Movies for Wrestlers (Vision Quest and The Warriors)

 

The ILLINI Wrestling Blog and Forum and Beyond will offer a new feature that will provide reviews of those movies that coaches must have on the bus for long road trips. These are movies for wrestlers. We'll start with two classics, Vision Quest and The Warriors. 

THE WARRIORS

The best-selling video game home system in 1979 was the Atari 2600. At the arcade, you could play Space Invaders, while new titles such as Galaxian and Asteroids made their debut. I bring this up because The Warriors movie was released that same year, and, if anything, it was a sweet, sweet video game. 

It has the basic plot you find in many video games.

Moreover, while watching, you feel like you're one of the characters, one of the Warriors, a New York street gang. You negotiate various "levels" along the way, until you face the final boss and earn the prize--your continued existence. 

That formula created a cult classic. 

And some future internet memes. Sure, the acting is awful, but the soundtrack is kicking, the story compelling, and the characters vivid. If you were the right age, you probably wore a "Baseball Furies" costume during at least one Halloween. 

[SPOILERS] The plot is simple. Members from every major New York gang gather together for a summit during which Cyrus, the leader of the Gramercy Riffs--the largest and most powerful gang in the city--sets out a plan for all the gangs to join forces and take over New York. During this meeting, an anarchist member of the Rogues assassinates the speaker, while falsely accusing the Warriors.

Like a video game, the movie becomes a quest to return home alive. All of the other gangs are hunting you down, so each face-off against another gang is like a new level. 

It isn't until the end of the movie that the Warriors make it back to their turf, Coney Island, and their name is vindicated. 

Special mention has to be made of the soundtrack.

The movie ends with the explosive, soul-cleaning guitar riffs of Joe Walsh's In the City, but there's also Martha and the Vandella's huge Motown hit Nowhere to Run, which is used perfectly in the movie. Finally, the movie theme sounds like it came from Pink Floyd, Alan Parsons Project and a video game. 

In fact, each battle against a rival gang or "level" in the movie had a compelling video game sound to it. 

The Warriors made a lot of money at the box office, at least doubling its budget. Part of that may have been caused by the bad press it received, as journalists and elected officials linked the movie to incidents of vandalism and three murders from people going to, or leaving, the movie. 

The perfect way to motivate kids to see it. 

Our Chicago guys, Siskel and Ebert, took a big crap on The Warriors. Ebert gave it two stars, Siskel only one. On their show, Gene Siskel said the movie was "certain to make my year's ten-worst list," while Roger Ebert chuckled unprofessionally in the background. 

They were wrong. The Warriors is 4 out of 4 stars. 

VISION QUEST

Every DVD player in every bus going to every wrestling tournament should be playing this elegant and ambitious movie. It is the movie for wrestlers. 

What you have in Vision Quest is the melding of a great and intricate story with one of the best soundtracks in the history of film along with some of the most realistic wrestling sequences in cinema--although I don't remember quite that many arm throws at high school duals in the early 80s. 

Some have called it a coming of age movie, or a Rocky or Karate Kid derivative, but it is much more complex than that. Sure, you have the boy meets girl, boy starts quest, and boy wins big match elements, but here you have realistic lead and supporting characters and realistic action. 

On top of all of that, you have a legendary soundtrack that I would rank higher than all of those masterpieces created by Martin Scorsese; and, in all of filmdom, only bettered by The Wizard of Oz and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. 

(Yes, you just got Gene Wilder and Judy Garland references in a Vision Quest review. Deal with it.).

Lunatic Fringe by Red Rider, standing alone, is better than almost any entire soundtrack, especially the way it was used and when it was used in this movie. 

Listen to the following clip, as the early groans of the song begin during the dialogue between our hero and his girl, then the song continues to, in effect, bridge three consecutive scenes:

 

That is glorious filmmaking that affects your ears, your brain and your heart. 

[SPOILERS] The plot is simple but effective, and it adds unexpected nuance to characters that would be throw-aways in lesser movies. Louden Swain plays the Mikey Poeta part, while his rival, Brian Shute, plays the part of Andrew Howe. 

Swain drops down in weight to wrestle Shute, who is a three-time state champion. Using Native American terminology--or at least terminology we use to describe the actions of Native Americans--this challenge becomes a vision quest. 

Along the way, Madonna sings, Swain runs into health problems, interacts believably with side characters, and falls in love with the girl. Unlike in most of these movies, however, he doesn't end up keeping her. Well, at least that's the impression we're supposedly left with at the end of the movie. 

Of course, we leave the theater believing otherwise.

At the time the movie opened, Madonna was becoming a star, and Crazy for You was becoming a hit. So, what they did in the foreign markets was to emphasize, unfairly, her role in the film:

Ciao, Italians! It's Madonna, and, yes, maybe just a little wrestling. 

Siskel and Ebert gave the movie two thumbs up, which, by the way, I think is the lamest hand sign a white guy can make. They should've used gang signs, or something that Dr. Dre would do with his hands when he thinks a person, place or thing is jiggy. 

The movie only gets a 60% from the Tomatometer at Rotten Tomatoes, although it has a 78% score from audience members. That goes to show you that 40% of all movie critics and 22% of all humans are stupid as ****. 

The movie gets 5 stars out of 4 from me. 

Finally, I wanted to mention that Matthew Modine is on Twitter. He has earned cult-like status from wrestlers, and deservedly so. He sometimes mentions Vision Quest or Stranger Things or Full Metal Jacket, but he often simply retweets the weird photoshops that his fans make of him sitting with FDR, Stalin and Churchill, or landing on the Moon. If you're on Twitter, you can give him a follow here.