geoffrey McMurray, said afterward, "It was a patriotic, pro-American movie...

...was largely unknown at the time but went on to achieve varying degrees of stardom: If you grew up in the 1980s, there's something weirdly entertaining about watching the Brat Pack muja-hedeen of Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Jennifer Grey, Lea Thompson, and C. Thomas Howell wielding RPGs and heavy machine guns as they set out to kill the Commies for their mommies...

...I guess they figured twice in one century was enough...

...The NRA couldn't have asked for a better piece of agitprop...

...Later, when she's shot and can't keep pace with her fellow Wolverines in the heat of battle, she asks Swayze to kill her so she won't be caught and tortured for information...

...This was, after all, before the heady days of Gorbachev, glasnost, and perestroika—and the formula worked...

...Ironically, during filming, extras in full costume actually were blown off course, and at least one had to convince unwitting locals that he wasn't a Russian invader and thus shouldn't be shot...

...Something of a cult classic in right-wing circles, the film has been accorded the ultimate compliment by the denizens of mainstream subversive comedy: It has been spoofed in an episode of South Park...

...Instead, they give her a grenade, which explodes when an occupying soldier finds her body and tries to move it...

...So, why does Red Dawn endure...

...And after watching the Wolverines boast of their ignorance of the Geneva Conventions as they prepare to execute an enemy prisoner, one can only wonder if perhaps a few of the soldiers serving in Abu Ghraib might have learned the wrong lesson from late-night viewings of the film...

...It's grrrrrrrrrrrrl power, Rambo-style...

...The movie's explanation of how the Communists penetrated America's defenses could have been scripted by Pat Buchanan, though it is told by Powers Boothe, the Air Force lieutenant colonel who has been shot down and brings news from FA— "Free America...

...The rest of the invaders start firing on the classroom, which is still full of students...

...All except England, and they won't last very long...

...They adopt as their name the mascot of their high school: Wolverines...