What possessed the brain damaged art director for this cheesy 1980’s action movie to affix Arnold Schwarzenegger’s grenades to his web gear by their pins? Methinks these guys have likely never handled live grenades. Wow.
“Somewhere, somehow, somebody’s going to pay,” was the tagline for the 1985 Schwarzenegger action movie Commando. This classic stylized bloodbath orbited around a retired special operator named John Matrix whose daughter is kidnapped. The archetypal evil mastermind takes the little girl in an effort at motivating Schwarzenegger’s super-soldier character to overthrow a small island nation-state on his behalf. The central theme, should you wish to think this deeply about it, explores the limits to which a devoted father might go to protect his child.
This was one of my favorite scenes from the movie. A dumpy Vernon Wells accuses the utterly shredded John Matrix of getting too old to fight. Incidentally, Wells also played the lunatic villain Wez in the Australian post-apocalyptic classic The Road Warrior.
According to www.moviebodycounts.com, for his era, Arnold Schwarzenegger was Hollywood’s deadliest actor as determined by total on-screen kill count. Commando was his bloodiest movie by the same metric. His record has since been eclipsed by more modern fare, but he was the unchallenged 1980’s king of gory vengeance. As an aside, one scene that was proposed but later cut had Schwarzenegger chopping a henchman’s arm off with a machete and then beating him to death with it. His dialogue was to have been, “Thanks for lending me a hand.” Sheesh…
The M202 FLASH launcher fired 66mm incendiary rockets and was intended to replace WW2-era flamethrowers. FLASH stood for FLame Assault SHoulder. It must have been a slow day in the US Army’s overworked acronym generation office.
John Matrix logged seventy-four kills in Commando. Among them fifty-one people were shot, seven were blown up by emplaced explosives, and five others succumbed to hand grenades. Another five met their gory demise thanks to an M202 rocket launcher.
A 13-year-old Alyssa Milano catches a ride aboard her perambulating battleship of a movie dad.Alyssa Milano has come a long way since her big-screen debut as a helpless teenaged girl in the Schwarzenegger kill-fest Commando.
Two faceless disposable bad guys got cut into pieces by thrown circular saw blades, one person was stabbed to death, and one particularly unfortunate rascal was impaled on a hissing steam pipe. As an aside, Schwarzenegger’s youthful daughter Jenny was none other than 13-year-old Alyssa Milano, the modern face of the Me Too movement.
How would you like to wake up to this every day before class? It worked for me while I was in college.
Commando was actually a pretty silly movie. The guns were cool, but the dialogue seemed like it was penned by a Third Grader, and the acting simply reeked of cheese. I’m nonetheless not too proud to admit that I had a life-size movie poster from the film plastered on my dorm room wall back when I was a college student. However, a year before Commando hit the big screen, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, saw a very public example of just how far one real guy might actually go to avenge a crime committed against his child. That guy’s name was Gary Plauche.
The Setting
By all accounts, Gary Plauche was just a normal dude. He coached little league and supported his community.
Leon Gary Plauche was born on November 10, 1945, in Baton Rouge. He served in the US Air Force and attained the rank of Staff Sergeant. After leaving the military he became a heavy equipment salesman and also worked as a cameraman for a local TV station. Though he had a temper, he was known for his affable demeanor and quick jokes. Plauche fathered four children—three boys and a girl. Gary was separated from his wife June in the early 1980s. This was predictably hard on his kids.
In case you were wondering exactly what a real monster looks like, this is it.
In 1983 Gary’s 11-year-old son Jody began taking Hapkido lessons from a 25-year-old ex-Marine named Jeffrey Doucet. Jeff Doucet had humble beginnings. He dropped out of school in Ninth Grade and, as a child, lost a sister to a rattlesnake bite. The discipline and exercise intrinsic to the martial arts seemed good for Jody. Doucet took the kid under his wing and cultivated a bond that appeared to be therapeutic given the circumstances. Doucet was a regular visitor at the Plauche home and frequently gave Jody a ride to the dojo for training.
Jeff Doucet abducted this young man when he was 11. Doucet was later suspected of molesting numerous other local children as well.
Authorities later determined that Jeffrey Doucet had been molesting the young man for more than a year. In February of 1984, Doucet kidnapped Jody and took him to a motel in Anaheim, California, near Disneyland where he sexually assaulted the kid repeatedly. Meanwhile, the authorities scoured the country looking for them both.
Yeah, that’s creepy. Jeffrey Doucet was a master manipulator.
Doucet eventually allowed Jody to make a collect call to his mother. The cops traced the call to the motel and staged a raid. Law Enforcement officers hit the hotel room, rescued the child, and took Doucet into custody without incident.
When faced with an unimaginably horrible circumstance Gary Plauche didn’t really know where to turn.
Jody was returned home on March 1, 1984. Once he was safe the details of the protracted abuse came to light. Gary, who was 39 at the time, was interviewed by a news crew in a ghoulish effort at ascertaining his feelings on the situation. He told the interviewer that he did not know what to do and just felt helpless.
