Phantom Soldiers (1989)

The My Lai Massacre is, arguably, the most infamous occurrence of the Vietnam War, a conflict that was unpopular in America to start off (and, certainly, I would imagine in Vietnam, as well).  On March 16, 1968, between three-hundred-and-forty-seven and five-hundred-and-four civilians were killed in two hamlets of the Quang Ngai Province, including infants, children, and women.  The massacre was set off, at least in part, by a bloodlust the soldiers of Charlie Company felt due to recent, heavy casualties of their brothers in arms.  These losses were perpetrated largely by booby-traps set by the Viet Cong, engendering a hatred for the enemy and their guerilla tactics.  Using specious reasoning and sketchy intelligence, the soldiers performed some of the most inhuman acts possible, partly in the name of vengeance/payback.  Despite protests from certain of the men and reporting of the extent of the carnage to superior officers, the My Lai Massacre was covered up for roughly a year before it was exposed to the world.  Of all the soldiers charged with criminal offenses, only one was convicted, and he wound up serving about three-and-a-half years under house arrest (that doesn’t feel balanced, now does it?).  At any rate, the massacre is the jumping off point for Teddy Chiu’s (under the alias Irvin Johnson) Phantom Soldiers (aka Commando Phantom).  In fact, a character is even named Barker after Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker, the officer in command of the My Lai operation.  Once this set up is done, however, the film essentially becomes a Missing in Action film, for better or worse.

A platoon of silent, black-clad, gasmask-wearing soldiers march into a small Vietnamese village, leveling the place and murdering everyone in sight with everything from bullets to nerve gas.  Investigating the titular troopers, Lieutenant Mike Custer (Corwin Sperry) and his men are captured behind enemy lines.  Meanwhile, back in the States, Mike’s brother Dan (Max Thayer) is a Texas Ranger, busting up drug cartels on the border.  He receives news of his brother’s disappearance and decides to go to Nam incognito and get his brother back.

It’s a little startling, though just a little, that American war films from the Seventies through the Eighties that were set in Vietnam very often focused on going back and winning the war.  Barring the righting of a perceived wrong in the minds of the more jingoistic, many of these films also centered on rescuing those soldiers who were MIA and forgotten about by all but their family members.  The two are not entirely mutually exclusive, both being seen as slights against the young men and women who gave their lives (literally and figuratively) in an “unwinnable” war.  Those who came back were not universally hailed like those who served in World War Two, and this only compounded the sour resentment of the veterans.  Likewise, this sort of film plays to the viewers who didn’t serve but still had strong feelings about America’s defeat.  Dan, then, is both a veteran and a patriot.  When not wearing his Stetson, he wears baseball caps, one that’s camouflaged and a blazing white number with the NFL logo on it.  He’s an all-American in every way.  He dislikes injustice, and he asserts at least twice that, “Nobody’s above the law” (I cannot imagine from whence this bit of dialogue came).  Dan has no real feelings about the rightness or wrongness of the Vietnam War, except in that his brother is involved in it.  Once he gets in-country, Dan winds up machine-gunning a slew of Viet Cong from a helicopter.  They are, after all, the enemy.  Yet, Dan’s first priority is his brother, so this bit of violence can be looked upon as survival rather than as any sort of soldierly duty.

Importantly, the American soldiers in the film are clearly distinguished from the Phantom Soldiers.  They do not fire on unarmed noncombatants.  They play by the rules.  They get irritated that the villains are making them look bad (and, y’know, that they’re blatant murderers).  Conversely, the Phantom Soldiers are ruthless, sadistic, and quasi-superhuman.  In their first scene, the Phantoms are shot and beaten with gun butts, but these things have no effect on them, shrugging them off like gnats a-buzzing.  Their uniforms are meant to inspire fear and call back to several reference points.  First, the gas masks are reminiscent of those creepy ones we’ve all seen in photos of the soldiers in the trenches and the civilians at home during both World Wars.  Two, the masks evoke images of death in their implacable brutality and lifeless visages.  Three, they recall memories of Star Wars in the audience with their similarity to Darth Vader and his stormtroopers, not only in the skull-like faces but also in the Nazi-esque helmets.  Their actions in the film, and the explanation behind it all is a way for Americans to say, “See?  We were the good guys here!”  It’s the sort of exculpation of America and some its soldiers that, I would suggest, they needed to have in order to deal with their involvement in Vietnam and to vindicate themselves to those who hated them for it.  Naturally, it’s also a power fantasy to reinforce that America is the best ever.

