This film comes across more as a made for TV movie than an actual piece of Hollywood cinema. The biggest flaw takes place in the first act with the very lazy telling of the Olympic hopeful gymnast's conversion to a cult.
We are expected to believe a pampered spoiled upper middle class athlete training for the Olympics can be brainwashed to join a cult over a 3 day weekend. His home life is happy and comfortable until he hits on a cute cult groupie. It's clear he went to the commune only in the hopes of bedding down the cute chick with issues. After spending the first two days being appropriately appalled at the clear cult activity, somehow on the 3rd day he has drunk the kool-aide.
It's a bit silly to think after 3 days of singing Kumbaya around the campfire and abstaining from masturbation is enough to make even the most disenfranchised youth shave his head and change his name. Yet there was no back story to suggest he was even slightly unhappy with his normal life.
A bit of real mind control factors are briefly explored. The athlete being initially approached by an attractive girl takes a page from the real practice of "flirty fishing" from the Children of God child molester cult known as The Family. They also briefly touch upon sleep deprivation and starvation (proven mind control techniques) but only in the briefest sense.
Everything else that follows is as lazy. The deprogramming is just as over the top and poorly executed as the original conversion. Cults and mind control are a very real thing and this movie does not educate or inform. It's a very cartoonish depiction of a very real thing.
This movie was released in 1982. This was an era when the original flower children of the 1960s grew into young urban professionals. It is truly a representation of the boogeyman that the baby boomers (who had now become parents) thought would come in the night to steal the American dream. This movie is best enjoyed only as a cultural snapshot of what parents feared in the halcyon days of Ronald Regan.
