How about the small towns of rural Colorado? That’s the setting for “Red Dawn,” the 1984 piece of militia porn that pitted a group of American kids against the combined might of the invading armies of Cuba, Nicaragua and the USSR. Led by Patrick Swayze, they lived off the land and harvested what seemed to be a never-ending supply of rocket-propelled grenades, with which they blew up tanks and Soviet-American Friendship Centers.

The film was released in the height of the Cold War, and its ludicrous premise (best summed up as “Hey kids, let’s go fight an insurrection!”) fit well with the rest of the decade’s fear-mongering anti-Soviet propaganda and jingoistic paeans to American exceptionalism. Let’s not forget that this was the same year that Reagan joked, “My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

Continue Reading...