First Blood | 1982
- Locations |
- British Columbia
- DIRECTOR |
- Ted Kotcheff
Obnoxious Sheriff Teasle (Brian Dennehy) makes one helluva mistake when he takes an extreme dislike to long-haired drifter John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) only to discover that he’s is a highly-trained killing machine with psychic scars.
The small town setting is ‘Hope, Washington’ in the US Pacific Northwest. Though the name is the same, the filming location is Hope, at the junction of the Fraser and Coquihalla Rivers about 95 miles east of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada.
Hope is proud of its heritage. There’s a statue not just of Rambo himself but of Sheriff Teasle too – but then the town is known as the “Chainsaw Carving Capital” (calm down, that’s wooden statues not obnoxious Texan teens).
Hope is kind of recognisable, particularly that spectacular backdrop of the Cascade Mountains, but many properties have been rebuilt since 1982, and some of the buildings seen in the film (the cop station, the garage and the gunship) were simply sets built to be blown up.
Rambo enters the town from the southwest, on Flood Hope Road at the turn-off from Hope Princeton Highway, where the ‘Welcome to Hope’ arch once stood.
Teasle intends the scruffy doesn’t stay too long, dropping him off at the town limit, east of Hope where Kawkawa Lake Road crosses Coquihalla River. The girder bridge has since been replaced by a rather plainer road bridge.
Sheriff Teasle's station was built for the film at the northeast corner of Wallace Street and Third Avenue, in front of where Hope City Hall now stands. It’s west along Wallace that Rambo escapes on the stolen bike, scattering pedestrians on the sidewalk on the north side of of the street.
He makes that famous leap across the railway tracks crossing 3rd Avenue a few blocks south, and passes one of Hope’s landmarks, the “H tree” – two trees whose young trunks became entwined to form the distinctive letter, still standing at the junction of Hudson Bay Street and 5th Avenue.
As Teasle’s car flips over, Rambo heads into the rocky woodland. The cliffs atop which he finds himself tower above the Othello Tunnels, a series of old disused train tunnels that were cut cut through the solid granite walls and pass over Coquihalla River in Coquihalla Provincial Park, east of the town.
Why Othello? It seems the project’s engineer, Andrew McCullough, had a theatrical streak, naming stations on the line after characters from Shakespeare.
The point from which he makes that reckless plunge into the tree branches is above the entrance to Tunnel 2.
Other movies that filmed scenes around Othello Tunnels include 1986' drama Fire With Fire, 1995 adventure Far from Home: The Adventures of Yellow Dog, and Roger Spottiswoode's 1988 thriller Deadly Pursuit, with Sidney Poitier and Tom Berenger.
In the final fiery confrontation, the gas station and used car lot were sensibly built on the southern outskirts of of the town, not far from the spot where Rambo first walked into Hope, near the Hope Lookout Trailhead, south of the Hope Princeton Highway.
‘The Outpost’ gunshop, in which Rambo sets off all the ammo to create a diversion, was constructed at the intersection of Commission Street and 3rd Avenue, a block north of the ‘police station’.
If you want to visit and take a walking tour, Hope is just under a two hour drive from Vancouver on Trans-Canada Highway, or you can take a direct bus (two-and-a-half hour ride) from Pacific Central Station, 1150 Station Street.
Once Rambo gets to hide out in the forest, the location oddly moves much closer to urban city, largely around Port Coquilam just east of Vancouver.
Realising serious back-up is needed, the makeshift National Guard HQ is set up beneath the bridge where Golden Ears Parkway crosses Gold Creek, just northwest of Alouette Lake in Golden Ears Park, 30 miles east of Vancouver in the Coast Mountains.
The forest scenes, with Rambo finding his burlap poncho in the abandoned junkyard, and the waterfall were all filmed on and around Minnekhada Regional Park, northeast of Port Coquilam.
The opening scene Rambo looking up his old ’Nam buddy was also filmed in this area. The cabin stood on a private estate on the Pitt River north of the park, but there’s nothing to see anyway – apart from the gorgeous scenery of course – as the cabin is long gone.
Port Coquitlam is a half-hour drive from Vancouver, or you can take the train or bus.
For a forensically detailed account of filming locations and all the background trivia you could want, see Scott Hardy’s lovingly researched First Blood Filming Locations.