He’s also ex-special forces and currently an air marshal charged with making sure the friendly skies stay that way. Unless, you’re an Islamo facist looking to make a name for yourself by terrorizing the passengers of an air plane. Then Brett Prescott goes to work making sure that little things like getting whacked in the back with an ax don’t slow him down from doing stuff like avoiding missiles and cruise ships at the last possible instant.

Brett isn’t just executing exciting mid-air maneuvers that could only be possible with the bad computer graphics used to represent all the exterior airplane shots though. He’s also doing all the usual in-flight bad ass stuff you expect from your Nu Image Amercian Heroes (see also Air Strike, Special Forces, Marines, and Submarines) brand of movie.

There’s numerous examples of his hand-to-hand combat techniques, all shot in loving slow motion and all featuring Brett with an expression on his face that looks like he’s trying to pass a terrorist-sized kidney stone. There’s his lengthy stint down below in the hydraulics section where he’s just generally being a pain in the ass, dumping fuel, patching himself through to Washington and eavesdropping on the terrorists radio chatter. He even has time to buddy up to a kid traveling all by himself!

And don’t think that all that good-natured conversation with young Ricky is wasted! When you see Brett checking out young Ricky’s mad skills on the computer game he’s playing and the computer game happens to be all about flying airplanes, you start to hope against all common sense and realism that young Ricky will at some point step in to pilot the plane to safety! Even though young Ricky is only about 10 years old!

And heck, Ricky isn’t only not sweating grabbing the controls once the pilot has his throat slit, he’s also ready to grab a terrorist’s gun whenever the opportunity presents itself. This is precisely why we need to really watch our liberal “friends” and all their bad mouthing about kids and guns. If Ricky was the sort of pansified, lavender-scented priss who routinely rats out the cool kids at school for bringing assault weapons to class, do you think he’d be so willing to grab that gun? Or be able to shake off a guy getting his throat cut right in front of him?

Hell no! He’d be converting to Islam as soon as those terrorists started waving around fake bomb detonators and shooting guys who won’t give up their cell phones! Maybe that’s okay for you parents out in Hollywood, but where I come from, the only thing I want to hear about my kid during a hijacking is that the little bastard handled himself like he was a one-boy Dirty Dozen!

Lest you think that Brett Prescott is leaving all the heavy lifting to a kid who doesn’t even have pubes yet, Brett is getting shot, axed, hit, captured, and even finds time in between terror attacks to haul Ricky’s ass back into the plane when he almost gets sucked out a window!

Brett even manages to call his wife and leave a message that makes it apparent that terrorists have taken over the plane and have probably killed him! Hell of a way for a pregnant wife to learn of the death of her husband, right? Bah! As Prescott’s ex-commanding officer puts it to some White House nerd, “Brett Prescott has been killed in action before!” Crud, his wife gets those calls about once a week, I’ll bet!

What’s truly spectacular about that whole sequence of events is that Brett only calls her after he tries to call a secure line to his superiors to report the hijacking and gets put on hold! Oh well, at least he didn’t get patched through to some tech support guy in India who couldn’t speak English!

There’s only a handful of terrorists so Brett plays it smart and only incapacitates a few of them so that they can come to later for another fight. It also helps Brett that the terrorists start to fight amongst themselves about whether they want to crash the plane into some target to make a political statement or whether they want to collect $30 million.

The money guys win out which means we need to attempt the toughest landing in the history of flight not once, not twice, but a grand total of three times! It’s all worth it because there’s special forces on the ground blowing up guys and equipment friendly to the terrorists. And don’t worry, just because this is a movie about a plane being hijacked, doesn’t mean you are going to be cheated out of seeing a helicopter shot down!

Dean Cochran (Shark Zone, Target Of Opportunity) is ably supported by a cast that includes the guy who played the nefarious Rafendenk from Special Forces as well as cult movie vet Tim (Trancers) Thomerson. Thomerson plays a mouthy senator who manages to have a moment that somehow makes you cringe and laugh at the same time when he tries to lead the passengers in an uprising using the anti-terrorist catch phrase “let’s roll!” I thought it was a bit tasteless. But also a bit funny.

The best job though is done by Alan Austin as the pilot of the plane. He spends the whole movie with a squinty, disinterested expression on his face and never seems terribly concerned about anything that’s going on! Even when he’s getting head butted and his throat slashed!

And yes, Air Marshal is the sort of frothy good time action flick where we’re assured that the pilot will be fine and where young Ricky gives Brett and his wife a toy airplane for their new child and they all share a good laugh! War is definitely hell, but it’s also something to look back on and chuckle at if you’re a surviving good guy! That’s just our natural American optimism and good humor, a by-product of sweet, sweet freedom!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

A Navy Seal unit battles terrorist pirates all across the globe in an effort first to shut down these dirtbags and their theiving, murderous ways, but only really getting revved up to kick ass once the head Navy Seal’s wife gets herself blown up due to a car bomb that also left the Seal’s only son injured!

