BURN THE TAPE: Youngblood is the nuttiest hockey movie around

There's probably only 20 or 30 hockey movies out there, and I have watched the least sensical of them all. Yes, factoring in the one where a chimpanzee plays hockey.

Hello, and welcome back to BURN THE TAPE, the ScorchStack’s super special bonus hockey movie review column. The inaugural BURN THE TAPE was Ramina’s review of an awful romcom with Wayne Gretzky’s son. It wasn’t called BURN THE TAPE then because we thought of the name this week. Sorry to Ramz, but you should read her review anyways even if it isn’t an official BURN THE TAPE.

This week’s movie is 1986’s Youngblood:

Youngblood!

The website that recommended this described it as “Point Break or Roadhouse on ice.” Say no more! With a star-studded 80s cast of Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze, and Keanu Reeves, this sounded like an immediate hidden gem to me.

It’s not. It’s an insane movie that has aged horribly and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I was lied to by that guy, who has apparently never seen Point Break or Roadhouse, but knows that Patrick Swayze has appeared in both of those movies.

---

The movie begins in a New York farmhouse, where Dean Youngblood (the name of the movie. It also means he is “Young blood”) says he has a once in a lifetime opportunity to move to Canada to play in the playoffs (?) for a junior team. His dad and brother are against it, as the dad needs people to run his three-man farm and his brother got injured following the same dream. He needed expensive dental work, which is apparently enough to scare people out of hockey forever. Naturally, as he’s outnumbered two to one and is the youngest in the family, he is allowed to do this with no further pushback. This scene takes two minutes.

The movie establishes some weird Canada versus USA fish-out-of-water story, as his brother lets Youngblood know that he has to learn the Canadian national anthem and that those darn Canucks just do things differently. This may be a very ham-fisted way to set up the central conflict of the movie, but that’s okay because this is also never touched on again.

Now we’re at tryouts for the Hamilton Mustangs, who are coached by a guy who is both Pierre-Elliot Trudeau and Cyrus from Trailer Park Boys. No one at this tryout is even close to good:

Oh I should mention now that I watched this movie on YouTube. The Swedish subtitles are baked in. They aren’t particularly good subtitles either, as there’s one scene where someone yells “bitch!” and the subtitles read “idiot!”

Anyways, there’s two standouts. Youngblood and a guy named Carl Racki. Youngblood has 92 goals and 125 assists in whatever league he most recently played in, which is apparently only good enough to get an emergency tryout with a bunch of schmucks. Racki, played by a former OHLer, is a 33 year old beer leaguer (or at least looks like one) and is very good at wrecking fools. The coach says he has 15 goals and a shitload of penalty minutes. It is somehow a close competition between these two.

Even after a staged fight where Racki one-punches Youngblood, Youngblood makes the team. The cuts are announced in the team’s dressing room/medical centre/laundry room/gym.

Yes, that man is doing squats (?) in full hockey pants.

Anyways, they cut Racki in front of the entire team, and he rightfully storms off. Youngblood goes out to apologize? or something? He just chases after Racki as he goes to leave the building, unclear why. Youngblood is also only wearing a towel and a jockstrap, and decides that this is all the clothing he needs to confront the man who beat him up to impress the coach and is now even more pissed off.

As he’s doing this, a mysterious yet to be named girl is in the same hallway as him. Youngblood drops his towel chasing Racki for some reason, which leads to this shot:

I’m sorry for showing you Rob Lowe’s butt. They don’t show the butt and Rob Lowe’s face in the same shot, so it could be a stunt butt. We’ll never know, but it is still a man’s ass.

A little meet-cute happens where mystery girl and Youngblood get a lil flirty, but she disappears for now.

For the next 15 minutes, we get a mini-montage that is fun by 80’s standards and horrifying by 2020 standards:

1. Youngblood, now back in his street clothes, is getting ready to leave the arena when he’s cornered by his teammates. He gets what’s about to happen, sort of. He knows he’s the rookie and he’s going to get hazed, so he playfully tries to escape but doesn’t fight too hard against the youthful, team-building shenanigans of stripping him into the nude and holding him down while they shave his pubes with a straight razor.

