To the reader who urged this week’s selection to be Shaun of The Dead: I started actually making this a grand triple feature of Edgar Wright’s whole “Three Flavors Cornetto” trilogy, with my personal favorite Hot Fuzz on the top, then Shaun of the Dead, and then The World’s End at the bottom because it just wasn’t nearly as good as the other two, even before the bleak, depressing ending.

Then YouTube pulled a Youtube. Every R-rated movie is “Age restricted” and cannot be embedded on another website, something that wasn’t apparent until now since the previous two selections just so happened to be PG-13. That SERIOUSLY puts a crimp on how much further “Movie Night Friday” can go as it’ll be just weeks until freaking Jurassic World is the best selection available. Which is to say I am going to need a new regular Friday night open thread format far sooner than anticipated.

On that note, was anyone aware that Red Dawn is PG-13? On one hand 1984 was the year the MPAA introduced the medium rating in direct response to the closer-to-R-than-PG violence of Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom so it’s understandable if their content reviewers were still fine-tuning the exact criteria. On the other it isn’t a close call as to whether it would be rated R if the exact same movie, with the exact same level of violence were made today. The actual Red Dawn remake from 2012, the one where the chickenshit studio had to digitally edit it from a Chinese invasion to a North Korean one before releasing the movie, sucked for that and lengthy list of other reasons, a big one was its utter tameness compared to the savagery of the original Cold War classic.

And 1984 Red Dawn is a classic, don’t kid yourself, even if its production value and the uneven talent in the cast falls unmistakably short of its ambitions. Over the years just evoking Red Dawn and “Wolverines!” is a quick and easy shorthand to mock the MAGA “survivalist” mindset, mostly because those fuckers really do fantasize that any day now they’ll be called to step up and fight on the front lines of a valiant resistance against a larger, more powerful occupying force. Let’s not go on a tangent about how that’s basically what the Oath Keepers and their ilk are doing now anyway.

Yet that association sells the film short (and that right wing demo also was no doubt at least part of the market MGM were aiming for when they puked up that dogshit remake with the Chinese being the invaders). It deserves more respect than it gets. The filmmakers put it in an alternate present where the Soviets had won the Cold War and flipped Latin America before starting World War III. The kids are not Luke Skywalkers, instant natural born warriors the day the bad guys show up. They face suffering and scarcity absent in big-budget 21st century PG-13 action adventures.

The edges are rough. The amount of damage and death the Wolverines inflict on their occupiers is a few degrees unrealistic. The kids’ clothes are a little cleaner than they should be during months and months of living outdoors in the Rockies in winter. But the script was written with precision, passion, and aimed at a cold and brutal tale of resistance with real consequences. Red Dawn has the reputation as being a power fantasy because of its fictional premise and not unearned association with right wing militia culture. But change the setting to 1940 France, Norway, or the Channel Islands, and the occupiers to the Nazis, while keeping as much else as you can exactly the same.

It’d probably be hailed as a “powerful” historical drama if largely forgotten forty years later.