Film Review: Young Warriors (The Graduates of Malibu High, 1983)

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Cannon Films was the studio known for making plenty of films with low budgets, low ambitions and few reasons for audience to expect good quality. Some of those films, however, went way below the low standards you could expect from studio that embodied cheap exploitation cinema. One such example could be found in Young Warriors, 1983 crime drama directed by Lawrence B. Foldes, also known as one of the films with dubious honour of being among the first “straight-to-video” titles.

The protagonist, played by James Van Patten, is Kevin Carrigan, Malibu high school student who at the beginning of the film graduates with his friends. Three years later all of them are in the same college fraternity and their life revolves around endless partying, pranks, alcohol and sex. All that changes when Kevin’s younger sister Tiffany (played by April Dawn) gets raped and killed by vicious gang of bikers. Kevin is deeply affected by tragedy and after police, which includes his father Lt. Bob Carrigan (played by Ernest Borgnine), fails to find the killers, he decides to take matters into his own hands and recruits his fraternity to help him in his search. Kevin and his friends are determined to complete this task despite warnings by his father and girlfriend Lucy (played by Anne Lockhart) that such quest might get them hurt of worse. They aren’t discouraged even when one of their member gets brutally murdered on the street. Instead they obtain weapons and begin cruising the city streets in order to stop and violently deal with any criminal they see. This course of action leads to inevitable bloodbath.

Young Warriors (also known by the alternative title The Graduates of Malibu High) was made at the time when vigilante films enjoyed great popularity. Foldes, known for semi-cultish exploitation films like Malibu High, tried to subvert the genre by his very explicit message that vigilantism is not only morally wrong, but also likely to lead to more violence and tragedy as well as to make vigilantes not very different from the perpetrators of crimes they want to avenge. This is best stated in the scene in which Kevin discusses crime in modern society during college class and his professor (played by famous comedian Dick Shawn) warns him that historical experiences show that vigilantism leads to fascism and global tragedy. Unfortunately, this intriguing message is drowned through inept direction and terrible scriptwriting. The film, very unusually, starts very much like the raunchy teen sex comedy like those there very popular in 1980s and features scenes of outrageous frat boy antics only to suddenly switch into serious vigilante film. This transition occurs during horrific rape scene, which is poorly intercut with the scene of Kevin and his friends partying. To make things even worse, protagonists are introduced as arrogant, immature and stupid and afterwards there is very little sympathy among the audience left for Kevin as his plight. Film looks even worse because of poor acting, with Van Patten looking awful in comparison of Borgnine and his older colleagues. Foldes even fails to deliver exploitation content in a right way – obligatory sex scene between Kevin and Lucy is utterly unconvincing and non-erotic (with annoyingly obvious use of body double) while the violence includes some poorly directed gunfights in slow motion which is matched by cheap and ludicrous scene of street thugs shooting down police helicopter with a simple handgun. Film ends with spectacular, but non-cathartic scene of pointless self-destructive violence that is almost certain to disappoint even the least demanding aficionados of 1980s exploitation cinema.

RATING: 2/10 (+)