MonsterHunter

This is an on again, but mostly off again satire about how dumb war is. I assume it’s some type of satire for two reasons. One is that there are some scenes in this movie that look like they were intended to be silly as opposed to just being chalked up to the usual incompetence you see in way cheap imports like this. The other reason is because the back of the DVD box tells me so. It also tells me that this movie was made in Yugoslavia which didn’t contribute all that much to things other than to confirm my suspicion that these Eastern Europeans were just as capable of bad movie making as their German, English, Italian, Spanish and Floridian (see the collected works of H.G. Lewis) brethren.

This was a bit of a let down from the other movie on this disc from Something Weird (This Is Not A Test). That one had one of those head-scratcher plots, but infused it with enough oppressive doom that the ridiculousness of it all was rendered immaterial. In contrast to that one, Atomic War Bride seesaws back and forth between atrocious foreign film with war crime level dubbing where the characters deliver dialogue stiffer than the dumb grin the star (John Johnson) wears throughout everything that happens and pretty decent takes on the ridiculousness of military thinking (the scenes where John is getting his training are priceless). Unfortunately, the movie gets heavy-handed more often than not, and the complete lack of realism in any of the people on the screen keeps the viewer at a mostly disinterested distance.

John Johnson (part of the satire of this movie is how all the players have names like Pete Peters and Jack Jackson and Dick Dickens - okay I made that last one up, but I guess I’m to assume that these people are generic everymen because of their relative nondescript and pornish-sounding names) is a smiling blonde guy that is about to marry some gal whose name I missed whenever someone said it (Maria Mariason would be a good guess). John’s friend Pete (or was it Jack?) is broke and can’t afford to buy John a wedding present, but John has a feeling that Pete will get a job today. Later we would learn that due to the war, Pete did in fact get a job just like John promised.

So John is pretty psyched about getting married and even has his landlady help him push the beds together in his swanky flop house sufficiency unit. John charges out of his building with flowers in his hand and goes to get his bride-to-be. While he does this, some kid is running around hawking newspapers while shouting “war declared” over and over. John is relatively unbothered by this development and sets about getting himself across town to the bride’s house.

On the way there he encounters the civil defense people passing out radiation suits and giving pointless instructions on how to use them. There are some bizarre scenes here where John complains that his suit is somehow busted and tries to get under a couple of other people’s suits. John also runs into an anti-war taxi cab driver that gets himself arrested for being against the war. Finally, he gets to Maria’s house and we meet his prospective in-laws. One of them is Maria’s cousin who faints whenever any mention of war is made. He sounds like he’d be fun at parties.

They get out to the church where the wedding is taking place and the priest performing the ceremony has to rush through it because of all the jets in the air and he just doesn’t quite get it finished before the bombs start landing on the open bar. He bolts, as does the rest of the wedding party, and we see John and his woman running around dodging bombs and gunfire. They finally make it back to town just in time to run into the military where John and the fainting cousin are promptly conscripted to fight the good fight.

The high point, humor-wise is watching them get trained. They get instruction on how to exercise their trigger finger over and over, they are taught how to fire their weapons at smiling targets with a heart painted on them, and they learn to use their gun for camouflage. This involves having a piece of branch stuck in the barrel of the gun and assuming various poses, including: flock of sheep, shrubs, trees (like shrubs but taller), and my favorite - casualty (just fall down). Understandably, this all has a very debilitating affect on the cousin with an aversion to the mere mention of war and he does casualty really, really well.

John then goes out on patrol and is told to bring some old coot to the fallout shelter, but the guy wont listen and somehow because John gets his arm caught in the door to the fallout shelter he has to go in with the civilians and basically deserts his unit. As fate would have it, he is in the same fallout shelter with his fiancee, so they get some quality time together and then John stops an anti-war guy from committing suicide after the leader of the nation announces they are using atomic weapons on the other side. John then begins an anti-war movement, all the while being AWOL from the military. All this on his wedding day no less! Some days it just doesn’t pay to do anything after your morning leak!

John leaves the fallout shelter, leading a pack of civilians in an anti-war march when he runs into his commanding officer. Since this is allegedly a satire, John is one of those wide-eyed innocent dopes that thinks everything is going to work out and has no clue as to the serious trouble he and everyone else is in. While the crowd is ready to attack the military guys to free John from certain execution, John just flashes that goofy grin and tells them not to worry about him, because he’ll just explain it all to the commander and once he does that the commander will have no choice but to release him.

He gives it a go with the commander, explaining that the war is bad and wouldn’t you know it, but the commander looks around says, “there’s a wall” and gets several soldiers to go and line this pansy against the wall to be dishonorably discharged the hard way. And who do we see in his firing squad, but his formerly unemployed friend who can now probably afford a wedding present. Just as John is about to take one for the team, some guy comes running over yelling that peace has been declared. John is saved and he and his bride scamper off, but the commander gets orders to go after him, and the chase is on!

He gets cornered and John is trying to tell them that since the war is over, it’s all no big deal, but then the president of the republic himself appears! He asks John if he made fun of him when he was protesting and John says, “yeah, but not much.” What a card! The president doesn’t think that he should be made fun of and it looks like curtains for John when a bulletin comes in! The other side has launched their own atomic missiles and in twenty minutes you may as well start puckering up and bending over if you catch my meaning.

The missiles find their mark and they haul out the low-budget atomic flash of light and the next thing you know, John and his lady are wandering around through wreckage with fashionably blasted apart clothes and they end up in their apartment and John babbles on about making coffee and then notices that Maria isn’t talking anymore. When he goes to her, he sees that she has croaked and he holds her wailing with grief. It’s a finish that would have been effective in a serious movie about people confronted with this situation, but all the goofy Fredonia-style political humor undermines the dramatic impact of the serious scenes, whereas the lapse into Threads-like drama at the end renders the satirical aspect pretty much forgotten.

A pretty bizarre film by any measure, it probably merits a look, though I think it flops more than it doesn’t. The disc as a whole is an easy buy with This Is Not A Test included as well as a half dozen short subjects from the atomic era. These are funnier than either of the movies with public service ads touting the benefits of a bomb shelter (one guy brags he built his for $118!) and a cartoon turtle named Bert helping kids to understand that they might be able to survive an atomic blast. I don’t see how anyone who really cares about their family’s safety can justify not screening this one for their kids. After all, as one of the shorts says, mutations aren’t that bad. Who wants to look like their parents anyway?

© 2008 MonsterHunter