Red Scorpion

Red Scorpion (1988)

Timing: 1:45 (105 min)

5.9/10
252

5.704/10
5102

5.2/10
11000

All about film

Video 1

Photo 28

Actors and characters

Release date

1988-12-24

Country

Namibia, South Africa, United States

Production

Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment, Scorpion Film Production, Abramoff Production

Genre

Adventure, Action, War

Budget

$16 000 000

Revenue

$4 192 440

Website

Director

Joseph Zito

Actors

Dolph Lundgren, M. Emmet Walsh, Al White, T. P. McKenna, Carmen Argenziano, Alex Colon, Brion James, Ruben Nthodi, Vusi Dibakwane, James Mthoba
All actors and roles (10)

Scenario

Producer

Jack Abramoff, Robert Abramoff, Daniel Sklar, Paul Erickson

Operator

João Fernandes

Composer

Jay Chattaway

Artist

Audition

Editing

Daniel Loewenthal
All team (11)

• 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.