Red Dawn

So in '84, I was in elementary school. The teachers has us walk a whole 3 blocks down to the Middle school where the para trooping scene was shot, later I did have an art class in that same room. My friend's father worked on some of the sets, and my friend got a hold of some of the machine-gun rounds from the movie...we'd throw them in the air , and watch them explode in "blood" on the ground.

All the locations you see in the "forest" and mountains in the movie I have been to...the gas station out of town never existed, it was built for the movie. The opening scene of the movie is a shot of Grand Avenue, and at the far left there is a gas station, and behind that a tan-colored building with a cowgirl on...Supposed to be "Calumet, Colorado"...the caption beside the cowgirl says, "Calumet says, "howdy", where the Rocky Mountains meet the Great Plains" it's still there, and the city repainted it a few years ago. The gas station below "Calumet" blew up a few years later, a careless driver drove off with the nozzle in the tank.

The in-town shooting locations were great for this movie...because my town boomed from the arrival of the train, and nearly busted when the train moved on. So, after the town dried up, we were left with numerous buildings, that were never used, and are now all on the National Register of Historic Buildings. The building that was "bombed" by the Wolverines is actually my favorite building, only for the extruded circular corner on the second story. The building is still standing, unused.

Edit: February, 2007...the building collapsed, due to lack of maintenance of the owner/economy of the town.

The town itself is just teemed with architectural beauty, from brick to stone to absolutely amazing Victorian homes, it's both sad and good that the town dwindled so rapidly and those with means didn't destroy the old and rebuild over it, leaving us with a heritage. The surrounding area really is as the Calumet painting says, the mountains back-dropping the meadows...thus the Spanish name, "Las Vegas" (Vegas meaning rolling hills or meadows).

There are natural hot springs a tiny bit north of town, in a village called Montezuma, where there's a castle, recently re-furbished, as well as the Armand Hammer International College (pages of history there at Montezuma). And an even further 1 minute drive north or there is the area where the town used to get it's ice, one can see where they cut into the cliff face to catch the water, so it would ice up. I've climbed that cliff free-hand. Much further north of that, on a 2-lane road cut into the mountain that switches back numerous times and gives drivers and passengers a slight fright, one comes the the base of the mountain where the forest scenes were shot for the movie...there's no words to describe the views, and the movie barely scratched the surface as far as views go. A mysterious hermit used to live there...thus the title, "Hermit's Peak".

As far as the others who have posted here about the movie, it was a movie that defined the times, the cold war and all. As far as the special effects goes, again, it was the early eighties, and apparently they didn't have a George Lucasian budget to work with. The special effects weren't too bad, I've seen worse from the same time. Patrick Swayze ended up buying a place out there, as well as a few other Hollywood types.