Phantom Soldiers excels in the action department.  The scenes of carnage are exciting, well-shot and edited, and impactful.  They are also overlong (and, I’m sure, fans of action films will argue that this is impossible) to the point of stopping the story dead in its tracks.  Some would say that’s just fine and dandy in this sort of movie (and to some degree, it is), but for my money, it also winds up becoming a vague blur and, ultimately, pretty boring.  It’s simply too much of a good thing, which I hate to say, because of the insane amount of talent involved in these sequences.  The actual plot, then, just meanders along, bopping from action beat to action beat, barely holding together just to fill the spaces between explosions and gunfire.  Thayer does a solid job as the good ol’ boy maverick, but even what charisma he musters isn’t quite enough to compel an audience along through the whole of the film.  He does blow things up real good, though.

MVT:  The action.

Make or Break:  The opening sequence is rock solid across the board, despite the remainder of the film not quite paying off on this potential.

Score:  6/10    

Silk (1986)

We’re all familiar with the expression “smooth as silk” (even the titular character in Cirio Santiago’s film knows it; “Because I’m so fuckin’ smooth”).  We’re all familiar with how the material is produced, as well (from the butts of caterpillars, amongst other creepy crawlies, just in case you weren’t).  For the life of me, however, I’ve never understood its appeal.  Sure, it looks nice and shiny and supernaturally wrinkle-free.  I get that it’s considered a luxury due to the arduous process of harvesting it (have you ever tried to milk a caterpillar?  Me neither, but I can’t imagine it’s easy).  I get that it’s exotic due to its origins in ancient China (at least to Westerners; Do people in the East just think of it like we do polyester?).  Thing is, I don’t particularly care for the feel of it.  It’s too smooth.  Despite its organic nature, it feels unnatural (again, like polyester, which I would, frankly, prefer).  I wore a pair of silk boxers once.  Once.  The constant, smooth sensation it provides just made me very self-conscious about how things were rearranging themselves down there every time I moved.  I can’t even imagine how much this gliding would irritate my nipples were I wearing a shirt made of the stuff.  I could see its worth in the ascot department, but I think that’s as far as I’m willing to go.  If you dig on silk, more power to you.  Give me cotton any day of the week.  Nice, plush, sweat-absorbing, snug cotton.

After massacring a bunch of thieves, intrepid cop Silk (Cec Verrell) finds herself following the trail of head gangster Austin (Peter Shilton) as he smuggles something somewhere.  Meanwhile, a couple of Nam vets run around killing and mutilating people.

Silk, the character and the film, is practically a carbon copy of George P Cosmatos’ Cobra, the main differences being that the protagonist is a woman, and she doesn’t cut her pizza with a pair of scissors.  Silk also borrows heavily from the Dirty Harry playbook (at one point, she has a villain dead to rights and says, “How do you feel, Slick?  Feel like takin’ the big ride?”; Of course, he does).  She wades into action in a heartbeat, climbing trestles, jumping on trains, leaping from rooftops, and shooting the shit out of bad guys with unerring accuracy.  And Silk is as disassociated with the violence she causes as any male action star ever was.  Maybe moreso.  In the opening sequence, she watches as the thieves’ car explodes into flames.  Santiago shoots Silk’s reaction in slow motion, her ice-blue eyes peering satisfactorily and disinterestedly at the deaths she brought forth.  The loss of life means nothing to her, because criminals, from the pettiest to the vilest, don’t deserve to live.  Her first rule of dealing with the lifestyle of a cop is “Don’t let it get to you.”  On the one hand, this makes sense, because there are surely a great many things about the livelihood that could desensitize a person.  On the flip side, though, it also means that one must be desensitized in order to kill crooks.  They must be dehumanized in the eyes of justice, unworthy to exist.  

Silk, the cop, is, in effect, a macho hero with female genitalia (which we don’t get to see, in case you were wondering).  She wears her hair slicked back.  She pauses before working to don a fingerless glove, but she doesn’t balk at getting her hands dirty.  The filmmakers, simultaneously, enjoy showing off Verrell’s female attributes.  Pulling herself over a ledge, we get a nice view of her hard nipples poking through her tank top (I guess it wasn’t made of silk?).  The camera also delights in focusing on her butt in various tight pants.  You can’t fault the filmmakers or the audience for this stuff.  Both know what they want, and both get it (plus, Verrell is strikingly beautiful).  For all of her testosteronic attributes, there are attempts to feminize Silk.  As the police celebrate a solid bust (you know, the kind where most of the perps are dead), Silk sits to the side, aloof.  Fellow cop Tom (Bill McLaughlin) approaches her to join in on the fun.  Silk tells him to meet her at her place.  This romantic relationship with a fellow officer carries tones of a teacher/student affair, Tom being a bit older and Silk’s superior.  When they go out, Silk wears dresses and does her hair up in curls, the opposite of her masculine appearance at work.  She needs Tom to provide a grounding against the rough life she leads, even if only physically.  Their romance never comes across as being between equals.  Tom leads the dance, and Silk follows, taking away some of her badass cred.  Part of the problem lies in the fact that Verrell is simply not a very good actress.  She can swing the deadpan delivery necessary for wasting bad guys, but she’s incapable of changing it up and actually showing emotion when it’s called for.  She tries to act everything with her piercing eyes, and it just doesn’t work (this is not helped at all by her covering them up with sunglasses in several scenes; Instead of playing enigmatically cool she’s simply inscrutably wooden).

