THE BEAST was buried at 245th place in 1988’s box office roll call, an ignominious fate for a superbly made movie. Its status as a cult film ‘discovery’ has rescued it from the dustbin, but the reasons for its near-instant obscurity, while lamentable, aren’t surprising if you know anything about the movie business or have bothered to glance at history. From the silent era to the day after tomorrow, buck-counting studios and their parade of czars have fed a cornucopia of wily guesses and witless blunders to cheer over or sneer at. And going as far back as an ambitious 20-something dubbed Alexander the Great, history has reproved one maxim over & over again: leave Afghanistan alone.

1981, the third of the 10-year long Soviet war in Afghanistan. After a Russian tank unit pulverizes a Pashtun village with ‘extreme prejudice’, one of the vehicles is separated from the squadron, taking the wrong turn down a desolate pass into a dead-end valley. Vengeful mujahideen fighters track them. Three groups of Afghans are in pursuit, including a number of women, armed only with grief-infused rage over the slaughter of their men. The tank is a 36-ton metal monster, the villagers a force of raw human nature.

“Well, sir, the roadwheel’s cracked. Kaminski drank our brakes. We’re low on petrol. The battery’s low. We’re losing oil. If the engine heats up it’s gonna seize. The terrain, obviously against us. We have no rations. The Mujas behind us don’t seem to run on rations, petrol, or anything we know of. And they have an RPG. Their aim is getting better. Sir.”

An epic in miniature, tightly directed by Kevin Reynolds (The Count Of Monte Cristo), the script by William Mastosimone (Extremities) was originally conceived as a play, Nanawatai (sanctuary). Shooting was done in Israel’s Negev Desert (daytime temperatures hitting 115°), ‘the beast’ a refitted Soviet T-55, one of a number swiped by the Israelis in one of their ‘self-defense’ conflicts with neighbors.

The vivid action scenes aren’t designed as Ramboiac fantasies of excitement posing as catharsis but instead give a sense of war’s built-in feedback loop of pitiless brutality. The cast excels, notably the three leads. Commanding the tank is ‘Daskal’, a Motherland-obedient war-lover since his battle-warped childhood at Stalingrad, put over with chilling conviction by the great George Dzundza. The rebel in the crew is ‘Konstantine Koverchenko’, played by 21-year old newcomer Jason Patric, whose breakout The Lost Boys was released while this being shot. With the Soviet quagmire in Afghanistan mocked as “their Vietnam”, Patric’s character and his realization of the futility and wrongness of the Goliath v. David blunder was there for American audiences to relate to—those who knew or cared about anything beyond shopping, bitching or boasting—and couldn’t locate Kansas let alone Kabul. Their chief adversary is ‘Taj’, a Pashtun elevated to the position of khan by the destruction of his village and family. Steven Bauer, familiar to audiences from Scarface and Thief Of Hearts, excels in the part.

“You’re a good soldier Anton. You can be counted on when they ask you to shoot your mother.”

After expending $8,000,000, the studio execs (in this case Columbia) made the sensible (financially) but risible (morally) decision to dump Reynolds’ dead serious dive into a hornet’s nest and instead amp up another 1988 movie set in the same war, the idiotic Rambo III, one more Stallone hit(job) that whipped macho masturbation (from & for poseurs who never got closer to a battle than a makeup chair or a barcalounger) into the year’s 16th most-attended film. Not merely demoted but court-martialed, The Beast played in exactly two theaters in New York City and L.A. for two weeks, receipts stopping at $161,000. During the years the movie languished in VHS obscurity, chickenhawk politicians got their marching orders from neocon warlords and The Complex dutifully sent a new wave of wanna-be Alexanders (and Custers—and Koverchenko’s) into a 20-year Little Big Horn. Happy, Bibi? *

DASKAL: “You know your orders”.  KAMINSKI: “What?”  DASKAL: “Out of commission, become a pillbox. Out of ammo, become a bunker. Out of time, become heroes.”  KAMINSKI: “You’re out of your fucking mind!”

Scored by Mark Isham. With Erick Avari, Stephen Baldwin, Donald Harvey, Kabir Bedi, Chaim Jeraffi and Shoshi Marciano (leader of the women bent on revenge, the up-close & personal variety). 111 minutes.

* Reynolds: “Not foreseeing where we were going to be 20 years on, at the time I saw the Soviets’ situation in Afghanistan as something akin to their Vietnam.”

Mastrosimone: “It’s my best work. I don’t care if it’s an Academy Award [winner]. I just want the movie to get its due some day.”

Rudyard Kipling: “When you’re wounded an’ left on Afghanistan’s plains. An’ the women come out to cut up your remains, Just roll to your rifle an’ blow out your brains, An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”

The T-55 is the world’s most widely used tank, with more than fifty countries having deployed them. Swell. Cowing or killing innocent people somewhere as you read this.