“They drew
first blood, not me.”
Maybe we are always more fascinated by things that we shouldn’t
see. At age 8 I saw my first rated “R”
movie. The daycare I was left at the
summer of 1983 had movie day every week.
Our first trip to the Fox Theater, a second-run movie house we saw “The
Secret of Nimh” kinda dark for a kids film but still a cartoon. The second movie we saw was “Star Trek II:
The Wrath of Kahn” not a kids movie at all, but I was one of the few who
enjoyed it. The final film, final
because when parents found out that we were taken to see a movie called “First
Blood” and it was rated “R” we never took a field trip to the movies again. Some parents didn’t want their kids seeing “those”
kinds of movies. The kind with guns,
explosions, bad language, and for some of us we got to see exactly what the
title promises, first blood.
Released in the fall of 1982 “First
Blood” directed by Ted Kotcheff starring Sylvester Stallone, fresh off “Rocky
III” who decided to take a different kind of role that would eventually create
a new character as popular as Rocky, his name was Rambo, John J. The film starts as Rambo discovers that he is
the last of his Vietnam Company that is alive; he wanders into a small town in
Washington where the local sheriff “nicely” leads him out of town. After being talked down to and insulted Rambo
gets arrested for vagrancy, resisting arrest, and carrying a concealed weapon. He is taken to the police station where he is
further humiliated by the local cops, along with a series of flashbacks to ‘Nam,
Rambo cracks and takes down the entire station of police. He escapes into the woods where while in pursuit
one officer dies, as Rambo incapacitates the rest of the group
single-handedly. Giving the Sheriff
played by lovable and hateable Brian Dennehy his only warning “Don’t push it
or I’ll give you a war you won’t believe.”
Which he does indeed.
Now Rambo became a series of films
that spanned over 25 years that also became a phenomenon, they even made a
cartoon series called “Rambo and the Forces of Freedom”. However after re-watching the movie today,
there is a lot that stands out. Mostly,
it’s a hell of a good film. It’s not too
long, the action keeps moving, and it almost feels short. The music by the great Jerry Goldsmith is
still awesome. Richard Crenna as Col.
Trautman in the role he will forever be known for. What surprised me the most was that (Spoilers,
if you haven’t seen this 30 year old movie) Rambo never kills anybody. The Deputy dies due to anger and negligence. Rambo does kill three dogs, a warthog, and a
few rats, but that’s it, unlike 2008’s “Rambo” where he kills…well everybody.
As a kid too young to be watching “First
Blood” it certainly made an impression, as I said I had never seen a movie like
this before, so when he started stitching up his own arm wound with needle and
thread my little mind exploded. Was this
possible? It was set in the real world, it
all felt like it could really happen. I
thought, could someone without the suffix ‘Bat’ or ‘Super’ in front of his name
take out all these guys by himself with some twine and a knife. That knife, which took on a whole life of its
own as well. It was incredible to see
then, and as I watch it now, I long for movies like that. Short, to the point, exciting, disguised as a
message about war and what it can do to a man.
The storyline has been done to death at this point, but if you haven’t
seen it in a while give it another watch, you may or may not feel the same
way. You may want your heroes to not
just be cool, but to be real.
--Robert L.
Castillo
No comments:
Post a Comment