That’s plenty in and of itself to get any American who supports the troops, their wives and little kids pumped up enough to watch this with no questions asked. That this is another Nu Image Films release (see also Air Strike and Special Forces) where they were able to apparently rent out the Bulgarian Navy for a day or two so that a helicopter and a few other pieces of equipment could be used is pretty much all the further endorsement anybody needs. It also demonstrates how wise it was to let Buglaria join NATO.

Still, I didn’t find U.S. Seals to be as jingoistically enjoyable as Air Strike or Special Forces. There wasn’t much in the way of overtly pro-American activity in this movie. Sure, you had the bravest guys in the whole frigging world never giving up against all odds, taking on all kinds of punishment and never cracking. What’s missing though is dialogue or action scenes designed to put the rest of the world on notice that America is the best there is, was and ever will be!

Unfortunately, that means quite a bit of non-whup ass stuff going on. While more muscular special forces movies are busy raiding terror camps, stealing motorcycles, and generally generating a nice healthy body count right from the get go, U.S. Seals is forcing us to endure the most arduous mission of all: character development!

We’re talking such heinous stuff as the Seals’ barbecue where we meet the team and their lady friends. It is here that we find out that Mike is quitting the Seals! Because it’s what his wuss family wants!

Thankfully, before he can actually hand in his Scuba gear and combat knife, the team gets a call from the Old Man! I don’t recall whether he was ever referred as the Old Man, but anyone who’s ever done their time in the special forces knows the dude you get your secret missions from is always known as the Old Man. Because he’s always an old man! It’s something you learn on your first day at Starfleet Academey or whatever it is they call Seal School!

The one last mission Mike has to tackle before cashing out involves taking on a group that raids ships, steals their loot, and kills all aboard! There was probably a reason us Americans were supposed to care enough to send our very best, but I’ve plum forgot what it is.

The Seals are charged with attacking an oil platform the bad guys are using as a base and taking a few prisoners to get more information on their leader. They end up getting one of their own guys killed which I don’t think was part of the mission.

More character development ensues when we have to go the hospital and then the funeral after Mike’s old lady makes the ultimate sacrifice for our country. I’m always in favor of family members getting eliminated by the enemy since it helps to keep our guys razor sharp, but in this case, it didn’t make a lot of sense. How was it that the bad guy knew the identity of Mike and where to locate his wife? Yes, there was a traitorous CIA agent involved, but how would she know any of that information or be able to get it?

Could a CIA agent on her first assignment just call up the Seal’s HQ and ask for the name and address of the guy who just covertly attacked that oil platform somewhere near Turkey?

And really, this is one of those instances of the bad guy being so stupid it hurts. Yes, he wants revenge, but what does he think the best Navy Seal ever is going to do once his wife is killed? How good of a business decision is that?

And this bad guy (Blaise) isn’t exactly the most intimidating guy around, even by the comparatively limp-wristed standards of European terrorists. He’s a middle-aged barrel-chested poof who doesn’t look like he could come out on top in a bar fight let alone against Navy Seal thirsting for vengeance.

U.S. Seals does give you solid action with guys diving out of moving trains, ramming an engine through a wall, blowing up stuff, and chucking grenades into pill boxes, but it’s all done in fits and starts until the last twenty minutes of the movie or so.

Too many briefings, too much handwringing over dead people, the laughable CIA doublecross storyline, and the way director Yossi Wein (Operation Delta Force 2, Operation Delta Force 5, Cyborg Cop III) constantly uses fade outs instead of directly cutting to the next scene all involve the Seals not kicking tail for Uncle Sam!

Still, I can’t deny that if you’re the sort who picks up a Nu Image military film that you’ll love watching the armored military vehicles chasing after each other in the middle of one of those budget-friendly eastern European cities, crashing into mysteriously pre-wrecked cars, tables with plastic lawn furniture, and a farmer’s market that are all conveniently placed in their way.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

While inevitably inviting comparisons to other school bus war movies such as Pierluigi Ciriaci’s War Bus Commando, Warbus takes a more realistic approach to driving a school bus in the middle of a warzone and ratchets up the suspense by giving each character a tortured backstory.

It’s a smart move because in between bouts of raiding supply depots, blowing up thatched huts, and generally mowing down entire divisions of North Vietnamese soldiers, we remain riveted to the screen as our heroes confront their demons. Such as the burning shame of Dixie having to wear eyeglasses when he operates a radio. Truly, our heroes are also very human.

Luckily, our heroes also don’t take no crap – even from their own men! When old Dixie Foureyes gives Gus an order and he refuses, Dixie Foureyes gives the guy a dropkick and then pulls a gun on him and tells him not to make him repeat his order again!

Shoot, you think Dixie survived the Nam as long as he has with his far-sighted handicap by playing nice with others? It makes you wonder though if the reason there were only three marines hijacking that missionary school bus was because Dixie wasn’t wearing his glasses during a firefight and ended up wasting his own platoon by accident!

There ain’t no time to shed tears though just because Dixie’s wearing a pair of Coke bottles because there’s lots of other folks who’ve got problems, too! And also because there’s a freaking war on!

