Red Dawn scared the bejeesus out of me when I was thirteen years old. I remember the opening scene, in which paratroopers descend upon a high school, spray the place with a shower of hot lead, and, in perhaps the film’s most disturbing moment, we see a young boy slumped in front of a window with a bullet hole in his head. I’m pretty sure that was the first time I’d ever seen a “child” die in such a way on film, and, seeing as how it was 1984 – smack dab in the middle of some of the tensest years in US/USSR relations – I left the theater that day with a very real fear of imminent Russian invasion. Sadly, if the invasion played out like it did in the film, I’d have been lost in one of those surgical nuclear strikes mentioned later in the film thanks to my proximity to both Boston and New York, so I didn’t fear surviving the invasion as much as I feared being fried before it even began. Now, over twenty years later, Red Dawn is still pretty terrifying stuff, but not for the same reasons it was back in the comparably halcyon days of the cold war. No, Red Dawn is terrifying because it shows just what a small group of people can do to fend off an incursion on their soil, and, in light of the current quagmires in both Afghanistan and Iraq, this film, albeit inadvertently, is as relevant now as it ever was.

Now that’s not to say Red Dawn isn’t entertaining; far from it – this is still the same sort of fist-pumping, Rambo generation action flick it’s always been; it’s just that, as I watched the film, I couldn’t help but think that there had to be a radical Islamic equivalent out there somewhere, maybe a “Zion Dusk” or “Infidel Afternoon”, currently unspooling in a musty old cinema outside of Kabul, an oil baron’s Abu Dhabi loft, or, more frighteningly, in a basement somewhere in suburban U.S.A.. The story of a small group of teenagers fighting to retake their country from invaders may have seemed like a silly Hollywood concoction back in the eighties, but, since then, from Afghanistan to Lebanon to Mogadishu to Iraq, we’ve seen what a few well-dug-in locals can do to disrupt an invading force’s military operations, and Red Dawn puts an American face on such an insurgency.

Back in the eighties, this film scared me, but it also made me want to pick up arms and defend the red, white, and blue from the commie scum that “threatened” our sovereignty. Watching it now, in between fits of laughter at nuggets of melodramatic dialogue like “Avenge me!” and “Shoot straight you…army…pukes,” I was surprised to find that it still got a rise from my inner patriot, but, at the same time, found myself disgusted by the fact that said inner patriot was too disillusioned by our current administration to do much more than mutter a weak “Wolverines!” when C. Thomas Howell took one for the team.

MGM is offering Red Dawn in a feature-packed, two-disc edition that’s chock full of featurettes, interviews with cast and crew, and a cleverly implemented “Carnage Counter” that keeps track of the multitude of deaths in the film. It’s a great package for this film’s legions of fans, as well as those who’ve yet to see it, and well worth it just to listen to gun-crazy director, John Milius’ dissection of the film and its legacy. He’s a scary, scary man (and also served as the inspiration for the "Walter" character in THE BIG LEBOWSKI!).

This is a must-have for Red Dawn aficionados, if only for the excellent supplements that feature new interviews with just about everyone you cared about from the film (unless you were a big "Aardvark" fan), plus lots of really politically charged insight (courtesy of the always controversial Milius) that helpes to elevate this set from pop culture curiosity to counterculture gem.