Red Scorpion VHS Tape

Red Scorpion on VHS, 1988, Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment release, Dolph Lundgren at full voltage as a Soviet special forces operative dropped into Angola. The cover art says everything about what the late-80s action shelf looked like: Lundgren shirtless, weapon up, with military helicopters burning behind him in a wall of orange and red that made the tape visible from three shelves away. No marketing budget required when the cover does that kind of work.

1988 was the year action VHS packaging became its own arms race. Cannon Films had already trained video store buyers to reach for big bodies and bigger explosions, and every mid-tier distributor learned the lesson. Red Scorpion came out the same year as Die Hard, Bloodsport, and Willow, a year when Lundgren was riding the credibility of Rocky IV and Masters of the Universe and had enough marquee weight to anchor a straightforward one-man-army plot. The film was shot in Namibia, production backed in part by figures connected to the South African apartheid government, which gave it a contested press reception and a cult life that outlasted almost any other Lundgren vehicle from that run. Jack Abramoff produced the picture. That detail alone keeps the film in film-history conversations decades after the action cycle that spawned it has faded from shelf memory.

This copy shows the fiery orange-red sleeve that made the original pressing recognizable. The clamshell construction is consistent with late-80s domestic VHS standards, and the label printing on the spine should carry the Shapiro-Glickenhaus distributor line clearly. Condition on these older tapes varies tape to tape: look at the cassette window on the spine end and check whether the ribbon sits flat with no slack, because ribbon sag on an unplayed-in-years tape is the first thing to note before you slot it into a deck.

OWNER VERIFY: Confirm the release year and distributor printing on the spine label match the 1988 Shapiro-Glickenhaus pressing.