After his sister is brutally raped and murdered by a gang of thugs, Kevin (James Van Patten) gets his friends together and says, “Why don’t we go after them ourselves? We’re not tied up with red tape and dumb fucking laws!” They turn vigilante and begin riding around the city in their Jeep looking to keep the streets safe. Needless to say, Kevin’s mom (Lynda Day George) and cop father (Ernest Borgnine) do not approve.
This is actually a sequel to Malibu High, but the title was changed by distributors Cannon Films to presumably cash in on the success of The Warriors. I don’t think it had anything to do with Malibu High anyway, since it takes place in college. The opening crawl says, “These are the graduates of Malibu High and this is their story”, but there’s no linking characters or conjoining plot lines from that film.
Like Malibu High it jumps from genre to genre on a dime. It kicks off like your typical Animal House rip-off. There’s a great opening graduation scene where a teen rides his motorcycle on stage and grabs his diploma. We also get the standard tropes of frat boys partying, hazing pledges, and playing pranks. (Pigs are stampeded through a frat house.) Then in a blink of an eye, it becomes a Death Wish-style revenge flick.
What’s refreshing about the movie is that Van Patten and his crew aren’t very good at being vigilantes. They get beat up, arrested, shot, and one of their members even dies before they make a successful bust. Heck, things get real dark when (Spoiler) the frat’s mascot Butch (Casper the Wonder Dog) gets killed during a raid. I mean, they even mow down some kids carrying toy guns and they still keep patrolling the streets. This eventually leads to a downbeat Peckinpah-inspired slow motion shootout with the gang.
Then things get REAL depressing.
Writer/director Lawrence D. Foldes also produced Malibu High, but this is very much its own thing. Maybe he was going for one of those Halloween 3 deals. Either way you would’ve never guessed it was a sequel anyway.
What’s impressive about Young Warriors is the way Foldes keeps doubling down on the message that violence isn’t the answer. You keep waiting for Van Patten and his crew to… you know… get good at their jobs of being Temu Guardian Angels, but it never happens. If anything, they make the streets a lot more unsafe. So, that’s intriguing and helps to separate the movie from countless other revenge films.
The cast is good. Van Patten is a bit bland, but that suits the character’s sociopathic tendencies. Borgnine is fun as his exasperated father and George is solid as his grieving wife. Richard Roundtree is kind of wasted as Borgnine’s partner though, which is the biggest disappointment. Anne Lockhart is also in there as Van Patten’s girlfriend and Linnea Quigley has a brief nude scene as a girlfriend of one of the other vigilantes.
AKA: Malibu High. AKA: The Graduates of Malibu High.
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