This week on The 80s Movie Podcast, host Edward Havens revisits the little-seen 1986 television thriller The Brotherhood of Justice, a mostly forgotten ABC movie starring a young Keanu Reeves and Kiefer Sutherland years before they became major Hollywood stars. Inspired by real events at a Texas high school, the film follows a group of students who form a vigilante organization to fight crime and drugs, only to watch their movement spiral dangerously out of control. Based loosely on the real-life “Legion of Doom” case in Fort Worth, Texas, the movie blends teen drama with cautionary crime thriller in a way that feels both deeply 1980s and surprisingly relevant today.
Edward explores the production history behind The Brotherhood of Justice, its status as an overlooked made-for-TV movie, and why early performances from stars like Billy Zane and Lori Loughlin make it a fascinating time capsule. Plus: personal memories from Edward’s own connection to the filming locations and high school where the movie was shot, reflections sparked by his 40th high school class reunion, and why this forgotten piece of 1980s television deserves rediscovery.
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From Santa Cruz, California, the Entertainment Capital of the Monterey Bay Peninsula, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.
Yes, that is correct. For the first time in our six plus years of doing this show, we are on the road.
If I time this correctly, I’ll have this episode up on Saturday, August 16th, 2025, which happens to be the day of my high school’s 40th class reunion. And that’s important, at least to me, because the movie I’ll be talking about today was filmed at my high school weeks after I graduated. But I’m getting ahead of myself, as I like to do.
Today’s movie will also be the first made for an American television network movie we’ve ever covered. For those of you under the age of 45, it’s kind of like a made for Netflix movie, except they were often modestly budgeted films with slightly familiar or completely unknown actors, not the massively budgeted films with stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence or Eddie Murphy or Adam Sandler. Although one of the actors in today’s movie would become one of the biggest stars on the planet, another would become a popular two-time Emmy award winning actor, and yet another would become the main antagonist in one of the highest grossing movies of all time.
And I can almost guarantee you don’t remember the film at all, if you ever even knew it existed.
The movie is the 1986 ABC television movie Brotherhood of Justice.
Before I get into the history of the movie, I want to dedicate this episode to a friend from that high school, Tommy Malmin. Tom played one of the students at the high school, and can be seen in several shots during the opening ten minutes of the movie.
Tommy was the first friend I made at Aptos High, when I started there in tenth grade, on my fifteenth birthday, no less.
The best way I could describe the Tommy I got to know in high school is that he was a human empathy machine. When you were around Tommy, he made sure you knew you were seen, and you were heard. He was kind when kindness was a liability. Gen X teens didn’t have blogs or social media or other ways of communicating their frustrations about the world, so we took it out on each other. Tommy was also a nerd. Or a geek. Or a dweeb. Whatever you want to call it. He loved pro wrestling, and he loved comic books, again at a time when being a fan of these things publicly was a liability for a Gen X teenager. But worse of all for Tommy, he tried too hard to be accepted, when he really didn’t need to try at all. Tommy and I were in a number of classes together during our nearly three years together at Aptos, including in drama class every semester.
Tommy was weird, but all were in drama class. He was amongst his own people, but he still tried to be accepted.
During my junior year of high school, me and a few of my buddies, Dick Hollywood, Beach, and Todd Downing, decided we were going to start a band. Dick would sing, I’d play my stepdad’s backup guitar, and play pretty much the three punk power chords every would be guitarist learns film, Todd would play my bass, and Beach would program the drum machine.
Tommy, despite not knowing how to play any instrument, really wanted to be a part of the band. So badly, in fact, that he went and bought himself a pretty decent drum kit, in the hopes we’d let him join us. But about the only thing he ever learned to do on the drums was play the opening drum riffs from Rush’s Tom Sawyer, and to say he was no Neal Peart is an understatement. We very quickly went back to the drum machine, but the band would never amount to anything.