But really, who has time to worry about a bunch of Commies booby trapping the woods, mining the opposite side of river or guarding a bridge you’ve got to cross when there’s marital problems between a couple of the missionaries?

The husband seems to have a problem with watching other folks do the nasty which probably also points out that other folks have a problem doing the nasty right in front of the dang Warbus while dudes are watching! If memory serves though, the woman involved was the owner of a couple of cathouses in Saigon, so it’s probably just some sort of continuing education program for her.

Now, your regular, run-of-the-mill Italian movie starring Warbus or one of his imitators wouldn’t go any further in developing the character of the husband. Got to get back to heaving grenades and having characters jump off stuff in slow motion and all that. This isn’t just any old Warbus movie though, this is the Warbus movie!

So it is that we are treated to the husband explaining that he has some kids in South Africa that he hasn’t seen in years and that he and the old lady joined up on this missionary gig so that it would straighten her out. I don’t remember what he was claiming her problems were, mainly because he went and had a seizure not too long after this revelation!

His old lady comes to his rescue and explains that he’s an epileptic with schizophrenic tenancies and that his story about the kids in South Africa is all some big delusion he’s been having for something like 12 years! At least it’s not she’s an enabler or anything!

She doesn’t really have time to answer questions about why’s she’s still with this dysfunctional dingbat because she’s too busy trying to make time with the grizzled Aussie missionary who is also riding Warbus.

But just because this is a Warbus full of human emotion and drama doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have its share of blood and guts, too! Plenty of guys are shot, knifed, and blown up. There’s helicopter crews with bullets in the head and nails sticking out of their backs! There’s awe-inspiring moments of Dixie hauling around some mega-sized gun with strips of ammo several feet long! There’s also a plethora of guys rolling here and there to get into position to squeeze off some more rounds, including a classic moment where Dixie dives out through the glassless windshield of Warbus and rolls off the hood to get a better fix on Charlie!

I won’t sugarcoat things though. There are moments of great loss in this one as well. A lot of good people make the ultimate sacrifice during the big raid Charlie leads on our guys’ encampment while they wait for friendly choppers to get them out.

The death scene that will stay with me until it’s my own turn to pay my last debt to the man upstairs is that of Warbus himself. When Warbus was driven into a shed full of Commie rats on his last suicide run, I really thought I was going to lose control and break down. Until I saw that shed blow sky high! How you can be sad when crap is blowing sky high? You can’t!

Besides, Warbus wasn’t just some missionary school bus a bunch of marines too lazy to walk went and hijacked. Warbus was all of us real Americans, full of love and hate and with a burning passion to kill stuff. What it lacked in good gas mileage, it made up for with bravado.

I can still see Warbus helping to rescue Dixie at the fuel supply depot, running through barricades, and most of all, eagerly bearing down on those Vietnamese soldiers in the shed, knowing full well what his fate was. Sure, Dixie Foureyes was one tough soldier, but I think he’d be the first to say that he wasn’t a hero, only that he had the privilege to fight in the company of heroes. Guys who never got to come home. Guys who didn’t get any parades. Guys whose relatives got all the medals. Guys like Warbus.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Frank was somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty years old when he made this movie. Fifty? Old Blue Eyes was more like Old Paint in this one. Frank was so old, they issued him a MedicAlert bracelet instead of dog tags!

I don’t want to ruin the movie for any of you out there with a fetish for watching senior citizens battle the Axis powers, but you didn’t have to be in the AARP to see problems for Frank when the final scene required him to run after a train while a bunch of Jerries shot at him. The only suspense in that scene was whether Frank would keel over from a heart attack before the Nazis pumped him full of lead.

In any case, after he gets shot down, he’s hauled off to an Italian POW camp that’s mainly populated by British soldiers and he becomes the senior officer. Shoot, when you’re that old I don’t think you could help but be the senior officer!

Ryan (Sinatra) demonstrates the superior intelligence of a superior American officer by telling the Brits that Italy is only a few weeks from liberation and that they should just ride things out as easy as possible. The Brits, led by Trevor Howard, are of the opinion that it’s their duty to try and escape and that if only one guy makes it out, they did their job.

Trev tries to keep control of the camp, but Ryan tells him he’s in charge and that as of now all these stupid escape attempts will cease and that the cafeteria will now be serving two flavors of Jell-O. He gets the nickname Von Ryan because the Brits see him as some kind of collaborator with the Italians.

Ryan then has all his boys strip down and burn their clothing in an effort to force the Italians to provide them with new clothing. Von Ryan gets the sweatbox for his trouble and is let out a few days later after all the Italians have fled and the POWs have been left to their own devices.

Further demonstrating the early onset of Alzheimer’s that he has, Ryan then begins to trust an Italian captain who had been helping run the camp and they decide to all march out to some ruins and meet up with some boats on the coast.

Trev is against trusting this guy and says he’ll just give them up to the Germans who in the area. Ryan pooh poohs all that and the next thing you know they’re all being herded into a train by the Germans that captured them at the ruins!

