Strike Commando (1987)

Pretty Good

A Masterpiece!

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

This film is so funny because it's trying to be serious! The acting and directing is terrible from grenades going off and taking out large amounts of people, over-reacting and corny lines to the funniest one-liners you'll ever see it's a film which never ceases to make you laugh!!! A must see for anyone who likes Rambo or who want's to see really bad acting.Also, Alex Vitale at the end with the 'americanskiiiiii!' line when his head is blown off and the sound still carrying is nothing short of genius!Seriously, you'll laugh and laugh and laugh!Must buy!

Italian director Bruno Mattei is often accused of being one of the most inept directors working in the film industry today. However, having watched many of his films I am left convinced that the sly old fox must be actually in on the joke.Take for instance the film in question.....I simply refuse to accept that any movie that showcases such a lofty combination of hilariously bad acting, side splittingly awful dialogue, woefully inappropriate incidental music and a plethora of jaw-droppingly silly scenes can have ever been intended to have been taken at all seriously in the first place. The second half of this movie especially seems to play like an all out comedy, further proof surely that Mattei was parodying the film that this was copied - er- I mean modelled upon (Rambo: First Blood Part 2)Either way, intentional or not, the end result is the same; this movie is utterly hilarious!B-movie god Reb Brown, star of many a cinematic craptacular, appears here as Michael Ransom, a super tough commando who has a predilection for yelling at the top of his lungs whenever he fires off an automatic weapon (which as it happens turns out to be a frequent occurrence) In fact if one were to base a drinking game of one shot for every time our Reb starts screaming, then you can fully expect to be in a coma by the end of the movie!Actually there's a bit more to the plot than the above, not much mind you, but I'll reveal it anyway.... At the start of the movie our hero and his buddies are shown infiltrating a compound deep behind enemy lines in Vietnam. However, back in the relative safety of the jungle nearby, a slimy general pulls rank and orders the charges that our boys are laying to be detonated early. Say bye, bye to our heroes, all except our main man of course, who manages to narrowly escape. He is eventually discovered floating downstream by a group of friendly fighters.In gratitude, our hero vows to lead them to safety. However, things don't go according to plan and they find themselves attacked by hostile forces led by a sadistic Russian officer.In amongst such brutal scenes of carnage and destruction it must be sure hard to retain one's humanity, but our hero also has a tender heart it seems as evidenced in a number of touching scenes between himself and a young boy who wishes to escape the turmoil of the war around him. Inevitably, (but not unpredictably) the poor little lad gets killed later on in the film by the aforementioned Russian miscreant thus eliciting what surely must rank as one of the most painful scenes of bad acting I have ever had the joy to behold from our Reb as he tearfully cradles the dying child in his arms and relates to him the joys of Disneyland (!!!) Promptly after the ill fated youngster expires (whilst dreaming of Mickey Mouse and co) our Reb goes mental with his M-60 whilst repeatedly yelling the name of the murderer of his little buddy. ....Infact he goes on and on hollering the villains name and wasting bullets until he is finally captured!Various arduous torture scenes ensue (including electrocution, a blow torch to the back, and leaving Reb in a cell with a decomposing body!) as Reb's captors attempt to break his will.But our man, being the tough commando sort that he is just won't crack and eventually breaks free to wreck yet more havoc (whilst yelling loudly yet again!)Finally our man must face his Russian nemesis in hand to hand combat (having by now laid waste to pretty much every one else in the cast!) And what a fight!!!!! Truly some of the worst (and most amusing) choreography I have ever witnessed! At one point both combatants run straight at each other from about 20 feet apart only to collide in a mutual head butt!!!!!Eventually our hero manages to knock his enemy over a cliff after which he lets off the mightiest victory cry yet!However, there are one or two loose ends remaining.....The General at the start who ordered the explosives to be prematurely detonated is revealed to be in cahoots with the Russians! Understandably mightily peeved by this traitorous act our man resolves to track him down......with his beloved M-60!!! After blowing the living excrement out of everyone guarding the general, Reb finally blows the cowardly scum up with a grenade launcher! WOAH!But there's one last surprise in store! - As he is leaving the compound, our man is attacked by the big Russian who it seems did not perish in the fall off the cliff after all and in addition, is now sporting some steel dentures which he is determined to sink into our mans throat!!!!Fear not, Reb simply shoves a grenade into his eager chops and blows him sky high (and manages to fire off a great quip after the aforementioned modified dentures fly into his hands!)WOW! Now this is what I call a movie! I really can't understand many of the derisory reviews I've read about it for whether the director intended it or not, this film is without doubt one of the most hilarious movies I have ever had the pleasure to sit through.Funniest scene? Well there's so many to chose from but for me it's a bizarre bit where a Vietnamese soldier jumps out on our hero to kill him prompting our man Reb to utter the woefully misplaced line, 'Dammit, you scared the sh*t of of me!' before effortlessly knocking him out with a rifle butt!!!Forget the humourless, sickeningly and blindly patriotic Rambo, simply put, one can not say to have lived until one has experienced the wondrous spectacle that is Strike Commando!

This film has about all of what one would expect from a film about "a lone hero in the Vietnam-War", but where many of the other films in this genre is so damned serious, this film is somewhat refreshing by being a little less serious in its approach, without falling for the temptation of being a complete parody or even a comedy.As one could expect there are a lot of shootings and explosions, stabbings, (no throat-cuttings), classic ambush-scenes borrowed from other films, Russian villains (of both sexes), a treacherous American Officer - courageous villagers, cute children and a Frenchman (that later on are brutally massacred by the Vietcon's) - torture of American POW's and the hero escaping from a Vietnamese POW-camp. And as it is said at the end of the film: "Any similarity between persons living and dead .... especialy dead .... is purely accidental .... yeah, very accidental, like one in a million - maybe".Perhaps this film isn't remarkable in an artistic sense, but personally, I would rather see this film 4 times, than I would see "Rambo" twice.

Directed by Vincent Dawn (ie Bruno Mattei) this is quite the shoddiest and worst acted war film in living memory. The plot "Ha!" is a direct steal from Rambo First Blood Part II with loser actor Reb Brown as a poor man's Stallone seeking revenge on a Colonel who deserted him and his buddies in Vietnam.Brown continually shouts "Rah!" and "Die!" about a million times and good job too as when he is required to act, his lines are delivered in an atrociously wooden manner. I do feel (and hope) that director Vincent Dawn (Zombie Creeping Flesh) was taking the pi** slightly - if not then he is surely the worst film-maker in the entire world.There are many hilarious moments such as when Brown awakes from a nightmare screaming and for no reason everybody else in the room stars screaming - including a small monkey. He then stumbles and falls backwards out of a raised hut!I reckon this movie could have been made by a twelve year old. How on earth do such useless directors as Dawn get producers to waste their money on this crap? Can you imagine the premiere of this movie (well there probably wasn't one!) and to see the looks on the investors faces when they were shown what their money had been spent on.No wonder Bruno Mattei has all these pseudonyms; Vincent Dawn, Norman Dawn(II), Bob Hunter(IV) etc - it's so he can pretend that he didn't actually make this hopeless mess of a movie. I also can't believe Dawn made a sequel to this - jesus, has the man no shame?