{"id":319031,"date":"2025-11-28T17:58:43","date_gmt":"2025-11-28T17:58:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/319031\/"},"modified":"2025-11-28T17:58:43","modified_gmt":"2025-11-28T17:58:43","slug":"the-night-rambo-ended-up-underwater-in-montgomery-village","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/319031\/","title":{"rendered":"The Night Rambo Ended Up Underwater in Montgomery Village"},"content":{"rendered":"

When MoCoShow reader Igor Gindin was digging through old Washington Post<\/a> archives, he stumbled on a story that stopped him cold: Rambo\u2026 in Montgomery Village. Given that Rambo star Sylvester Stallone spent part of his childhood in Montgomery County, the headline almost feels like it could be true. But the real story is a bit stranger than that.<\/p>\n

It was July 1985. \u201cRambo: First Blood Part II\u201d had been in theaters for just two months and was playing at Roth\u2019s Quince Orchard Theater in Gaithersburg. The small, two-screen theater, with its outdoor box office and simple left-and-right layout inside, was a local favorite before closing in 1990 when the new theaters opened at nearby Rio Washingtonian.<\/p>\n

But in the early morning hours of Thursday, July 18, between 1am and 2:30am, Roth\u2019s became the scene of a bizarre burglary. Two individuals, including a former assistant manager of the theater, broke in and stole a reel containing part of the movie. They didn\u2019t stop there. According to the report, they also cut a four-foot section out of the middle of the screen, grabbed about twenty dollars\u2019 worth of candy, and made off with the marquee letters and a \u201cBack to the Future\u201d poster.<\/p>\n

Police quickly tracked down the suspects, who then guided officers to where they\u2019d dumped the film reel: Lake Whetstone in Montgomery Village. Fire department crews were called in to retrieve the waterlogged reel from eight feet down, but the damage was already done. \u201cRambo is all wet,\u201d Montgomery County police spokesman Phil Caswell joked at the time.<\/p>\n

Fortunately for moviegoers, the theater moved fast. The screen was repaired the next day, and a replacement reel arrived soon after, allowing showings of \u201cRambo\u201d to resume without much interruption.<\/p>\n

Stallone, of course, has deep local ties. He and his family lived on Seminary Road from 1952 to 1962, during which he attended Woodlin Elementary School, Montgomery Hills Junior High, and may have been enrolled at Montgomery Blair High School (though he never actually attended). So while the story of Rambo ending up at the bottom of Lake Whetstone isn\u2019t exactly what anyone had in mind, Stallone\u2019s Montgomery County roots make the tale feel like a uniquely local twist on an already wild episode of 80s movie history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When MoCoShow reader Igor Gindin was digging through old Washington Post archives, he stumbled on a story that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":319032,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":{"0":"post-319031","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/319032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}