But it wasn’t like Trev was right or anything. It turned out that that plan was so dumb, the Germans didn’t even need anyone to tip them off. You start to think that maybe we shouldn’t be worried about whether we can trust Captain Oriani (the same guy who played Teocrito in The Giant Of Marathon), but whether we shouldn’t get some kind of guardian appointed for Colonel Ryan.

Trev spends most of the first part of the train ride scowling at Ryan and complaining about all the POWs his dunderheaded plans had gotten killed so far. Ryan shows us some of that good old fashioned American know how and never say die no matter how ill-equipped you may be to deal with a given situation attitude when he starts tearing up the floor of the boxcar.

He and some of his posse drop out the bottom of the train and roll clear of the wheels and you're hoping that Ryan's Serenity Guards are empty when he started because they sure as hell will be full once he's out from under that train!

After taking over the train Ryan concocts another plan to escape, this time through the Alps across the border to Switzerland. This leads to a series of tense moments aboard the train and at various pit stops.

Besides Sinatra being clearly too long in the tooth to be doing any of this convincingly, the other big problem with the film is that other than Sinatra’s character, no one else in the movie stands out so that you can even remember their name, let alone anything about them. Trev is probably the second biggest character and the only personality he has is that he doesn’t like Ryan!

Even though you’re hoping that Sinatra’s dentures don’t come loose when he’s heaving grenades at the Germans, he’s playing a character that displays a bit of depth, making bad decisions throughout the picture, realizing what stinkers they are, and having to live with all the POWs his dumb ass gets killed!

The last scenes with the trains and the mountains bring things to a solid close and the ending isn’t what you would expect from one of these POW movies. The good outweighs the bad in this one and fans of war-adventure movies shouldn’t be let down by it as long as they place a premium on action over character and don’t mind watching grandpa play war hero.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Crawford plays Michelle de la Becque (mainly by affecting a faint to non-existent accent) and if her character is supposed to represent all that is great about the French people than I have to wonder why we ever busted our hump to rescue them.

You see, she’s one of those fair-weather patriots that “rises” to the occasion only when the war is smacking her upside the head and her boyfriend has turned traitor. Before this, Nazis were sweeping over the rest of Europe and Michelle’s biggest concern was that she was going to have to start getting her silk imported in a diplomatic pouch or something.

The first part of the movie strenuously tries establish her character as a rich, thoughtless, self-centered jerk. This is done in all the usual ways – mainly by having her mistreat the hired help at the department store that supplies all her beautiful gowns. (Supposedly the gowns were the only positive experience for Crawford while making this film.)

Michelle has a fiancé named Robert Cortot who is an engineering genius and also really rich. He babbles all the time about how busy he is and ships Michelle off to Spain so that he can help win the war. When the Nazis capture France, Michelle slinks back home.

This is when the movie plays the war out in a bunch of spinning newspaper headlines and scenes of Michelle stumbling around with dirt on her face amid a bunch of scurvy refugees including a little kid with a missing foot! When she gets back home, Robert is busy with the war effort, but now it’s the Nazi war effort!

Oh, Robert! Say it isn’t so! Michelle, having been a war refugee for about a week, has changed and is now a superpatriot who can barely contain her contempt for the occupying Germans that Robert introduces her to.

He takes her to a really sweet cocktail party that he’s hosting and she is shocked, just shocked that it is a Nazi dinner party! The only question I have about these Nazi dinner parties is whether they really arranged their dining tables in the shape of a swastika?

With Michelle’s new found sense of French pride, she leaves her fiancé and goes back to her own mansion. She soon discovers that the horrors of war have struck her right where she lives! The Nazis have commandeered her home for some administrative offices and now she is allowed only one room in the entire mansion!

Duke Wayne finally appears about half way through the film as an RAF pilot who got shot down over France and is now on the run from the Krauts. He’s being trailed by some German agents (why don’t they just arrest him?) and he hasn’t eaten or slept in awhile when he runs into Michelle. After a little back and forth, she takes him into her place and gives him some food and a bed.

For some reason Duke starts hitting on Michelle (isn’t he supposed to be trying to escape back to Britain?), but she’s pulling a wholly unconvincing gimmick about how there’s no time for love in war. Duke gets in a little he-man action though when he decks the drunk and amorous Nazi that has taken over the rest of Michelle’s pad. Then she concocts a plan to get Robert (even though he’s a traitor) to help her and the Duke get out of France.

I never understood why she thought this plan would work or why she thought that Robert would want to help her after she punked him just because he went and looked out for number one. Then I didn’t understand why Robert actually did help her. But what really eluded me was why anyone would believe that Duke Wayne was not only a American college student, but a chauffeur as well!

The Nazis weren’t buying it either and tried to doublecross all involved, but since this is a propaganda movie, the doublecross was really on them!

A terrible, unbelievable story that makes little sense on any level and is topped off by the fact that you don’t believe anything the stars do in this movie (except for when Duke slugs that Nazi).

