Troma's War (1988)

... aka: Club War
... aka: 1,000 Ways to Die
... aka: War

Directed by:
Michael Herz
"Samuel Weil" (Lloyd Kaufman)

Since the 80s became more and more conservative as the decade progressed, violent action movies featuring flag-waving American meat-heads (usually with military training) going overseas to kick evil foreigner ass became all the rage. An excellent dipstick to gauge where the decade headed was the Rambo series. The initial entry in the franchise, 1982's First Blood, took place in America and dealt with a disrespected, forgotten drifter war vet who's forced into action after being victimized by abusive and corrupt police officers in a small Washington town. This film was clearly made with anti-war commentary in mind, particularly in regards to the neglect and poor treatment of our soldiers after they've served. On the other hand, the later Rambo sequels (released in 1985 and 1988), threw lead character John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) into third world countries and asked audiences to cheer him on as he blew away countless Vietnamese, Afghani and “Commie” bad guys. Audiences also flocked to theaters to see Arnold Schwarzenegger take on pesky Central and South Americans in Commando (1985) and PREDATOR (1987) and Chuck Norris taking on the Vietnamese in three Missing in Action films and Lebanese and South American terrorists in two Delta Force films. And there were plenty more where those came from.

A number of directors offered up a counter balance of sorts to the action heroism of the above films (which some felt not only tastelessly glorified war but also were pushing a right wing blind patriotism agenda during the Reagan Era), including Oliver Stone with Platoon (1985), Stanley Kubrick with Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Brian De Palma with Casualties of War (1989); all of which made war out to be what it truly is: ugly, depressing, often utterly pointless and dehumanizing for all parties involved. Since the 80s saw plenty of shoot-em-up war action movies as well as plenty of serious war dramas, it seemed like the perfect time for a war movie spoof. After all, there was plenty to poke fun at and who better to tackle such delicate subject matter than Troma, the folks behind The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke 'em High? Well, actually, I can think of quite of few people who'd have been better suited but considering no one else at the time would even think of making a movie like this, Troma's War is what we get.

A Tromaville Airlines plane crash lands right off the coast of a seemingly-uninhabited island near Cuba. Many are killed, but the survivors gather together on the beach and try to figure out what to do. Though the majority of these people are outright obnoxious to start they strangely become almost likable by the end. The closest thing we have to central figures in this group are the shirtless Taylor (Sean Bowen), who's a smart ass but basically a nice guy, and Lydia (Carolyn Beauchamp), an uptight, tough girl feminist. There's also mysterious British spy / blowgun assassin Marshall (Steven Crossley), racist, sexist, homophobic and violence-loving Vietnam vet Parker (“Michael Ryder” / Rick Wasburn), flamboyant punk singer Sean (Alex Cserhart) and his all-female band “The Bearded Clams” (Aleida Harris, Mary Yorio and Susan Bachli), blind vegetarian Jennifer (Lisa Petruno), Jewish widow Dottie (Jessica Dublin), single mother Kim (Brenda Brock) and her baby (Lisbeth Kaufman), priest Father Brown (Dan Snow), Wall Street broker aka corporate slime Roger Kirkland (Patrick Weathers), fat guy Cooney (Ara Romanoff), feisty Latina Maria (Lorayn Lane Deluca), cancer-stricken, one-armed Hardwick (Charles Kay-Hune), a prissy male flight attendant, a neurotic woman and others. Yes, that's a lot of people to keep track of but at least everyone has their own individual quirks.

Almost immediately, the gang notice some heavily-armed soldiers patrolling the woods but this isn't a military rescue mission looking for them. The island is instead home to a multi-ethnic and multicultural group of terrorists, who've gathered there from all over the world with one goal in mind: to “make American crumble.” They plan on infiltrating the U.S. and causing as much destruction as possible from coast to coast, which includes setting off car bombs, infecting citizens with AIDS and poisoning every major water supply. The group is working hand-in-hand with republican politicians (Ha!) in the U.S. who are helping to fund their little organization and want to freak out the population and destabilize the country in order to line their own pockets, increase their power in Washington and help out their corporate buddies. Gee, sounds like the George W. Bush reelection campaign all over again.