2. Now smooth, he goes to his new billet home. He meets a middle aged woman who gives the impression of an old, caring woman who makes her billet sons tea and takes good care of them. This illusion disappears pretty quickly when she takes him upstairs, revealing that she’s wearing spandex shorts with a side of sexy 80s music playing in the background. She leads him to his room, where she shows him a stack of hockey cards of her favourite players, her voice fluttering as she remembers their physiques. Now’s a great time to bring up that Youngblood is a stated 17 years old in the movie. Two hockey players/voyeurs are outside, just casually reminiscing about the times that happened to them.

3. After an actual crime occurs, the hockey team is in a bar getting drunk at 3 pm. Again, Youngblood is still a minor. They proceed to get more obliterated even though Youngblood keeps spitting out his drinks because he’s never been drunk before. There’s no jokes here, the 80s suck and so does hockey.

If you would like one nice thing about these scenes, it’s that we get to see Keanu Reeves try out the worst Quebecois accent of all time.

This is the only time we hear Keanu in this movie. He does not say another thing. Go watch John Wick if you need your Keanu fill.

So after being the victim of at least three crimes, Youngblood shows up to practice in rough shape and is chewed out by the coach. He goes to the movies, which is extremely meta, but also for unclear reasons:

No real reason for this image beside Pyjamaspartymassakern.

But who should also be at the movie theater besides mysterious girl! How serendipitous. Instead of checking out Pyjamaspartymassakern, he follows her into a convenience store where she buys him a book for some reason (Moby Dick- this is called symbolism). He also buys porn for less clear reasons, but that’s just a clumsy joke set up to-

Surprise! Mystery girl is actually the coach’s daughter. Ooh, isn’t this awkward? The coach asks what they were doing and he says that she bought him a book and accidentally pulls out the porn (you knew that joke was bound to pay off somewhere!). She rejects a ride home with her father just to talk to Youngblood a bit longer, but then says that they can’t see each other and she starts walking home. She really needed that extra 15 seconds.

Brief aside: this movie was definitely made for Americans who had no clue about Canadian geography. Hamilton’s not the most well known Canadian city, I’ll give them that, but it had 500,000 people living there when this movie came out. In this little scene outside the movie theatre, the daughter refers to it as a “hick town” and that it’s “hard to get lost” in Hamilton, which is a fairly big city. Youngblood also asks if she goes to the city often, meaning Buffalo, New York (Hamilton is actually bigger than Buffalo). I’ve been to Hamilton, you can see Toronto from Hamilton. The GTA has spread out so far that they’re very close to being the same city.

So anyways, first game. Youngblood is on a line with Patrick Swayze, who is the team’s star and has scored 90 goals this year. He is also in his 20s, has never attended high school, and is worried about whether he’ll be first overall in the draft or will play in beer leagues for the rest of his life, the only two options when you’re a 90 goal scorer in junior. This movie had an NHLer (Youngblood’s dad) among its cast who also functioned as the “hockey consultant” for the movie and was apparently ignored or had some very strange ideas about what it’s like to the make the NHL (also raises some questions about the entire hazing sequence).

Anyways, Swayze (I didn’t catch his name) and Youngblood have great chemistry together, and Youngblood scores a goal in his first game. He is then promptly benched, for dating the coach’s daughter (even though they aren’t dating). You think that might actually be the central conflict of the movie, but it too is rarely brought up after this point.

Also, this game is happening during school hours, as the coach’s daughter is listening to it live on radio in her classroom. Okay.

Later, she’s driving the Zamboni, presumably after class (forgot to mention: during that movie theatre scene, she goes on a weird rant about how she wants to be close to hockey and drive the Zamboni, but also doesn’t want to be that close to hockey because it’s too violent, so she can’t date him. This girl is a mess). They have another cute scene and go on a date later that night at the senior’s free skate. The couple hits it off immediately by terrorizing senior citizens and the guy whose job it is to make sure seniors don’t get run over. Dicks.

Alright, what did I have next on my notes? “sex scene with nudity between two people playing high schoolers”? I fucking hate the 80s.

This scene runs parallel to the predator billet mom making tea. She puts the teaball into the teapot, an unsubtle euphemism I’m not comfortable thinking about given the stated ages of everyone involved. She also does a bit of voyeurism. Again, this is all played for laughs.