Duke and Crawford’s scenes could have been filmed on separate sets as little as the played off one another. They wanted us to think there was some love triangle, but Duke just would periodically grab and kiss her or say he loved her, while she would turn her nose up at him. All the while everyone (including Michelle) figured that Robert was a dirtbag conspirator. Suffice it to say, the love triangle bit flopped along with everything else in this hasty stew of war time posturing and clichés.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Greer Garson (Mrs. Parkington, Blossoms In The Dust) plays the Mrs. Miniver in question and apparently she’s supposed to represent the sturdy British wife that perseveres no matter how tough things become on the homefront, even if that means that she won’t be able to buy anymore expensive ugly hats.

She’s such a pillar of goodness that she even inspires the guy at the train station to call his rose the “Mrs. Miniver” which while quite unsettling at least doesn’t assume the familiarity of using Mrs. Miniver’s first name, whatever that was. Even the Brits who are psychotic stalkers are all about manners.

Her husband (frequent Garson co-star Walter Pidgeon) is an architect and spends his time ignoring his kids so that he can brag all about his new car to his wife. I initially contented myself while wallowing in all this dull domestic bliss that at any moment, Panzers would be grinding that stupid rose into the mud and that Mr. Miniver would be killed in action, no doubt whispering “Mrs. Miniver, you were always my rose.”

But the minutes kept ticking away and there was still no signs of anything happening other than a mounting crisis over this flower contest. You see, the annual rose show is put on by Lady Beldon and every year she wins the show because no one has the audacity to rise above their station and enter a competing rose. But then the stationmaster decides to buck tradition and enter Mrs. Miniver. (Hey, I thought that was Mr. Miniver’s job!)

The village is divided by this and Lady Beldon’s granddaughter goes to Mrs. Miniver to ask her to convince the stationmaster to withdraw from the competition.

Making matters even worse from an entertainment perspective is that the Minivers have several annoying kids, but none more annoying than Vin. He’s a young, not terribly manly looking lad who is back home from Oxford.

He’s also full of new-fangled ideas about how the class system in Britain is wrong and doesn’t mind telling this to Beldon’s granddaughter, Carol. Do I have to point out that his “new-fangled ideas” were invented by us Americans way back in 1776?

In any case, he’s a mouthy know it all so Carol immediately falls for him. I would have been clawing my eyes out at this point, but now I was sure that it would be Vin that buys the farm while on some daring air patrol saving Buckingham Palace or some other British tourist trap. They get married straight away since with Vin doomed as a pilot in the RAF, the window for getting laid is rapidly closing.

But a funny thing happens on the way to the war for the Miniver men. They all survive! Mr. Miniver is battling on the homefront, going on patrol and joining a flotilla of civilian boats to help out at Dunkirk. He also spends most of the second half of the film either cowering in his bomb shelter with his family or joking about all the damage the Germans did to his home.

Vin flies off on various missions and we always know when he’s flying overhead because he makes his engines backfire as his mom gazes longingly up at the sky (more on that icky angle in a moment), but somehow he survives as well! This is a war? Someone has to die, right? So who is the gnarled finger of Death fingerbanging in this one? Carol!

Carol? How the devil does she buy it? You can thank Mrs. Miniver for that! Driving home after the big rose show during an air raid, some shrapnel or a bullet rips through the roof of Mr. Miniver’s new car (man, is he going to be pissed!) and kills her, but not before a rather extensive death scene that finally concludes on Mrs. Miniver’s kitchen floor.

You can pretty much guess what that death scene means – Oscar, baby! That’s right, actress Teresa Wright scored an award for Supporting Actress for this role.

Speaking of the Oscars, Mrs. Miniver somehow won Best Picture, beating out superior films such as Kings Row and The Magnificent Ambersons despite its long, plodding story of a woman who didn’t do much of anything for the war effort. (Sure she captured a downed German pilot, but that was an accident and he was right outside her house.)

For Mrs. Miniver‘s most memorable moments though, pay particular attention to the scenes involving Garson (who also won an Oscar) and her on-screen son Vin. Guess who got married after the movie? That’s just plain gross, but at least it makes the movie a little more interesting. In real life, they would be divorced after a couple of years.

Don’t fret for Greer though because there would a happy ending in the form of Texas millionaire Buddy Fogelson. Sadly, for those of us watching the movie, there would be no oil baron to rescue us.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

There is some trepidation though when approaching a director’s work on a film when he isn’t exactly known for that particular genre. When guys like Pierluigi Ciriaci and Camillo Teti fire up the jeeps and blow the crud out of jungles, you don’t fret much since these guys know their way around an exploding bamboo hut.

When it’s an unknown like Mario though, you wonder if he’s going to understand what we need in our jungle mercenary movies. Is he going to realize that our hero needs to be more psychotic than the guys he’s hunting down for some good clean revenge?

I am happy to report that not only is Rolf a total nutjob, but he also carries a gigantic gun that he fires in the air during his hunting of his old mercenary buddies for no real reason! Guys with big guns are great! Even better are guys with big guns that have a great backstory!

Rolf isn’t just some blank slate who decided one day to be a merc because the local college had all the meteorology classes late on Friday afternoon! We learn during a particularly sensitive moment with his girlfriend via flashback that Rolf was raised by a whore!

