Lawrence D. Foldes' YOUNG WARRIORS (1983)

“What do you get if you cross Animal House with Death Wish?"

That previous statement is not a phrase found in the satirical online newspaper The Onion but comes straight off of Young Warriors video box copy. Young Warriors remains the favorite of director Lawrence D. Foldes’ earlier features, cramming in lots of production value, action sequences, name actors and challenging themes. While technically polished, Young Warriors also tends to overreach itself in the manner of Foldes’ much-dismissed Don’t Go Near the Park (1979). Never released to DVD, Young Warriors can be found in the rare store that still carries VHS tapes.

James Van Patten stars as Kevin, a petulant film student attending college in Southern California. He hangs out with his frat buddies, whose chief concerns are getting laid, drinking beer and subjecting pledges to sadistic, homoerotic hazing rites. Van Patten’s hedonism comes to an end when his teenage sister Tiffany (April Dawn) is brutally raped and killed on the night of her prom. Enlisting the aid of his friends to bring the killers to justice, the collegiates begin hanging out in waterfront bars in order to stakeout the city’s various underworld connections.

Alas, Van Patten and company fail to heed Friedrich Nietzsche’s admonishment, "Battle not with monsters, lest you become a monster -- and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." Things go from bad to worse, innocent people die and Van Patten kills himself and the remaining cast members by dropping a live grenade into an ammo box, sending the frat house up in a fiery conflagration.



An American and Canadian co-production, Vancouver’s skyline very unconvincingly stands in for Los Angeles during a funeral scene. Foldes was so impressed with Linnea Quigley’s friendly demeanor on the set of Don’t Go Near the Park that he rehired her over a young unknown by the name of Vanna White, who was willing to do the nudity required for the role. Foldes would later kick himself over the potential residuals lost with that casting decision.

Two aspects of Young Warriors would return in a big way to Foldes years after the film was shot. While the film has definite camp appeal, the rape scene at the beginning is as harrowing as the ones shown in Irreversible (2002) and I Spit On Your Grave (1977). The sequence is so potent and relentless that it originally tagged the film with an X-rating.

Foldes enlisted the help of teachers and clergy to write letters to the ratings board arguing that the act of rape is ugly and horrifying, and needed to be depicted as such in the film. Controversy also swirled around the fact that actress April Dawn was underage, although the more revealing parts were accomplished with a body double. The ratings board let the film slide with an "R" rating after a few token cuts.



Adding to the film’s production value is a scene of a helicopter crashing into a used car lot, setting off a series of explosions. Foldes and crew accomplished the scene with the aid of a junked helicopter found by former wife Victoria Paige-Meyerinck in Oregon. Shot on an exterior set built near Valencia, the sequence only lasts a few seconds but cost Foldes $50,000 to shoot.

The aforementioned scene would later haunt Foldes and company when the ethically-challenged producer Menachem Golan would use this scene whole cloth in Exterminator 2 – but that, as they say, is another story …