I would lose touch with Tommy after we graduated, although he would occasionally pop back up in my life very briefly for the next several years. The last time I would see him or speak to him was just before the Fourth of July, 1992, when he came down to Los Angeles to pick up my roommate Dick to go on a fishing expediIon somewhere in Utah or Wyoming. I don’t remember. I hate fishing, I wasn’t invited, and I had to work at the theaters all that week. Tommy and Dick got into some kind of argument outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Tommy ended up dumping Dick and his stuff just outside town, and drove off, never to be seen again, at least by me.
Tommy did not, from all accounts, have a great life.
More losses than wins. More downs than ups. What I do know is the sense of loss I felt when I saw the Facebook Messenger message I saw this past February from a mutual friend of ours, telling me that Tommy had died from pulmonary thrombi. It’s been more than six months, and it’s sIll hard to believe I won’t see him at the reunion tonight, if he even would have gone.
Tommy, you were seen. You were heard. And in our weird Gen X ways, you were loved, and you are missed.
Thank you for indulging me for a moment.
As always, we need to hop back in time, for a story that is very personal to me, and has absolutely nothing to do with me.
In the spring of 1985, seventeen year old Ed was itching to get back to Los Angeles to break into film production. So much so that, the day after I graduated, I already had my worldly possessions packed up and was driving down Highway 101 for what I imagined would be my triumphant entry to the Hollywood film industry.
What I did not know at that time was that the Hollywood film industry was literally coming to my high school a few weeks later.
The Brotherhood of Justice, originally written by first time screenwriter Noah Jubelirer, was inspired by a group of high school students in Fort Worth, Texas, who took it upon themselves to terrorize suspected vandals and thieves at their school. The group, that included a football star, the class’s future valedictorian, one of the members of the yearbook committee, and a member of the National Honor Society, called themselves the Legion of Doom, and would eventually move on to breaking into lockers, firebombing a car, beating up several of the gay students at school, painting swastikas and neo-Nazi slogans on school walls, hurling homemade Molotov cocktails as a suspected vandal’s house, and taunting black citizens of their neighborhood with crude racial epitaphs, as well as acquiring more than two dozen weapons for their crusade, including a .357 Magnum handgun, an HK-91 assault rifle, and a rocket launcher, before they were finally arrested.
A grand jury in Fort Worth would hit the members of the Legion of Doom with more than 30 felony and misdemeanor charges, with one of the most damning evidence being the videotapes they made of themselves performing these crimes.
A salacious, true-life story like this was always going to get noticed in Hollywood, and their story would inspire more than one movie.
One of those projects would become The Brotherhood of Justice, while another, Albert Pyun’s Dangerously Close, would take a slasher script that had been sitting around Cannon Films for a few years called Terror at Miller High, and rework it into a similar vigilante story.
Certainly, there were other incidents of student vigilantism gone wrong going around America in the mid-1980s, including one where a group of students in Santa Barbara viciously beat up and repeatedly stabbed a local derelict, and then invited their friends to watch as that man died. And in Santa Cruz in 1984, there was a similar group of student vigilantes from Soquel High who called themselves The Troll Busters, who would prey upon the homeless population of downtown Santa Cruz, especially on the outdoor Pacific Garden Mall. The members of their group would, like The Legion of Doom, build a homemade bazooka, and they would end up blowing off the arm of a local resident who wasn’t a homeless person.
In a May 1986 Los Angeles Times article about the rush of teen vigilante movies, both the producers of The Brotherhood of Justice and Dangerously Close swore up and down their respective projects were in development before the incidents in Fort Worth were reported on, and the public information officer for the Fort Worth Police Department said in the article that they received a number of calls from Hollywood producers about the incident, including from former Starsky and Hutch star Paul Michael Glaser, who himself was in the middle of developing his 1986 film Band of the Hand, about five teen juvenile delinquents who are forced together to clean up a dangerous area of Miami or spend the rest of their lives in prison.
