In short: Edge of Honor (1991)

A troop of boy scouts (our main scouts are played by Corey Feldman, Scott Reeves and Alex “Sasha” Walkup) is on an outing in the Pacific Northwest. While farting around, our protagonist scouts break into a shack where they find a hidden cache of SAMs. They eventually decide to contact the authorities about their find, but before they can do much about it, the smugglers of said illegal weaponry come calling, and, as the audience well knows from the intro sequence where these guys murder a family operation of smugglers (apart from daughter Meredith Salenger who is going to help our heroes out with quite the talent for killing) in coldest blood, they aren’t above killing themselves a troop of boy scouts.

But these teenagers are more difficult to kill than you think.

Watching Michael Spence’s early 90s action movie with a very 80s action movie vibe, I couldn’t help but imagine this as an attempt to make a film a little like Red Dawn but without John Milius’s unpleasant idiot politics, keeping the teenagers under duress turning effective killers when threatened enough but dumping the red scare nonsense in favour of disgruntled weapon smugglers (Don Swayze giving the nastiest one) and the weird British main henchman (Christopher Neame) of their main customer. So there’s more space for the truly entertaining elements of action cinema, like said British guy’s tendency to randomly quote Shakespeare at you before he sticks you with a trick knife in his sleeve. Or Feldman’s typically strange line delivery that suggests a little kid imitating James Dean, badly, or a guy very consciously pretending to be a little kid that imitates Dean.

The woods are wet and claustrophobic, the action is fun and creative – with quite a few moments like the early scene where our scouts are trapped under enemy fire with little ability to do anything about it but cower that suggest a bit of realistic weight to the violence – a bit like a teen version of Rambo (again, without politics silly or not so silly), and the villains are perfectly hateable. It’s fun for the whole family (if your whole family watches R-rated movies).