YMMV / Self Defense

• Awesome Music: The ending theme is a rather effective little slice of 1980s electronica. It's a shame it's never gotten an official release.
• Complete Monster: Cabe is the leader of the neo-fascist New Order in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who is taking advantage of a police strike to try to take over the streets. Cabe's goons harass people at a gay bar and accidentally kill the bartender. Cabe decides to kill all the bar patrons so no one can testify against his gang. One of the bar patrons, Daniel, escapes, and Cabe orders his goons to kill him. Daniel escapes into an apartment building where the residents are protecting him, so Cabe orders his goons to kill everyone in the apartment building.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The very premise is the stuff of nightmares - basically, the local police are on strike, meaning they cannot intervene as a vicious gang of armed thugs terrorizes our protagonists.
  • The neo-fascists' cold-blooded execution of the gay bar patrons also qualifies.
  • The reveal at the end that one of the neo-fascists is a police officer, who just goes back to work (albeit having sustained heavy injuries) once the strike is over. The film does not outright confirm whether he is the only cop in the neo-fascists' ranks, but the extensive knowledge of police procedure they demonstrate to calculate their odds and their access to heavy weaponry heavily implies he is not.
• Values Resonance: The film's anti-violence/anti-bigotry message is just as pertinent now as it was in 1983. Additionally, the gay character Daniel is portrayed positively and sympathetically, the murder of the gay bar patrons is explicitly presented as being a hate crime, and the neo-fascists' open homophobia is depicted as unambiguously bigoted, at a time when such bigotry was more common in society.
• The Woobie: Daniel. He's forced to endure a pretty traumatic ordeal, seeing his friends murdered in a violent hate crime, and spends the remainder of the film clearly shaken emotionally.

---