Another aside: all of this happens in about two days. He leaves New York and goes to Hamilton, joins the team, receives a lifetime of trauma, gets rejected by the coach’s daughter, scores in a playoff game, gets benched, and then starts dating the coach’s daughter for real this time and moves through the stages of relationships at lightning pace. Literally only one night passes during all of this.

There’s also some scene here where he talks about life after hockey with Swayze. This is what your grade seven English teacher would call foreshadowing.

Back to hockey. After winning the prerequisite one game, Hamilton’s now in the Memorial Cup (they got a Canadian thing right!), set to play a three game series (??) against Thunder Bay. They drive up to Thunder Bay by bus to play the wait hang on a sec

15 hour bus ride across the entire province of Ontario! I’ve done this before and it sucked. There is a grand total of zero things between these two cities besides rocks, trees, and more rocks.

Nevermind that, suspension of disbelief. They start the game against the Thunder Bay Bombers, who, according to their PA announcer, just swept Calgary alright hang on a fucking second

I’d like to forgive them a bit for trying to stick to Canadian cities people have heard of, but they also name dropped Medicine Hat, Blind River (?), and someplace called Squaw Island.

That’s in Nova Scotia, by the way. If you never heard of Canada before this movie, you’d get the impression that it’s a lawless land of tiny cities all within driving distance of each other.

Away from geography, back to hockey. Thunder Bay is the mean team, filled with junior hockey players who are absolutely in their thirties, including….

Racki! You remember Racki. The guy who got cut by Hamilton for Youngblood? Well he’s also had an adventure, as his one tryout - witnessed only by two coaches- was enough for a team 15 hours away to sign him to a contract for the playoffs after presumably a day.

So this series will be violent. There’s quite a lot of violence packed into these ten minutes, so I’ll just try and sum it bullet point style. Sorry if this is long, but there’s a lot of ridiculous that happens in one scene.

• Keanu Reeves (apparently named Heaver, which is never brought up) goes for a poke check on Racki but gets decked by him instead. Kind of his fault, as he just charged at Racki, but a flawless portrayal of 80s goaltending (I should bring up that Keanu Reeves is a shitty goaltender: literally every shot but one goes in on him). This starts a bench clearing brawl.

• Racki takes a guy into the boards, which have chain link fences instead of plexiglass around them. Once again, this is the Memorial Cup. In retaliation, Patrick Swayze delivers a Marty McSorley baseball swing to Racki’s brain for no real reason except fuck him.

• Now we get to the refs, who are inappropriately referred to as the “three blind mice” by coach Trudeau. They aren’t blind, they’re just the dumbest, most hapless men to officiate a hockey game. They give the baseball swing five minutes (?) for slashing (???).

• Swayze starts complaining about the spearing Racki did, even though he absolutely did not spear anyone and made a clean hit. When the ref says (rightfully) that there’s no spear, Swayze shoves him which gets him ten minutes and then fires the puck at the ref, which results in a game misconduct but he stays in the game anyways.

• Coach also starts insulting the refs to their face and is told that he’ll be kicked out. He continues, and they don’t kick him out.

• Think it stops here? Nope, Racki scores a goal and immediately tries to start another bench brawl. The Thunder Bay crowd keeps taunting the coach, so he just straight up goes into the stands and punches a guy out for the crime of hollering at a hockey game.

• A cop shows up to escort coach out of the arena, but there are no actual laws in the world of Youngblood as he also gets to return to the game.

• Hamilton scores again, but Racki decides he’s had enough of Patrick Swayze and crosschecks him in the back of the head and knocks his helmet off as he’s celebrating. In a scene that forces us to question the laws of physics, he also manages to trip Swayze and cause him to fall backwards even while he’s still falling forwards. Swayze hits his head on the ice hard and bleeds profusely.

If you’re keeping score of the crimes, you can add two assaults and attempted murder to the docket.

Immediately after the game, Youngblood visits Swayze in the hospital, who is miraculously conscious and aware of his surroundings after having a plate put into his head by a team of doctors that work damn fast. This is the turning point in the movie, as now it’s existential time. Youngblood wonders why he didn’t stand up to Racki, and why he lied to Swayze about standing up to him. He’s now torn (I wish I could add more emphasis to really get at that existential tension) between his hockey and who he is as a person, which is never established because we’ve only ever seen him play hockey in this movie.