Filming on Brotherhood of Justice would begin in late June 1985 all around Santa Cruz and neighboring city Watsonville, as well as several days at Aptos High. What I didn’t know was that Judy Boulet, the local casting agent for the movie, who also helped cast local actors for other Santa Cruz-based movie shoots including Sudden Impact, The Lost Boys and Killer Klowns from Outer Space, had started casting for student extras weeks before I graduated, and not just as Aptos High. Several of my future coworkers at the Del Mar Theatre who attended Santa Cruz High, would be contacted about playing extras in the film, confirmed to me in the last couple days, weeks before their school year ended. And as fate would have it, Judy lived next door to my best friend and future roommate Dick Hollywood.
So how I never learned about this movie happening in my literal backyard in the pre-production stage before I graduated and left, I’ll never know. Today, I can look back and lament, but I was very angry with my friends who knew about it at the time and let me leave anyway.
In The Brotherhood of Justice, the eponymous groups begins as an attempt by several students to end vandalism and drug sales in and near their high school, but as they become somewhat successful in their acIons, end up becoming worse than the original problem, as their targets expand to include all who irritate them for any reason. Their acIons escalate to car bombings and attempted murder.
As I mentioned towards the start, most of the actors working on The Brotherhood of Justice were not very well known at the time of their casting.
The best known member of the cast was Joe Spano, who at the time had been playing Lt. Goldblum on the popular NBC series Hill Street Blues for five years. Spano would play the principal of the high school, whose opening speech to the seniors about stepping up as role models to the younger students at school, which happens roughly fifteen minutes into the movie, inadvertently sets up the creation of The Brotherhood and their ever escalating vigilante actions.
The organizer of The Brotherhood, Derek, would be played by a twenty year old newcomer named Keanu Reeves. Reeves would be cast in his first starring role here in only his second movie, after playing a goalie in the Rob Lowe/Patrick Swayze hockey drama Youngblood, which would arrive in theaters four months before The Brotherhood of Justice would air.
Lori Laughlin, playing Derek’s girlfriend Christie, had already been seen in movies like Amityville 3-D and Secret Admirer, and was featured on the theatrical release poster for The New Kids, a thriller directed by original Friday the 13th director Sean S. Cunningham.
Victor, who works at a local pizza parlor and becomes a target for The Brotherhood because of a non-sexual friendship with Christie, is played by Keifer Sutherland. Sutherland had starred in the 1985 Canadian drama The Bay Boy, but was sIll pretty much only known at the time as the son of Donald Sutherland. He would, of course, return to Santa Cruz several months after the filming of The Brotherhood of Justice to play the main vampire antagonist, David, in The Lost Boys.
The other members of the The Brotherhood would include Billy Zane, whose film debut as Match in Back to the Future, would come out during the shooting of this film; Darren Daulton, who had already been seen on screens as Randy the Soc in The Outsiders and Daryl, the son of the mayor, in the original Red Dawn; Don Michael Paul, who had just finished shooting his role an almost identical character in Albert Pyun’s Dangerously Close; Gary Riley, who would become better known in 1987 as Dave in Summer School; and Danny Nucci, who had only played a small role in Joe Dante’s underrated 1985 sci-fi comedy Explorers but would become better known in the 1990s for playing supporting characters who often got killed off in movies like The Rock, Eraser, and Titanic.
Peter Guber and Jon Peters, who would parlay their working relationship into eventual co-chairmanship roles at Sony Pictures in 1989, would executive produce the movie, and it would make its world premiere as The ABC Sunday Night Movie on May 18th, 1986.
Last year, when I started planning this episode, I reached out to the movie’s director, Chuck Braverman, to speak with him about the making of the film, but we never quite connected.
The movie was released on VHS in 1987, and on DVD in 2003, but in August of 2025, can be seen for free or supported by ads in an upgraded high definition version, on many streaming services, including Amazon Prime, Fandango at Home, Fubo, Plex, and The Roku Channel. It’s about 93 minutes long, and it’s an okay movie. The fun for me is seeing my old high school and lots of my friends and classmates all over this movie, but especially seeing Keanu using my old locker, which I shared with Scotty Douglas for nearly three years.
Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk again soon.
Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about The Brotherhood of Justice, including screen shots from the movie as well as personal behind the scenes photos from friends who were kind enough to share with me.
The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.
Thank you again.
Good night.