NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Comeuppance Reviews Kevin Carrigan (Van Patten) is a recent graduate of Malibu High and now is studying animation at Pacific Coast College. All he really wants to do is party down, drink beer, invite babes over to his Phi Delta Tai frat house, engage in quasi-homosexual frat initiations, and did we mention he also just wants to party down? His buddies Fred (Norris), Scott (Tom Reilly), and Jorge (John Alden) are all in on the carefree fun. But when a mysterious gang of bikers rapes and kills Kevin's sister Tiffany (April Dawn), Kevin changes. He realizes there's more to life than keggers and pranks, and he becomes sullen, distant and just plain weird.Tired of what he sees as too much police incompetence, signified by his own cop father, Lt. Bob Carrigan (Borgnine) and his partner Sgt. John Austin (Roundtree), these former frat-house knuckleheads go out on their own in a jeep with their beloved dog Butch (Casper the Wonder Dog) and try to solve the mystery of his sister's assault. But Kevin and his cronies get deeper and deeper into the seedy underbelly of the city - and its culture of extreme violence - and people like Kevin's mother Beverly (Day George), his girlfriend Lucy (Anne Lockhart) and his professor Hoover (Shawn) - worry Kevin has lost the plot, as well as his mind. Will Kevin's newfound obsession with violence consume him and everything he loves?In this pickup from Cannon, which infamously combines the 80's teen sex romp and violent revenge genres, we see a major flaw: the movie, despite all the action and shooting and such that we see, actually has an unpleasant, anti-revenge motif. Obviously director/co-writer Foldes didn't realize what audience he was making this film for. You can't make a relatively entertaining, if misguided and overlong, exploitation film catering to drive-ins and hounds of that genre, and then turn around and say "violence and revenge is wrong; don't do it". That's really lame and hypocritical. Just blow up the bad guys with a missile launcher and save your whiny treatises for your shrink (i.e., make a different, less confused, movie).Another flaw is that our "heroes" are unlikable and you don't care about their plight. The whole first half of the movie is carefully setting up our protagonists as frat-boy jerks. Would it have been so very hard to NOT have done that? So when Kevin flips out and becomes addicted to going out and "fighting crime", the transition isn't as dramatic as it could have been. You know he's really out of it when he wears his bandanna around in daily life. Also we don't know anything about the bad guys or even who they are. They are not established at all. So we don't really even know who Kevin and his buddies are fighting, which detracts from the conflict.So we have a rockin' title song by Lennie Gale, and the film is dedicated to legendary director King Vidor. I'm sure he's thrilled about that. For some reason, Kevin's father is elderly, and Dick Shawn plays the college professor Kevin talks to, where we get the annoying comment on violence the film puts out there. The theme "violence destroys us all" is just irritating for this type of film. But in the plus column we have Casper the Wonder Dog as Butch. He wears sunglasses and a hat, and, like we've seen so many times before (Killpoint, 1984, and Fist Fighter, 1989) come immediately to mind), he steals the movie. Here's what Young Warriors SHOULD have been: 1. Kevin and his friends are set up as nice, normal kids 2. The bad guys are established 3. They rape/kill Kevin's sister 4. Kevin and his friends become vigilantes 5. The bad guys kill/injure Kevin and his friends 5. Borgnine and Roundtree go rogue and get revenge for the deaths/injuries to their friends and family, and (OPTIONAL) 6. Ernest Borgnine shoots a missile launcher. THAT'S IT! If that was the movie, Young Warriors would be a classic for the ages. As it stands, we have a deeply flawed, but still worthwhile watch.Released in a big-box VHS in the U.S., for all its foibles, there's still some meat on the bone for 80's obsessives to enjoy with Young Warriors.For more insanity, please visit: comeuppancereviews.com.

HughBennie-777 Without taking too much away from this lunkheaded 80s vigilante movie's action, I must say the atrocities pale in comparison to the remarkable fluffy mullets and athletic shorts sported by the gang of twenty-something avengers,(led by a whiny James Van Patten, who looks here like a genetic cross between Jay Leno and David Patrick Kelly). Not even the wall-to-wall synth stingers and thumping drum machine can compete with wardrobe and hair. The gang even has a sports mascot, a poodle named Butch. Van Patten is so traumatized by the rape and murder of his sister, there's no safe retreat into his art (some form of lame graphic animation he screens to his friends; these "space-y" visuals looking like the rejected material of the video game companies who brought us Detroyer, Battle Zone, and Asteroids). He, instead, embraces spontaneous violence against street crime. Most of the atrocities avenged in the movie are so well-lit and conveniently found as to make the work of Dirty Harry, Charles Bronson and Robocop seem positively procedural. Yet the merciless violence can't sustain the awful characterizations and Van Patten's adolescent outbursts. Ernest Borgnine is in full Comm. Peterson mode here, playing Lt. Carrigan. Aside from sporting a snazzy red leather jacket that barely conceals his bulbosity, he's partnered up with Richard Roundtree, and both men's "hands are tied" by the system. Cannon Films produced this mess, but it's easier to measure the movie by its flaws than its assets. Not even Linnea Quigley can improve things any. Memorable scene highlights the disturbed Van Patten's degenerate art reaching a new low, as his professor shouts in front of the class, "This goes beyond the boundaries of art!" and "It's abnormal!". Who would have thought a vigilante's neon, flashing renderings of "Tron"-like haunted-house werewolves and toothy snakes and skulls could disguise the reason behind all this vengeance? Decent exploding miniature at the end.

dgordon-1 This movie starts off as a college T'n'A flick, but turns pretty ugly after the main character's sister is gang raped by a biker gang driving a van. It has a pretty good pace, and James Van Patten does a pretty good job in this Cannon tax write-off movie. This was the first movie I ever saw at the Parkway Drive-in, here in Toronto. The main feature was "Alphabet City", and "Young Warriors was the added feature. Out of the 2 movies, "Young Warriors" was by far more entertaining and memorable. If you are a fan of blow 'em up, excessively violent movies, this one would make a great addition to any collection.

bassett This movie was just average. Some scenes were good and some were just plain stupid! A well supported cast though and some good action. The best actor in this movie is definetely Anne Lockhart from the T.V. series "Battlestar Galactica." Cast also features "Mission: Impossible's" Lynda Day George, Mike Norris (Chuck's brother) and a supporting role by cult actress Linnea Quigley as Ginger(lookin' good!), who only appears in a few, but good scenes. There's also a one violent rape scene by a vicious gang which was well done! Savage Streets did a movie like this a year later (which also featured Quigley, but the role was bigger and better), except it was alot better than this movie! Some of the scene's in this movie was filmed in my hometown.