But not just any whore! That whore was his mother! And she was a junkie! And her pimp gave her a fatal overdose of drugs right there when Rolf is the room! In the pimp’s defense, he did sort of push Rolf to the floor and knocked him out for a little while so that he didn’t actually get to see the lethal injection.

Once he woke up though, he did get to hold his mother’s head as she was foaming at the mouth while stupidly saying something like “mama, what’s wrong?” What’s wrong? Your hooker mom just got a bad case of that drug rabies that’s going around all the used up whores!

Rolf’s girlfriend also had a backstory, but who cares because she’s just there to get gang raped and shot so that Rolf will get off his duff and start rampaging!

Now why would Rolf’s girlfriend go and get herself violated and ventilated like that? Blame on it Rolf! Rolf’s old pals want him to pilot a plane full of drugs for them, but he’s against drugs due to his mother’s death and refuses.

That’s not why they did his girlfriend though. They only beat Rolf up and left him for the leeches after that. It’s when Rolf hijacks their plane, pisses in the drugs and chucks them out the window that his buddies go looking for Rolf’s girlfriend!

Despite the fact that there’s only five guys that Rolf needs to settle up with, the film still delivers a nice dosage of violent mayhem. There’s grenade traps, impalings, stabbings, shootings, and Rolf even gets his hands all full of bullet holes! This leads to a scene where he’s involved in a truck chase and he has to drive with his wrists!

You also see a guy getting boiling soup heaved in his face and then having said face held over a gas burner before he’s finally shot in the head! There’s even flashbacks to when Rolf’s buddies threw kids into the air and used them as target practice!

Mario clearly doesn’t have a hell of a lot to work with here. The sets for the interior shots look a lot like something left over from one of his low budget sex movies, the story is barely existent, and the dubbed dialogue sounds like it was written by someone who has no idea how conversational English sounds.

Mario also doesn’t exhibit much flair behind the camera and his efforts could be characterized as fluctuating somewhere between aggressively disinterested and not quite passable. Simply put, Rolf looks every bit the cheap and nasty film it is.

Still, there’s no question that there’s more than enough positive stuff going on here to require a viewing or three. Aside from the healthy dose of violence already outlined, there’s also a great scene where a prison guard shoves Rolf’s hand into a toilet full of poop and smears it on his hand. Then he puts Rolf’s poop-stained hand on the wall and says they ran out of ink for the fingerprints!

As great as that was, it left me deeply troubled. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out whether that was the best part of the movie or whether it was Rolf’s theme song which sounded like it was performed by a Bee Gees tribute band!

Gloriously grotesque and unabashedly ugly at every turn, Mario makes sure that one of his only forays into jungle warfare has the impact of a guy getting his head slammed repeatedly into a truck door by Rolf! He also ensures that you’ll be on the lookout for his other misanthropic mercenary flick, Skin’em Alive!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Since the novel this movie is based on won a Newbery Medal, I have to assume that it’s the God’s honest truth and that the colonists were such great guys that after they stormed the ships in Boston Harbor and dumped all the tea overboard, that they then took time to swab the decks and generally cleaned up the boat when they finished with their consumer protest.

Johnny Tremain was made by Walt Disney in 1957, which means that the acting by the youngsters on the cast (mostly Hal Stalmaster as Johnny and Laura Patten as Priscilla) come across as Mouseketeers playing dress up and being more interested in maintaining these beaming smiles and spewing out their lines with glee than they were with showing anything remotely resembling an emotion that someone who lived in those turbulent times would have experienced.

The result is a revolutionary war movie that has the vague feel of a theme park, with everyone in their bright new costumes and Boston looking like a super clean part of Disneyland (call it Patriotland). You half expect to go into Paul Revere’s shop and be able to get a funnel cake and/or stuffed Mickey Mouse.

Johnny is an apprentice silversmith who is one of those self-absorbed cocky guys that doesn’t have any time for politics and these Sons of Liberty that are printing up their anti-British propaganda. We all know that Johnny is basically a good kid at heart because his ego and pride show up in such positive ways as wanting to work really hard and make something of himself. Shoot, the kid’s biggest sin is working on the Sabbath!

Johnny, like all great superheroes has a secret origin story that would lay the groundwork for his newly awakened civic-mindedness. It seems that one Sabbath while he was working when he wasn’t supposed to, Johnny’s hand has a run in with some super hot liquid silver!

What follows are Johnny’s darkest days. He’s given the boot from the silversmithing job he so slavishly devoted himself to. (He would often go to Paul Revere to get tips on how to do it since his boss was old and senile.)

He tries to sign up for every job in town and it’s always the same story: just when they’re about to give Johnny a job, they stick their hand out to shake on it and Johnny is forced to reveal his crispy-fried hand. Even though Johnny probably has a claim under the Revolutionaries With Disabilities Act, you can’t help but giggle as he dejectedly puts his mutant hand in his pocket and sits on the curb all beaten down.

Johnny seeks assistance from a rich guy, but ends up framed for a crime he didn’t commit. The Sons of Liberty come to his aid, thus showing Johnny that this revolution stuff might just be kind of awesome after all!

