The *actual* worst movie I've ever seen 😳

Review of Red Dawn (1984) by kcookandcatsco: 👎 1.0/10

I can't be wasting my time with a crazy-long ReelRank review. Guys, my LiveSky BlueSky review of Red Dawn was 38 posts, and will be 40 by the time I post this link and the link to the 1.0 Films 🤢 Reel that it is most assuredly getting added to after this.

Holy Christ!

@jamiedid try to warn me, but there was just no way I could have known what a bullshit, sloppy, horrible, wrong-hearted, nonsensical fever dream of an adolescent power-fantasy this was. PG-13 torture porn for Tea Partiers.

It's the worst thing I've ever seen. It isn't really close, either. I'm just going to hit some highlights here, but you should obviously go read the actual LiveSky review, which was torturous and lasted, like, a week, almost. Goddamn... use the Blog Button at the lower left to jump to the first post (or just click any of the posts I'm about to embed below).

The vibes were bad right away.

You see what I mean? I'm stopping down every 30 to 45 seconds of screentime (sometimes less) and going 'Wait, what the fuck...' and it's all just the absolute worst.

Speaking of absolute worst: the acting. Nobody in this film has ever been worse in anything else. This is the worst acting performance every actor in this film ever gave. I can only imagine what the fuck the director was telling them to do, but they're all just actively, aggressively making each other worse with every bad decision they make.

Oh, oh, oh! Watch for Swayze's nose-acting. Oh, my, God!

He does it twice (or more) in every single scene, I swear to God. It's so awful. Swayze doesn't give A SHIT, you can tell, nobody should, either. But I also get the sense that they were made to senselessly reshoot a lot of it a bunch, too? Idk, man. I'd imagine the production of this was a nightmare, but I'm not going to look into it, because it's just not that interesting or worthwhile of a film.

It is notably bad, though. And in a dizzying, kaleidoscopic variety of ways!

Nothing the whatever-it-is, invading communist army ever does ever makes any sense, like this little strafing job in which a foot soldier empties a magazine into a car, hitting none of his targets, rather than just walking 6-8 feet towards them and shooting them both directly in the head (maybe with just one bullet if he lines them up right).

The meta of the film is this: 'those animals want what we have.' That's how Republicans and right-leaning nationalists view the Other, which in this case is Russians and Brown people speaking Spanish. And, like, you could make a film that isn't abjectly stupid and on-its-face absurd with that premise (I wish you wouldn't, but you could), but take a squiz at just how fucking stupid this is as just an image.

LOL! They want Colorado, guys. They want rural Colorado sooooo bad. Oh, God, they've just gotta have it. Lol.

This post has kind of hit a bit (so hey, go boost it more, make me famous on BlueSky), and I think it speaks to how juvenile, crass and ill-researched this whole project is that the bad guys don't even sound that bad when they're not cartoonishly gunning down unarmed civilians 25 at a time.

I honestly think that's fair, lol. I don't disagree with the internment-camp loudspeaker propaganda in this film, though I gather I'm meant to. It fades out in the mix before he starts saying more stuff, and my question was, 'Is he still making lots of good points?'

Oh! Oh! Oh!

This movie does Jennifer Grey so dirty. Goddamn. It's a whole story/arc unto itself. I'll break that down, and then we'll get out of here, bc this movie isn't worth either of our time.

The Ballad of Jeannie Bueller

Oh, and Just One More Thing...

Red Dawn is also just riddled with weird production errors and gaffs. There are, by my count, at least five and maybe six or seven lines that are visibly spoken by characters that are just nowhere present in the sound mix. My guess is that sound on most of their outdoor days was unusable, they had to ADR everything, and they just didn't get a bunch of lines recorded.

There are also just a couple of fully-flubbed lines that made it into the film, which was, I'll remind you, exhibited to people in theaters they paid money for the privilege of patronizing.

Yeah! It's just the worst! I've found the worst one. So it can only get better from here, right?

GIFRed Dawn: Wolverines Battle Cry