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Since the Red Dawn remake is on the verge of being unleashed upon the world like so much Commie propaganda, I figure it might be a good idea to examine the awfulness that was the original, or doing a joint episode where both are dissected for comedic effect. I have not seen the remake, obviously, but I'm pretty confident from the trailer that it's going to be not-so-good. North Korea invades the US, huh? Sounds likely! "How DID this get made?" indeed. Just mocking the original would be wonderful. It has Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen as siblings, Swayze's future 'Dirty Dancing' co-star Jennifer Grey, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Harry Dean fucking Stanton, and Powers Boothe being manly while talking around a camp fire. Are there age-inappropriate/potentially statutory rape-ish googly eyes made in Powers Boothe's direction? Hell yes! The plot is basically a series of militarily impossible situations that have the Keystone Cops of the Soviet Union and their dirty Mexican Latin American allies invading the US via the choke-point of American power: Calumet, Colorado. With the help of John Milius's dicrtion and screenplay, it all adds up to the least subtle bit of Reagan-era propaganda this side of a 'Just Say No' after school special.

I know I've been kind of sieging the forums in the past hour (I'm a recent listener who's fallen in love with the show), but I'd be remiss if I didn't suggest Act of Valor. It's the America, Fuck Yeah action movie perhaps best known for starring real-life Navy SEALS. If it weren't for that fact, I'm confident the movie would have been a direct-to-DVD release. Some of the action scenes are actually pretty cool, but otherwise the movie is total WTF. May I present: The general promotional premise. I heard a Fox News interview with the directors/producers/doesn't really matter, in which they said the movie began with traditional actors and Navy SEAL consultants, but that the creators decided if they used actors, they wouldn't be telling the SEALs story. But consider this: the soldiers aren't playing themselves, they're not recreating a true life mission, and many of the plot happenings are wildly implausible. The wooden under-acting and crazy over-acting that lets you identify the SEAL actors from the "actors." Grenades that destroy entire city blocks. Surprising levels of anti-semitism. The two main bad-guys are a Jewish drug runner and an Islamic terrorist who you find out was converted from Judaism--and the script goes far out of its way to point that out. A soldier is shown in montage to have a huge "God Bless America" patch on his helmet. That patch is never shown again, even though he's still wearing the helmet immediately after the scene. The bad guy's snidely whiplash laugh in the first scene of the movie. The plot revolves around new explosive jackets filled with ceramic ball bearings to avoid metal detection. The scheme is described along the lines of "Seven 9/11s"