The movie then concentrates on the Boston Tea Party. It comes off more as a fraternity prank than as act of defiance against an evil empire. (Everyone was in fine spirits, dressed as Indians, and really polite to the crew of the ship all while some British admiral looked on chuckling.)

I suppose Disney was trying to amp up the educational quotient of the movie when they had that crazy old coot James Otis going on and on about freedom and the price it costs. A little of that goes a long way and I was wishing that Otis had been hit by lighting about ten years earlier than it did in real life.

They run through the expected beginnings of the war with the “one if by land, two if by sea” gag and then they finish the movie with a variety of battle scenes between the colonists and the redcoats. These scenes lack any drama or power as they consist of guys standing around firing their muskets and either falling down or running away.

You don’t get real involved because that punk Johnny, whom we’re supposed to care about, doesn’t do diddly and half the time we don’t even focus on him. I certainly hope the book was a bit deeper in its characterization of Johnny and of his conversion from self-absorbed boob to crippled up do-gooder because this movie was all about Johnny smiling and just going with the flow for no good reason other than he got acquitted at trial.

It’s a good idea to try and get kids involved with history by interweaving a young person into these events so that they can become familiar with guys like Paul Revere and Sam Adams (well, familiar beyond his beer that is), Disney though just did a prettified whitewash of things and put these inept kids through a script that was so simplistic they couldn’t screw it up too badly.

Disney’s obsession with lowest common denominator family entertainment renders Johnny Tremain pretty much into just another cookie cutter live action effort the company used to crank out with uninspired regularity in the 1950s and 1960s.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

Toss in the fact that we’re in the capable hands of Walking Tall‘s Bo Svenson (well, the Walking Tall sequels anyway) and former pro football player Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, not to mention the guy who played Dr. Strange in a TV movie and Richard Basehart’s son and the only way you could possibly screw this pooch was if the director couldn’t keep up with all the macho action on display.

That’s not a concern though, as the man leading the Inglorious Bastards on their misadventure through 1944 France is one Enzo G. Castellari! Enzo put The Hammer through his paces in the post-apocalyptic thriller, The New Barbarians. And if that wasn’t enough, he was behind the camera for both Bronx Warriors and Bronx Warriors 2! Once you’ve seen those films and star Mark Gregory as Trash, you’ll understand the talent Enzo has in coaxing great performances out of guys with really big perms who are decked out in headbands!

You can damn sure bet your Kraut-loving ass though that there aren’t any headbands or big hair to be seen in the company of the Inglorious Bastards! One guy does have long hair, but that’s just a testament to how long he’s been in the stockade! And he was only the thief/forger of the group!

The Hammer plays a dude who killed a sergeant for looking at him wrong and threatened another one saying, “they can only shoot me once!” Dr. Strange shows up as a racist piece of trash who gets into it with Hammer while the Bastards are on the run.

Throw in the coward as well as their leader (Svenson) who’s a pilot that was more interested in flying his fighter plane to London to see his girlfriend than bombing Jerry and you’ve got yourself the filthiest half-dozen imaginable!

Luckily for all involved, Svenson puts all that girlfriend stuff on the back burner for the duration of the movie, because he’s all about killing as many Nazis as he can find. But here’s the thing about Bo. Even when he’s killing or being threatened with death himself, he always has a pleasant smile on his face and seems bemused by events.

That’s just the sort of cool-headedness that comes in handy when you’re shooting Nazis with a crossbow while rescuing Hammer from a German-held castle. Of course, Hammer is no slouch in the murder department either and manages to get his hands on an ornamental battle axe and do some bone cracking with it during the big castle scene as well.

Based on that sequence alone, this movie doesn’t have anything else to prove to anybody. But do think Enzo, Hammer, Walking Tall, Dr. Strange, and Richard Basehart’s kid are even capable of taking their foot off the gas? This movie’s so busy whipping tale, it doesn’t even have time to get around to giving the Bastards their suicide mission until about half way through! And that first half isn’t filler neither!

After an enemy ambush allows our gang to escape, they get themselves into all sorts of jams. At one point they even have a deserted German SS guy in their group!

Every five minutes they’re getting bombed or shot at or captured. Inevitably, this turns out bad for whoever is on the other end of things what with Hammer dumping piles of rubble on some hapless Germans, Dr. Strange hiding a pistol in his pants and using it at an opportune time, and all the Bastards accidentally wiping out a bunch of their own men! Whoops!

It’s this bit of friendly fire that leads the Bastards into their mission. It turns out the guys they killed were going to do the mission, but now Walking Tall figures he can leverage the situation to the Bastards’ advantage by offering to have the Bastards do the mission if they have their various charges dropped.

And what is this mission that has no chance of succeeding and every chance of getting all the Bastards dishonorably discharged straight to hell? An assault on a Nazi train carrying a prototype of the V-2 rocket! It’s like Von Ryan’s Express, but without the wimpy old farts!

