My friend’s father – most everyone’s father or mother or uncle, whoever – would, while on business trips overseas, visit the occasional video store or flea market and return with whatever films or books or albums they happened to find.
Released in the early 80s, it belongs to a large fraternity of films in which scrappy underdog Americans fight back against the seemingly insurmountable but of course ultimately very surmountable power of the Soviet empire.
In a couple of decades, the Russians would pass the baton of villainy to people who look like me, though in our case there was no real empire to speak of, and so we were mostly small-batch insidious, our specialty less tank-and-jet and more suicide-bomb-level violence.
Among my hazier memories of early adolescence in Qatar is a screening, at a friend’s home, of an obviously pirated Betamax copy of Red Dawn.
It didn’t much matter; Red Dawn with Arabs instead of Soviets for villains would have still been shit.
.jpg?auto=webp&width=800)