After the 15 hour bus ride back to Hamilton, coach immediately wants to do a contact practice to toughen the team up. Youngblood is frustrated, doesn’t want to do it, and quits the team. He mopes to the coach’s daughter and ends his NHL dreams right then and there after two games, moving back to New York after about two or three days who’s really counting at this point.

Back on the farm, his brother is pissed about not fighting even though he argued against his brother playing hockey. The brothers yell at each other, punctuated by Youngblood yelling "you wouldn't have made it anyways, all you could do was fight!" as his brother leaves, even though he is the guy who has spent the past 24 hours wondering why he didn’t fight. Cue dramatically throwing stuff:

None of this makes sense. I’m trying my hardest to summarize the movie in a linear fashion, but it absolutely goes off the rails. Around this point, Racki is set up as both the ultimate bad guy, killing and scoring at will (he is literally the only opponent who scores a goal in this movie), but also as a dogshit player who Youngblood shouldn’t be afraid of because he didn’t get mentioned in one post-game newspaper article. Youngblood is pulled every which way by his desire for revenge, his desire to please the coach’s daughter and not be violent, his need to impress his family, his NHL dream, and appeasing his coach who literally just hates him for reasons that he has likely forgot.

One of Kurt Vonnegut’s rules for good writing is that every character should want something, even if it is just a glass of water. Youngblood wants a glass of water, but he’s unsure if he should drink it, pour it all over himself, throw it at someone, or mope about how the water isn’t what he really wanted.

Well just as quickly as he leaves his dream, he decides to go back to it after doing ten minutes of farm work and learning that the team needs him after they lost game two. We get that classic 80s montage set to vaporwave (not even a popular inspirational song, I don’t think they had the money. They used a song that could be passed off for vaporwave today) where he toughens up and learns to fight from his brother, the guy who ruined his promise by fighting. Given the movie’s sense of time, he became a bonafide tough guy in about two hours.

Also, it is both summer and winter in rural New York. The montage shows them training in the hot sun and at the rink.

Now dad’s back (he was also a former NHLer this whole time, by the way), trying to teach him the secrets to fighting. I don’t know what they would be, as it’s mostly an awkward scene where his dad is commanding his son to rip his jersey off and his son refusing to do so while still grappling with him.

Back to the game. Youngblood arrives back in Hamilton for warmups, but his coach doesn’t let him play. Then he immediately relents because Patrick Swayze (back from Thunder Bay after debilitating brain injury) says he should play. Whatever. Coach benches him until the second regardless.

Down 2-1 with seconds left, Youngblood scores on a beautifully executed double wraparound to tie things with 10 seconds remaining. Then he immediately gets a breakaway off the faceoff and is tripped by Racki. Penalty shot!

Well, after the refs meander about for fifteen seconds and get bullied by the coach into making the call. The trip happens right in front of the ref.

Youngblood scores, but he still has to fight Racki for honour. Coach tries to take him out, but Youngblood insists on staying in. There are three seconds left in the game.

This movie’s grasp on hockey is tenuous, at best. But I have no explanation for this fight scene.

Instead of just dropping the gloves, they literally start fencing. There’s about a minute of them trying to swing their sticks at each other while no one stops it. Everyone forms a circle around them, refs included.

After they eventually disarm each other, they start throwing punches. Racki gets the upper hand early, but Youngblood punches him out and takes off the jersey. Instead of just stopping this and ending the game, Racki gets back up to get his ass kicked again. Game over, Youngblood gets carried off the ice on his teammates’ shoulders. Coach’s daughter is back because he won her over with his heroics even though she despises fighting. I have forgotten why she’s in this movie.

---

So the final summary is a succinct what the fuck. This movie seems to have been cobbled together from a coked-out 80s producer thought of “hey what if we made an underdog movie about hockey” followed by 100 minutes of improvisation. I really don’t know what I watched and I don’t want to commit any more brainpower to thinking about it.

There’s three comments on the YouTube edition of this movie. Let’s see what they say.

Yes, I am also wondering why there is no sequel. Also hello, Leduncan Appel.