Young Rebels has neither youth nor rebellion, but rather is an Amir Shervan joint about a guy, played by Jon Greene (as Johnny Greene) who has a down-on-his luck brother that's into a mob boss for a lot of dough. To settle the debt, Greene agrees to fly a helicopter to pick up some guys in Mexico for the mob boss, but when that goes south, the mob boss, as mob bosses are wont to do, decides he wants his revenge, so he starts by killing Greene's brother. Turns out he messed with the wrong guy, so Greene gathers up some friends, including Tadashi Yamashita, to take the mob boss, and the mob boss's son, Robert Z'Dar, down. It's going to be a blood bath--or maybe just an extended shootout and extended strip scene bath, but a bath nonetheless.
This is pure Shervan. All of our late 80s action movie excess is run through Shervan's Iranian filter and reflected back at us. How long should a strip scene go before it crosses from sexy into uncomfortable? Shervan has no idea, American guys seem to spend hours in these places, so why not make it as long as possible? And does seeing a sweaty doughy man responding to the strippers make it more uncomfortable for the viewer? Why would it, don't American men go to these places with other guys all the time? What about the shootouts taking place in late 80s finished basements, known at the time as "dens,"--before we had to give everything cute names like "man caves"--how long should those be? I mean, Americans like action and they love their guns, the longer the better, right? And to that point, who cares how good the dialog is? Does it even need to make that much sense? It makes sense enough to me, that should be all that matters, right? While this doesn't have the all out classic level of ridiculousness that Samurai Cop does, for the kind of movie this is, it hits all the right spots.
We last saw now DTVC Hall of Famer Robert Z'Dar back in October when we did his induction post, which was also an Amir Shervan film, Killing American Style. Like that one, this was a bigger role for Z'Dar, which let him do more. The problem here was, part of that doing more was watching a woman do a strip tease with a long necklace of pearls that she drags through parts of her body that maybe she shouldn't have, and Z'Dar has to react to it like he's into it. There is no real face someone can make to show they're into it that doesn't look ridiculous, especially on camera, which means Z'Dar was already working uphill before he even agreed to do that scene, but he ends up making it more cringey for us the viewer. The question is, where do we go from here with Z'Dar? He does have some stuff on Tubi and YouTube, but the reality is, a lot of it is two or three notches below where we usually go with all the stuff that's available now. There are a couple though, like Red Line and Double Blast, which our friends at Comeuppance have already covered, that I think we need on here, so this definitely won't be the last we see of Mr. Z'Dar.
We're now at three Amir Shervan films on the site, and I slot this one between the other two, right after Samurai Cop and before Killing American Style. It's a fascinating filmography though, where he's an established director in Iran, then is forced to come to the US after the Iranian Revolution, and while the next generation of filmmakers there are, despite the restrictions put on their work by the government, a few years out from putting out some of the best stuff in the world at that time, Shervan is giving us what are objectively some of the most off the wall low-budget actioners ever. As we get into the later part of the 90s, in Iran we get Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, Makhmalbaf's Gabbeh, Dariush Mehrjui's Leila--and Mehrjui was actually a contemporary of Shervan's before Shervan left Iran--and Majid Majidi's Oscar nominated Children of Heaven--and even before that, in 1992, one of my favorites, Nargess, directed by Rakhshan Bani-etemad, all while Shervan is giving us Samurai Cop and Young Rebels. It's really fascinating to consider these two tracks in parallel, that we have a set of directors who are the darlings of international cinema working in the country Shervan was forced to flee, while he's struggling to put together some schlock actioners that he thinks are what Americans at that time wanted. What we get isn't maybe something worthy of the Criterion Collection, but it's fun just the same, making it a short but sweet legacy in the DTV action world.
Our hero is played by Jon Greene, and when we look at his filmography on IMDb, it's a lot of "police officer," "police detective," or "police sergeant"--in fact, we've seen him before as "Officer Baylor" in Crack House. This was his one time to shine as the hero, the problem was, I think in Shervan trying to push the "young" element in the film, he ended up making him into the guy I used to see in the convenience store on a Friday when I was growing up who definitely looked like he was onto cooler and better things than me and my friends who were loading up on junk food before a night of video game playing. Was that guy really about do something cooler than that though? When I finally got to be his age, I learned that life generally wasn't that much cooler, that maybe finishing every level in Super Mario 3 without warping was better than getting wasted and having a hangover the next day, and now it's even worse, as guys that age post on social media what they're doing to try and make it look even better. At least that guy back then, or me 10 years later, didn't need to worry about making everything look better to keep up with the Joneses on Instagram, didn't need to worry about how our sneakers looked, if our T-shirts had designer logos on them, if the place we were at was more of a destination than what our friends were posting. No, that guy in his mullet, dirty high-tops, and faded jeans was living his best life before we coined horrible terms like that and needed to hashtag it on our social media posts about what we were doing.
Finally, as I mentioned above, parts of this film take place in the finished basement, or den, of the house where they were filming. When I was in high school, a friend of ours had one of those finished basements complete with a bar and a bathroom, and he used to host big sleepovers with five or six of us on a weekend. We could sneak out the backdoor to smoke weed, or go to get late night food, often the friends with cars letting them roll in neutral to avoid waking up his parents before they started the engine. Nowadays, that den would be called a "man cave," the dad wouldn't let his son use it for sleepovers, and Ring cameras would patrol the backdoor so no one could sneak out. Were we "young rebels," or just kids in a small town in Maine who were looking for something to do? And to go back to the previous paragraph, we couldn't wait until we were old enough to have our own places where we could smoke our weed and come and go when we felt like it. The problem, as I'm sure you know, is your own place comes with bills, which means you need a job too. Now we don't even need to sneak out to get weed, I can take a bus to New Jersey and get gummies legally--and if I snuck out at 1am here in Philly, I don't know what kind of unsavory characters I'd run into, but I can order my Taco Bell through Doordash so I don't need to sneak out to get it. Here's to you 90s den and all that came with you, you were one of the good ones.
And with that, let's wrap this up. Here in the States you can stream this free on Tubi. That's your best bet. It's not quite Samurai Cop, but it will anchor your Saturday movie night well enough. As the guys at Comeuppance said, they don't make 'em like this anymore, and I agree with them that that's not a great thing.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2394099
And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, Holtman Arms, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!
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