The Setting
It took a little planning to pull off Gary Plauche’s hit. The event in all its gory detail was captured by a local TV news crew.
Two weeks after Jody returned to Louisiana, Jeffrey Doucet was extradited from California to Louisiana to stand trial for child molestation and sexual assault. Doucet’s Flight 595 out of Dallas landed at Ryan Field in Baton Rouge, and Doucet was led through the terminal in handcuffs. Meanwhile, wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses, the aggrieved father Gary Plauche stood nearby at a bank of pay phones speaking with his best friend. He cryptically whispered into the phone, “Here he comes. You’re about to hear a shot.”
Local TV news crews captured Jeffrey Doucet as he returned to Baton Rouge to face justice for pedophilia.
In the immediate aftermath of what was to come it was assumed that local Law Enforcement officers had tipped Plauche off regarding the timing and location of the transfer. Plauche enjoyed friendships with many of the local cops, so this was not an unreasonable assumption. It was later determined, however, that a former co-worker from the local ABC television affiliate WBRZ-TV was Plauche’s source of intel. Then as now tragedy sells, so the media slathered the sordid story with attention.
Though he did not realize it, Jeffrey Doucet was mere moments away from some serious frontier justice.
This bit is all pretty unsettling when you think about it. Humans in the Information Age are drawn to calamity like politicians to other peoples’ money. Throughout this whole ghastly episode, TV crews hounded the major players in search of that Pulitzer-grade image that might graphically capture one man’s anguish in the face of something so epically horrible. At 9:30 pm with the manacled child molester Jeffrey Doucet passing just behind him, Gary Plauche gave the world those images.
The Killing
Sheriff’s Deputy Major Mike Barnett took Plauche down immediately.
Plauche retrieved a small revolver of unknown make from his boot, stepped alongside Doucet, placed the gun to the right side of his head, and fired a single .38-caliber hollowpoint round. The cops subdued him immediately. Plauche’s friend Deputy Sheriff Mike Barnett can be heard on the tape asking him, “Gary, why? Why, Gary?”
Plauche tearfully answered, “If somebody did it to your kid, you’d do it, too!”
The Aftermath
I don’t myself care much for Michael Moore’s work.
The sex criminal Jeffrey Doucet fell into a coma and died in hospital the following day. Video footage of the horrific scene has taken on a life of its own. Michael Moore used it in his anti-gun documentary screed Bowling for Columbine. The clip also featured prominently in an unsettling compilation of real-life video killings titled Traces of Death 2 released in 1994. It was viewed more than 20 million times on YouTube prior to its removal.
This is still America, so Gary Plauche’s tragedy naturally graced a t-shirt.
Gary Plauche was charged with murder in the second degree but subsequently pled no contest to manslaughter. He was given a seven-year suspended sentence along with five years’ probation and 300 hours of community service. He completed all of this in 1989.
The public was naturally mesmerized by this whole horrid tale.
Opinions were mixed on the outcome of the Plauche case. Some felt that shooting a man in the head in cold blood in an airport warranted more than probation and community service. Others believed that the circumstances surrounding the crimes committed against his child absolved him of responsibility. Plauche’s defense team made a compelling argument that Doucet was a charismatic manipulative predator who had used Plauche’s family challenges to take advantage of his son.
Gary Plauche had no criminal record prior to his gunning down a child molester in the Baton Rouge airport.
Psychological assessments alleged that Plauche was so traumatized by these events that he was unable to discern the difference between right and wrong at the time of the killing. Any parent can imagine the unfettered anguish this might precipitate. The judge in the case, Frank Saia, ultimately agreed and opined that Plauche represented no risk of further criminal behavior. He felt that sending Plauche to prison would serve no material purpose for the state.
This guy was just a freaking sociopath.
It was later revealed that Doucet and Plauche’s wife June were having an affair at the time. This revelation just served to muddy the waters further. However, forensics determined that Doucet’s assault on Jody occurred just as had been alleged.
Jody Plauche has since parlayed his horrible experience into an effort at helping others similarly traumatized. Good for him.
In 2019 Jody Plauche released a book titled, Why, Gary, Why? The Jody Plauche Story. The book was described thusly, “Through his own incredible story of using his past for good by helping others, he shares how any reader who has suffered great trauma can move on and not let the past define him or her.”
Jody went on to letter in four sports before finishing high school.
I’ve not read it myself, so I can’t comment on its contents. However, the excerpts I have found do yield insight into Jody’s subsequent attitudes about the shooting.
This horrible episode inevitably brought the Plauche family a great deal of attention. Here Jody and Gary are shown alongside Geraldo Rivera.
He wrote, “I think for a lot of people who have not been satisfied by the American justice system my dad stands as a symbol of justice…My dad did what everybody says what they would do…Plus, he didn’t go to jail. That said, I cannot…condone his behavior. I understand why he did what he did. But it is more important for a parent to be there to help support their child than put themselves in a place to be prosecuted.”
