Movie Guns XXXIV

This week's Movie Guns post is not quite as lengthy as the last post. The movie that I had originally started has some pretty poor picture quality, so I shelved it, and instead opted to cover Rambo: First Blood.

This is the type of film that inspires countless young men to join the Army in an effort to be a bad ass. Unfortunately, a lot of the Speshul Forses stuff in this movie is fantasy, with very little tactical relevance. Special Forces I am not, but I have gone to some of the schools that some high speed special operators go through, and know that some of this is just Hollywood hype. Just know that my tough love attitude toward much of the substance in this movie does not lessen my love for the film in general.

The location of this movie is in Washington state, in a town called Hope. Our prestigious hero is John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone), who has just found out that the last guy from his US Army Special Forces unit died, making Rambo the sole survivor. He is on foot heading towards Hope when the town Sheriff, Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy), intent to keep "drifters" out of town, picks him up and drives him outside of city lines. That pisses Rambo off, so he heads back toward the town so the Sheriff arrests him.

The first pick is of the Sheriff's nickel plated Smith & Wesson Model 629, which he starts to draw when he thinks Rambo might give him trouble:

We'll see this gun again later.

The Sheriff finds a big ass knife on Rambo, and holds it up with the same look that I've had cops give me as a teenager when they noticed I was carrying a knife:

I've never cared for knives that big, and mine have always been considered tools, not weapons, or for hunting, which is what Rambo claims his is used for.

The over zealous Sheriff takes Rambo to jail where even more over zealous cops work him over.

I caught a glimpse of the department armory which consists of mostly M16s:


After the cops beat on him a little bit, a creepy looking Deputy tries to shave Rambo, making him flashback to his time in Vietnam and his torture as a prisoner of war:



Despite the intense suffering, Rambo survives his earlier torture with the help of his trusty porno mustache.

Back in his current nightmare, Rambo flips out and beats the cops in the jail to the floor. Sheriff Teasle tries to find out what all the racket is about when Rambo does a top secret Judo/Ninja Dragon kick; knocking the Sheriff down and making him negligently discharge his gun:


As he runs out the front door of the building, Deputy Galt (Jack Starrett) tries to shoot him in the back outright with a Winchester Model 88, but the Sheriff knocks the gun away:


This is one of the few instances where one of the film's actors actually puts the weapon up to the shoulder.

Rambo escapes to the great outdoors where his speshul forses training helps him fight The Man and win!

The Sheriff and his goons attempt to track Rambo down in the woods with a variety of mismatched M16s and a couple of Heckler & Koch 33s. Here is a pair of pictures where the Deputies flag each other as well as the Sheriff with their rifles:


Safety violators!!

Here are a couple of H&K 33s and a hybrid M16:




Rambo shows us his survival skills by making a super warm jacket out of an old tarp, thus making him impervious to the Washington cold. Here he is with his new jacket, and you can see his big ass knife in it's leather sheath on his waist:


As Rambo is hanging helplessly onto the face of a cliff, Galt tries to get some retribution for Rambo having made him his bitch in the jail cell by firing that Winchester Model 88 at him from a helicopter:


Rambo taketh his life with the skilled throw of a tactical assault stone that hits the helo in the wind screen, thus causing the pilot to gyrate on the cyclic and toss Galt to a righteous screaming death. Sorry, I didn't grab a gruesome picture of that.

Rambo does take Galts rifle and radio, and then tries to surrender to the Sheriff and his goons who are still up on top of the ridge. Rambo is standing there unarmed, but they open up on him with some full auto fire which just bounces off Rambo's skull:


Now shit's on!

Rambo takes off and prepares to take out all of the hostel little bastards with some pernicious booby traps that he builds during a little arts & crafts time:



He kills the dogs that were tracking him, and the Deputies start some indiscriminate fire with their M16s:



One by one the Deputies fall:


But none of them are killed because Rambo has a heart, you see. He takes the Sheriff at knife point and warns him that further action will not be tolerated:


Well, Sheriff Teasle calls in the National Guard, which the director of this movie thinks are a bunch of yahoos, and they appear to be. . . well. . .yahoos. All of them are cowards, but again Rambo shows restraint by not killing them mercilessly.

Here's Rambo heading toward the mine that he's using for a shelter with an M16 that he's holding by the carry handle:

That's a big no-no in the Marine Corps. Carrying your weapon like that will get you smoked for an hour or so.

The National Guardsman fire in vain at the mine where Rambo is with M16A1s:




And Rambo shows them how speshul forses handle an M16: by hip firing with his eyes closed:


No one hits any one, so the Lieutenant in charge of the yahoo brigade has one of his idiots fire a M72 LAW at the entrance of the mine:



But it takes more than a nuclear warhead fired from a Soldiers M72 to take out Rambo!

Rambo escapes from the mine, steals a National Guard truck containing one M60 machine gun and an assload of ammo, and heads towards the town of Hope. Some of the State Police demonstrate their lack of safety and gun handling by shooting over each others heads at the truck that Rambo is driving:


Along the way Rambo decides to shoot the town up, destroy buildings, and pretty much make his wrath known to the good people of Hope.

One of the places that he destroys is a gun store called "The Outpost," which he breaks into, dumps the ammo and cans of gunpowder - some of which is Red Dot - and lights the whole shootin match on fire:




The whole building goes up in a huge fireball, but Rambo's appetite for destruction is not quenched. He shoots up a couple of electrical transformers in order to bring about some darkness, which he uses to get all stealth-ninja and sneak up to the Sheriff's Department:

Firing a M60 one handed with his eyes closed is just another day in the life of a speshul forses soldier, and Rambo has the proper amount of veins sticking up in his arms to qualify as being in that elite part of the Army, because we all know that average sized guys just don't have what it takes.

Sheriff Teasle has his own personal armory in his office, so he grabs an M16 and some ammo and heads up to the roof to wait for Rambo:



Here he's seen with his S&W Model 629 while clearing the roof:


Rambo shoots the building up with the M60, and surprise surprise, uses the sights:


The fight is short lived as Rambo wounds Teasle with some automatic fire and wins the fight. Afterwords, Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna), who trained Rambo, shows up to make him surrender. Rambo breaks down and cries like a sissy, thus betraying his eliteness. He's led out of the building by the Colonel with two State Troopers flanking him: one with a M16, the other with an unknown shotgun with folding stock:


In the bonus features of the disk there's an alternate ending which has Rambo taking Colonel Trautman's M1911A1, cocking it, and making the Colonel shoot him with it:


How was that for a Movie Guns? I can't have a collection like this without including Rambo. To tell you the truth, this one was a challenge to get pictures from because most of the scenes are filmed in low light, and for the most part there are no close ups of the weapons. Throughout there is that military drum beat music that I talked about earlier showing the viewers that something military and organized is happening.

Well, I had fun with this one, and I hope you enjoyed it.