Red Scorpion
All actors and roles (10)
All team (20)
Short description
Red Scorpion follows Nikolai Rachenko, a Soviet special forces lieutenant whose superiors consider him the ideal instrument for their most sensitive operations. Sent to an African country wracked by rebellion, he is ordered to find and eliminate the leader of the insurgents fighting Soviet-backed forces. Once in the field, the mission goes wrong: he is captured, tortured and left for dead, then rescued by the very people he was sent to kill. What he witnesses of the army's treatment of the local population turns him against his former commanders, and he becomes a fighter for the rebels instead.
Joseph Zito directed the film, the fifth in the directing run listed for him, after The Prowler, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Missing in Action and Invasion U.S.A. Arne Olsen wrote the screenplay, and Jack Abramoff produced. Dolph Lundgren leads as Rachenko, with M. Emmet Walsh as Dewey Ferguson, Al White as Kallunda Kintash, T. P. McKenna as General Vortek, Carmen Argenziano as Colonel Zayas and Alex Colon as Sgt. Mendez among a credited cast of 32. Shot in Namibia and released in late 1988, the film cost about 16 million dollars and took roughly 4 million worldwide, a fraction of its budget.
On IMDb it holds 5.2 out of 10 from around 11,000 votes, and on TMDB 6 out of 10 from 319. Critics were harsher still, giving it 4.3 out of 10 across 12 reviews, below both audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film featured real Bushmen, and Regopstaan, at 95 years old, was the tribe's chief who agreed to appear only on the condition that his tribe would follow him everywhere.
- The opening scene of the original script was different from what appears in the film. It was supposed to show the character played by Dolph Lundgren training in snowy Moscow. The scene was ultimately cut from the script due to its cost and the filming schedule.
- At one point, the film's cast and crew were stranded in Johannesburg for three months while waiting to move to a new location. This was originally intended to be the Kingdom of Swaziland (renamed the Kingdom of Eswatini in 2018). Eventually, however, filming took place in Namibia. At that time, it was part of South Africa, and the filmmakers thus violated the international boycott of the country imposed due to the apartheid regime.
- During the filming of this movie, Dolph Lundgren performed some of the most dangerous stunts of his acting career, including a motorcycle jump onto a truck.
- On many posters, Dolph Lundgren's hairstyle was altered to more closely resemble that of Ivan Drago from Sylvester Stallone's sports drama *Rocky IV* (1985), even though his character already had a different hairstyle in that film. This was likely done to emphasize that the actor was once again playing a Russian. In reality, it's more likely that the filmmakers deliberately gave him a different hairstyle so that the characters in these two films wouldn't resemble each other, and so that Nikolai would visually differ from Ivan in Stallone's film.
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