The genius of a filmmaker like Enzo is that he knows what we expect and want when we hear there’s going to be an attack on a Nazi train. You’ve got Bastards on board dressed as Krauts. You’ve got French partisans blowing up bridges. You’ve got guys jumping off of trains. You’ve got guys jumping onto trains from overpasses. You’ve got guys running on top of trains and leaping from car to car. You’ve even got a motorcycle jump as it blows through a German checkpoint!

And when a guy tinkering with the rocket prototype says something about accidentally setting off the self-destruct mechanism, you instinctively know that Enzo is going to be blowing up some serious model railroads!

A lot of folks would want to get their cheesy model shots done as quickly as possible, but Enzo knows that anything worth doing cheaply is worth doing a lot! When the train finally blows, it’s like ten nuclear bombs went off! All sort of models explode, there’s fire everywhere, walls are caved in, dudes are aflame, and half of occupied France is covered in rubble!

Enzo also compliments what is a surprisingly good looking film with stylistic touches all veterans of Italian cinema will easily recognize: slow motion death scenes and skinny dipping German girls shooting at the Bastards. I imagine that for Hammer, it’s a toss up which is the more impressive accomplishment – being in the Super Bowl or being an Inglorious Bastard!

© 2009 MonsterHunter

Thankfully, another great American, Walt Disney, used his Disneyland TV show to dramatize Johnny’s adventures back in 1963. Demonstrating a commitment to Johnny’s legacy as well as to the burgeoning home video market of the 1980s, the Walt Disney Company also thankfully saw fit to edit both episodes into a 90 minute movie and release it on VHS for real Americans to savor!

Disney regular Kevin Corcoran plays Johnny and gives a Yankee Doodle Dandy performance as the kid who was going to fight the Civil War for the North no matter what! Even if he was only nine years old!

That’s right! Nine freaking years old and this kid is out there ready to lay a lick on the rebs and their treasonous efforts to tear this great country apart! It doesn’t matter that every pea-brained adult tells him that he’s too young to be a soldier, Johnny is bound and determined to do whatever it takes to stick it to old Dixieland!

Corcoran, who was excellent as the kid who ran away to join the circus in Toby Tyler turns it up a notch when he runs away to join the war! He stows away on a train and then endures a tough boot camp run by his friend Gabe. (Brian Keith sporting a red beard that looks like it was made out of Carrot Top’s pubic hair!)

And when his daddy finally comes to retrieve him from camp, Johnny just sneaks off the train taking him home and rejoins his old outfit, the Blue Raiders!

And Johnny isn’t there just to be some cute mascot! Johnny earns his nickname the hard way at the Battle of Shiloh when the South has the Union soldiers on the run and only one man, I mean, kid, is refusing to run! Johnny Freaking Shiloh!

Standing tall! Beating his drum! Inspiring the rest of the troops to turn back around and take the fight straight at the Confederacy! It’s drum solos like that place him right in the middle of all the barroom arguments about who the greatest drummer of all time was: Johnny Shiloh or John Bonham!

If forced to choose between the two, I have to go with Shiloh over Bonzo for a couple of reasons. Like the fact that Shiloh actually shot a Confederate colonel!

In 1863 at the Battle of Chickamauga, Johnny plugged an officer who was trying to kill his buddy Gabe. Some of you might think that Disney just made that up to further pump up Johnny’s image as the youngest bad ass of all time, but I would suggest that incredibly, Disney’s version softened up the incident!

The real version isn’t that he was saving a friend, but blasted the colonel when the colonel ordered Shiloh to surrender! And while Shiloh merely wounded the guy in the movie, in real life, he killed his ass!

Disney also made up some other stuff to make Shiloh more family-friendly (well, as family friendly as a 10 year old kid training with a bayonet to kill enemy soldiers can possibly be) with how they handled his time when he was captured by the Confederates.

While in the enemy’s clutches, Johnny makes the acquaintance of a similarly aged boy who is fighting with the South. Though they have their disagreements, Johnny comes to learn (and relates to Gabe later on in a vomit-inducing scene) that the guys fighting for the South are just like the guys fighting for the North. Except that you know, they’re traitors to America. There’s no historical record though about Johnny ever learning a bunch of life lessons from an illiterate Southerner named Billy while in some Confederate POW camp.

I can’t really fault Disney for making Shiloh less of a ruthless killing machine then he really was though. You’ve got to make your story palatable enough to all the wimp parents out there so that they let there kids watch the movie.

As it is, the film apparently has the general drift of Shiloh’s story. Depending on the source, Shiloh was wounded a few times, escaped from enemy camps a couple of times, and was even left for dead and made it past enemy lines in the middle of the night to safety.

Still, even the slightly sanitized version of Shiloh’s adventures are something all American school children should view.

Considering the generations of bloated up losers we’ve been raising, they need to know that in the past, citizens of this country, even snot-nosed brats, weren’t afraid to go out and fight and die for what they believe in. This is especially important now when you have liberal crackpot organizations like the United Nations and Amnesty International condemning the use of child soldiers.

I’ve always been proud to say that it was Johnny Shiloh that inspired me to join the Delta Force and skip the sixth grade. After all, I can always go back to school once the world is safe for freedom.

© 2009 MonsterHunter