Ludicrously believing the plane crash survivors are actually commandos sent there on a mission to destroy them, the terrorists set out to hunt them down, but our band of heroes prove to be tougher and more resilient than they expected. This leads to lots of lengthy, laughably violent battle scenes that include lots of gunfire and explosions and death by snake, quicksand, neck snapping, gutting and harakiri, a crossbow arrow to the crotch, a tongue ripped out, mutant Siamese twins cut in two, ears cut off and fashioned into a necklace and literally hundreds of extras being shot, stabbed and blown to smithereens over the course of the film. This is exactly what you'd expect from Troma taking on the war genre. It's fast-paced, noisy, crude, gory, zany, filled with violence and T&A, sometimes very funny and clever but at other times painfully stupid and irritating. One thing it's not is boring.

 

Not all of this works and the film suffers mostly from several incredibly tasteless “gags” that simply aren't funny (like a woman getting raped by an AIDS-infected man covered in puss-oozing soars) and some hideous overacting. Especially awful are the bad guys, including a training camp colonel doing one of the worst Schwarzenegger impressions imaginable and an incredibly annoying, snorting, pig-snouted military base commander. Subtle this ain't.

At 3 million dollars, this remains Troma's highest-budgeted in-house production to date. It was originally called Club War (also the release title in Germany) and played at numerous international film festivals; even winning a critic's award at Fantasporto in 1990. However, it wasn't financially successful as a theatrical feature and had to recoup its budget on home video. The cast also includes Pericles Lewnes (who was in charge on the special effects along with William Jennings) and Troma regulars Rick Collins and Joe Fleishaker.

★★1/2

Blood Hook (1986)

... aka: Carnada (Bait)
... aka: Ihmiskalastaja (Human Fisherman)
... aka: Leichen an der Angel (Corpses on the Hook)
... aka: Muskie Madness
... aka: Pêche Humaine (Human Fishing)

Directed by:
James (Jim) Mallon

Mallon started as a production manager while Mystery Science Theater 3000 was still at KTMA in Minneapolis before moving up to become director, writer and / or producer of the series for all eleven seasons lasting from 1988 to its cancellation in 1999. I make no bones about my dislike for MST3K and what it stands for. Do I really need to see silhouettes at the bottom of my screen ridiculing cheap movies for a cheap laugh? Nope, not at all. I could do this with friends if I wanted and certainly don't need to be spoon fed scripted “witty” one-liners the entire time I'm trying to watch something. It also makes it damn near impossible to give a film a fair shot when it's being mocked the entire time you're watch it. For me, the MST3K format is nothing more than a distraction that completely takes all of the fun out of watching cheap / bad / weird / dated movies and strips many of these films of their charm. Mike and the robots are basically the equivalent of obnoxious, attention deficit teenagers in a theater who won't shut the hell up and can't put down their cell phones for 10 minutes. One's enjoyment of the show probably just boils down to personal taste, but it's just never worked for me. I've heard many fans say they couldn't make it through most of the movies featured on the show without the commentary. I think that says it all right there.

The fallout from MST3K, not necessarily the show itself, is probably the most annoying thing about it. Especially grating are many of the show's die-hard fans, who call themselves MSTies. Not to generalize, but I've encountered too many MSTies in my day who insist all of the movies featured on the show are awful or else they wouldn't be on there. They end that perception with a period as if it's not even up for debate. When they're not telling detractors the humor must be over their head if they don't find it funny, they're flocking to sites like Amazon and IMDb to down vote the features and prove they can't independently write reviews about movies without quoting one-liners from the show. To many of them, Devil Doll (1964) is on the same playing field as, say, the same year's The Creeping Terror. And PHASE IV (1974) is just another MONSTER A GO-GO (1965), right? Having to read countless moronic comments like "Mario Bava was a hack. His movies were even on Mystery Science Theater 3000!" is enough to have me put a period at the end of my STFU.

With hundreds of "turkeys" at their disposal, when the series decided to make a feature film version they selected This Island Earth (1955) of all things. To me, that shows a certain disdain for classic films instead of an appreciation of them. It also sets in motion a type of thinking that a film should be judged primarily on when it was made, how much it cost to make and all qualities superficial, with no real appreciation for the film's ideas, inventiveness or historical significance when applicable. Most of the people blasting everything featured on MST3K haven't actually watched the movies they insist on critiquing. Not really. They're not giving these films a chance and opting for a highly-altered form that tinkers with not only the original film but their perception of said film. Sometimes focusing entirely on where films go wrong keeps one from appreciating where they go right. Hey, you can point and laugh at the Venusian monster in IT CONQUERED THE WORLD (1956) or you can appreciate that the film deals sincerely with the importance of human emotion.