Here is Gary later in life attending a Saints game. He lived out the rest of his days in relative normalcy.
In his final interview prior to his death, Gary Plauche showed no regret for killing Jeffrey Doucet and stated that he would do it again if given the opportunity. In 2011 Plauche had a stroke as a complication of diabetes and was placed in a nursing home. He died in 2014 at the age of 68.
Though Jody was angered by the killing in its immediate aftermath, he subsequently understood and appreciated his father’s motivations. Interestingly, he later said his dad’s implicit willingness to kill anyone who harmed his family was an impediment to his coming forward to report Doucet’s abuse.
Of his father, Jody wrote, “A lot of people remember the guy who shot somebody. I remember someone who would pick up stray animals…someone who was just a kind soul, a gentle person.”
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor — by instinct, by inevitability, without the thought of it, and certainly without saying it.
So wrote Raymond Chandler in a 1944 Atlantic Monthly essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” in which he defended the fiction genre he had come to master, the detective story. Chandler died in 1959, eleven years before the first screen appearance of the detective he surely would have admired and who almost precisely fit this description: Inspector Harry Callahan of the San Francisco Police Department, better known as “Dirty Harry,” played by Clint Eastwood.
Dirty Harry premiered 50 years ago in a time of social upheaval and rising crime, conditions very much resembling today’s. Inspector Callahan was a man whose feet were planted in one era while his eyes beheld another, one he did not find pleasing. He harbored a smoldering contempt not only for the criminals whom he saw unraveling society’s fabric, but also — and perhaps even more so — for those he viewed as abettors in the unraveling, the spineless police brass and inordinately legalistic district attorneys and judges.
I say Harry Callahan almost precisely fit Chandler’s description because he was in fact tarnished, willingly, even eagerly so. He was not tarnished in the sense that he was corrupt — perish the thought! — but because, in performing his job as a homicide detective, unlike the office-dwellers he disdained, he sometimes entered situations in which his only choice was between the commission of two wrong acts, one illegal, the other immoral. He accepted the stain of having acted illegally as the price of acting morally.
The main storyline of Dirty Harry involves Callahan’s pursuit of “Scorpio,” a serial killer loosely modeled on the still-unsolved “Zodiac” murders committed in and around San Francisco in the late 1960s. Chillingly played by the harmless-looking Andy Robinson, Scorpio holds the city in fear after randomly shooting two people with a sniper rifle. When he kidnaps a teenage girl and holds her for ransom, claiming she is hidden underground with only a few hours of breathable air left to her, Callahan is dispatched to deliver the payment.
Scorpio directs Callahan from one payphone to another across the city before they finally meet face to face near the cross on Mount Davidson. Rather than accept the ransom and release the girl, Scorpio brutally assaults Callahan and tells him he’s going to let the kidnapped girl die. Callahan produces a hidden knife and stabs Scorpio in the leg, but Scorpio escapes.
Callahan tracks him down to the abandoned Kezar Stadium, former home of the San Francisco 49ers. Entering the killer’s lair without a search warrant, Callahan pursues Scorpio onto the football field, where in a cinematically brilliant scene he shoots him in the leg.
It is here that Callahan must choose between doing what is legal and what is moral. Aware that the kidnapped girl will die if not found soon, Callahan extracts a confession from Scorpio by stepping on his wounded leg. The girl is found, though already dead, and Callahan is upbraided by the district attorney and a judge, who tell him that no case can be brought because of his transgressions. “The suspect’s rights were violated,” says the judge, “under the Fourth and Fifth and probably the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments.”
“And Ann Mary Deacon,” says Callahan, of the murder victim. “What about her rights?”
With this, Callahan speaks for many today who see the criminal-justice pendulum as having once again swung too far in the direction of coddling criminals. San Francisco is home to district attorney Chesa Boudin, one of the George Soros–funded “progressive” prosecutors lately installed here and there across the country, overseeing dramatic crime surges in their respective cities. San Francisco’s homicides have increased 17 percent so far this year, coming on top of a similar increase in 2020. What would an updated Harry Callahan have to say about that?
But of course there will be no updated Harry Callahan, no matter how eager the moviegoing public might be to embrace one. In today’s Hollywood, where woke reigns supreme, it is unthinkable that such a character would be brought to the screen, though one can imagine a studio pitch meeting where Callahan is envisioned as a woman or gay or transsexual or some acceptable amalgam of all three. “How about,” a screenwriter might propose, “if we have Harry take up ‘Alice’ on his offer of a quickie on Mount Davidson?”
No, thank you. I’ll stick with the original.
Raymond Chandler concludes his description of the ideal detective thus:
He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. . . . He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. . . . He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.
That is Harry Callahan, whose exploits in Dirty Harry and its four succeeding films in the franchise are as enjoyable today as ever. He remains, 50 years later, a supremely entertaining man of honor.
