Red Dawn (1984)

So in '84, I was in elementary school. The teachers has us walk a whole 3 blocks down to the Middle school where the para trooping scene was shot, later I did have an art class in that same room. My friend's father worked on some of the sets, and my friend got a hold of some of the machine-gun rounds from the movie...we'd throw them in the air , and watch them explode in "blood" on the ground.

All the locations you see in the "forest" and mountains in the movie I have been to...the gas station out of town never existed, it was built for the movie. The opening scene of the movie is a shot of Grand Avenue, and at the far left there is a gas station, and behind that a tan-colored building with a cowgirl on...Supposed to be "Calumet, Colorado"...the caption beside the cowgirl says, "Calumet says, "howdy", where the Rocky Mountains meet the Great Plains" it's still there, and the city repainted it a few years ago. The gas station below "Calumet" blew up a few years later, a careless driver drove off with the nozzle in the tank.

The in-town shooting locations were great for this movie...because my town boomed from the arrival of the train, and nearly busted when the train moved on. So, after the town dried up, we were left with numerous buildings, that were never used, and are now all on the National Register of Historic Buildings. The building that was "bombed" by the Wolverines is actually my favorite building, only for the extruded circular corner on the second story. The building is still standing, unused.

Edit: February, 2007...the building collapsed, due to lack of maintenance of the owner/economy of the town.

The town itself is just teemed with architectural beauty, from brick to stone to absolutely amazing Victorian homes, it's both sad and good that the town dwindled so rapidly and those with means didn't destroy the old and rebuild over it, leaving us with a heritage. The surrounding area really is as the Calumet painting says, the mountains back-dropping the meadows...thus the Spanish name, "Las Vegas" (Vegas meaning rolling hills or meadows).

There are natural hot springs a tiny bit north of town, in a village called Montezuma, where there's a castle, recently re-furbished, as well as the Armand Hammer International College (pages of history there at Montezuma). And an even further 1 minute drive north or there is the area where the town used to get it's ice, one can see where they cut into the cliff face to catch the water, so it would ice up. I've climbed that cliff free-hand. Much further north of that, on a 2-lane road cut into the mountain that switches back numerous times and gives drivers and passengers a slight fright, one comes the the base of the mountain where the forest scenes were shot for the movie...there's no words to describe the views, and the movie barely scratched the surface as far as views go. A mysterious hermit used to live there...thus the title, "Hermit's Peak".

As far as the others who have posted here about the movie, it was a movie that defined the times, the cold war and all. As far as the special effects goes, again, it was the early eighties, and apparently they didn't have a George Lucasian budget to work with. The special effects weren't too bad, I've seen worse from the same time. Patrick Swayze ended up buying a place out there, as well as a few other Hollywood types.

Fmovies: Well, I cant honestly say this movie evoked any sort of political argument or emotive response from myself, unlike a lot of some of the reviewers on here (in fact a few seem to have taken the film or its reviews as a personal affront!). The film was an entertaining, nostalgic and highly commercial action movie from a time past.....and on a base level I just plain enjoyed it. It made me smile! The trailer reminded me of a video game called Freedom Fighters (set in New York, you play the part of a plumber leading a resistance force against a Russian invasion) which I had enjoyed too, i liked the premise, so my flatmates and I (2 English, 1 Irish and 1 American) sat through the movie last night. Once the giggles from the girls had subsided (yes Swayze and Sheen look like babies and have not aged too well!) the opening parachute invasion got quite a buzz. Handled clumsily and probably with an extremely limited budget it took a good 20 minutes for the B-movie ethic to settle in, but once over that the premise really started to work, and you could actually begin to empathise with the kids in their situation. The story became a bit strung out in places, the action was cardboardy and basic and the acting was...well....not there really, but I don't think that was down to a lack of talent. But it hung together, and we all enjoyed it. Where peoples readings of political messages come from I have no idea. I understand that America has it's extremists who hide in the mountains, stash mountains of weapons and food for just such an event, but the movie certainly doesn't satirise them. The joke in the film of the NRA bumper sticker and the dead guys "cold, dead hand" falls flat if it was intended as a purposeful message and therefore seems more to be an attempt at acknowledging the certain irony of such events in the states. The rhetoric of the kids in their internal arguments is hollow and situational, not political, and just about manage to hold some water. The movie is and was just a great "what if.....?" and an amusing 80's Hollywood schtick action movie, no more, no less. If a backstory of a continued Cold War was introduced I can well see this being ripe for a remake, and perhaps then you can apply your knee-jerk reactionary theories to it with more basis then...who know?

Man o man. This movie is great. As a history student its awesome to look back on these types of things and see what the buzz was around the time of the movie's release. The plot is insane, acting over-the-top, but the historical commentary is amazing. People actually believed that such a thing as this was possible in the mid-80s, pre-Gorbachev. This is not "low-level propaganda," its the most obvious pro-American movie I have EVER seen.

On the movie alone, the "film" shouldn't even rate. But as a Cold-War barometer, every interested person should see this to peer into the height of US-Soviet tensions.

Red Dawn fmovies. The Red menace and Russkies and good old wholesome American boys.

How the Russians and Cubans got to the center of America with no resistance and barricaded the strategic little town but kids could leave and enter is part of the magic!

It's no masterpiece, but reading some of the reviews here...you'd think it was an affront to humanity and that some people has been personally harmed by its existence.

It's an action movie, folks. Don't get your communist panties in a twist. Just kick back, enjoy it and get off your soapbox.

I saw this movie when I was in college in Colorado Springs, Colorado when it came out in 1984. Many people dismiss this movie at best as either a teen fantasy or at worse as a right-wing maniac's delusional vision of the future. Yes, it is a teen movie, but there's a bit more to it than that. I'm basically writing this for those of you who either weren't born or too young to remember those days. I grew up in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Anything mildly patriotic was regarded in bad taste. So when John Millius and his friends decided to make this patriotic teen movie about resistance fighters fighting invaders from the Evil Empire, he was just tapping into the frustration that many people (including myself) felt at that time. The scene I remember most vividly is the one when Patrick Swazye shoots the young Russian political officer in the Chevy Blazer. The audience consisted mostly of guys from nearby Fort Collins and Peterson AFB, and they gave this scene a standing ovation. In this post 11 September world, it's hard to imagine a time when, during the Cold War, flying the flag or loving your native land made many people think you were either a Nazi or a member of the John Birch Society. Now this film isn't "Seven Days in May" or "Fail-Safe." It's just a movie that was made at a time after we had lost a war and many in the world regarded the USA as a paper tiger. That's all.