Unfortunately, once the series was finally canned, series alum like Kevin Murphy and Trace Beaulieu continued riding the gravy train with similar dreck like Cinematic Titanic and RiffTrax. Even more unfortunately, a lot of the films riffed on are harder to find in their original form than they are with the stupid commentary attached. There are still obviously legs on this concept, though, and plenty who enjoy this kind of stuff; something made crystal clear by a successful Kickstarter fundraiser held last year that raked in over 5,700,000 dollars (!) for MST3K to be revived with 14 new episodes. Blood Hook is what some of these guys (Mallon directed and co-wrote the original story along with his wife Gail Anderson and two others, and Murphy is credited as key grip) were up to before goofing on other people's movies. And I actually found this more entertaining than any episode of MST3K I've ever seen. This is a gimmicky, intentionally goofy, cheap, stupid little regional flick but it's more honest, sincere and genuine than what came later. For better or worse, it is its own entity, not one completely reliant on the work of others.

Seventeen years after his grandfather was yanked into a lake never to return, rich kid / wannabe musician Peter van Clease (Mark Jacobs) decides to make a return visit to his family's cabin in the small town of Hayward. Wisconsin. Coming along for the trip are his girlfriend Ann (Lisa Todd), “punk” friend Rodney (Patrick Danz), Rodney's snobby Valley Girl girlfriend Kiersten (Sara Hauser) and third-wheel Fenner (Christopher Whiting). Upon arrival, they meet crazed, always-ranting caretaker Wayne Duerst (Paul Drake), who chews out Rodney for playing his “headache machine” and thinks the world has gone to hell, and his equally-unhinged son Evelyn (Bill Lowrie), pronounced “Evil-In;” a beer-swilling, shell-shocked war vet who sits in the front yard polishing his machine guns and goes on and on about “vibrations.” An old 45 of a song called “Fishing For Your Love” starts triggering flashbacks in Peter about that fateful day his grandpa disappeared but his girlfriend can't understand why he won't just go to the police if he suspects foul play.

The entire town is filled with tourists for the annual “Muskie Madness” fishing tournament and we meet a handful of other strange, eccentric types who give Old Man Duerst and his son a run for their money in the red herring department. First, there's sinister German bait shop owner Leroy Leudke (Don Winters), who feeds mysterious chunks of meet to something in a tank. And then there's local fishing champion Denny Dobyns (Dale Dunham), self-proclaimed “Muskie Maniac,” who accuses others of cheating when he's planning on substituting a big fish he's raised at home for one he's caught. A jerk urologist, his loon / On Golden Pond-obsessed wife and their two bratty kids also roll into town. Perhaps most amusing of all is contest hostess Bev D. (Sandy Meuwissen), a single mother who is so exercise-obsessed she often forgets she has a toddler to raise. When asked whether she's worried if a bear will eat her son (who's kept in the front yard in a playpen while she's out jogging), she nonchalantly replies, “Well he might. I make sure he doesn't have any sweets before.”

Someone takes it upon themselves to start killing everyone they can sink their bobber into. The killing mechanism in this film is as unique as it is ridiculous, with the psycho fisherman casting a line, literally hooking the intended victim and then reeling them right into the water and into his clutches. When caught, people are treated just like normal fish would be: pierced through the chin and out the mouth with a metal rod and kept on a stringer under a dock. Bodies are then chopped and / or ground up. Everything's explained by some silliness involving a metal plate from a wartime injury, the sound of cicada's (?!) and certain musical notes in the theme song, which makes up something called “The Devil's Tritone.”

Aside from the novelty of having a fisherman killer who treats his prey as the catch of the day, what makes this film slightly more entertaining than your average low budget mid-80s slasher is its humor and colorful supporting characters. It's every bit as dumb as it sounds, but there are at least few laughs to be had here so it has that much going for it. Still, due to budgetary (and perhaps imagination) restraints, this doesn't seem to go as far as it should have. The kills are silly, repetitive and not as gory as most would like for this kind of film and the premise wears itself completely out after about an hour when the film runs out of steam. Even a potentially amusing cast-off between our hero and the killer at the very end seems dull and tired by that point.

Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz are listed in the opening credits as the executive producers but the film was first released on VHS here in American on the Prism label. Troma then handled the subsequent releases, including a (pretty substandard) DVD release on one of their “Troma Triple B-Header” sets. That release also comes with the killer lawnmower Jaws parody Blades (1989) and almost completely zombie-free ZOMBIE ISLAND MASSACRE (1984).

★★