The film’s plot is incredibly convoluted.  I’m sure it made sense on paper to Santiago and company at some point, but it’s confusing on screen.  For this film, however, it’s also unnecessary, and Santiago understood this.  All we need to know are these are the good guys, those are the bad guys, and there are a lot of punches, gun shots, and explosions between the two.  The stuntwork is well-handled, and it appears that they actually allowed Verrell to do quite a bit of it, which helps sell the copious action.  I suppose on the one hand it’s unfair to criticize Silk for being so devoted to its action aspects, as it delivers on them so well.  That being said, without a strong story to hold the set pieces together, it becomes little more than a highlight reel.  Granted, a slick (dare I say, smooth as silk?) highlight reel, but one, nonetheless.  For the undiscerning action junkie, this movie will work a treat.  For everyone else, it’s more like a snack you’re unsure if you regret or not after the fact.

MVT:  Santiago’s direction is tight and slick.  It’s his writing that needs to catch up with this skill set here.          

Make or Break:  The opening action scene sets the table for the film, both good and bad.

Score:  6/10

Cop Game (1988)

There once was a man named Vladimir Koziakin, and about this man’s personal life I know very little (read: nothing).  What I do know is that he produced one of the most entertaining, engrossing, and lovingly remembered books of my youth.  I’m of course speaking of Movie Monster Mazes, the 1976 tome that not only reinforced my love of monsters but also gave me new creatures to track down (if only their films would play on one of our stations; bear in mind this was back when we had maybe thirteen channels that could be tuned in on our television, and you were subject to whatever their programmers wanted to/could afford to run).  The premise is self-evident; there were fifty (“a panoramic journey through FIFTY (not Forty-Nine) FIFTY Monstrous Mazes!”) puzzles in the shapes of different cinematic fiends (as common as Godzilla, as obscure as The Monster of Piedras Blancas).  The accuracy on a few of the pieces would drive monster perfectionists insane (He spells Ghidorah as “Gidra” and calls Ray Harryhausen’s Ymir “Giant Ymu”), but I didn’t care.  I was too intent on running through the mazes (in pencil, of course, because the book cost ninety-five cents [!], and it’s not as if the book was easy to come by [that I recall]), erasing the lines, and doing it all over again (the erasures made their own permanent paths on the paper after a while, but the artwork was still attractive enough on its own to warrant paging through again and again).  There is a PDF of the book you can find online, the great tragedy of which is that many of the mazes have already been solved.  I’ve made it my mission in life to digitally remove all that and print each of these pieces to do again (and to share them with my monster-loving godchild if I can get him to lift his head up from his Nintendo DS or whatever the hell that thing is).  It’s good to have goals.  The relevance of this circuitous circumnavigation to Bruno Mattei’s (under the pseudonym of Bob Hunter) Cop Game (aka Cop Game: Giochi di Poliziotto), is that the film’s plot is so convoluted, you’ll almost certainly need to use the rewind button (the modern film viewer’s equivalent to a pencil eraser on a maze) to get all the way from start to finish with some idea of the plot intact.

During the final days of the Vietnam War, officers are being picked off one by one by former (maybe current?) members of the Cobra Force.  Enter special investigators Morgan (Brent Huff) and Hawk (Max Laurel) who are charged with getting to the bottom of this mess.  And they’re not afraid to break the rules in order to do it.

Post-Vietnam-War, movies set during almost any conflict tend to have a very dim view of the governments who send the soldiers off to fight in them as well as of war itself (though the latter notion in cinema has been around for much longer, it rose in prevalence around the time of this war and carried on ever after).  Typically this stink eye is focused on America, and there is far more anti-colonialist subtext at work (and not wrongfully so in both regards, I think).  Gone is the homogenized “rally round the flag, boys” depiction and attitude of good men fighting the good fight for a good reason.  Having the bloody footage of a war broadcast into homes on a daily basis not only peeled away the clean cut façade of warfare and changed the public perception of the men and women who fight, but it also forced filmmakers to steer toward more realistic portrayals of war time, even when the stories were fantastic in nature.  Things became grottier.  Characters became less idealized, and many began to lean far more to the dark side than to the light.  Italian filmmakers, combining the neo-realist movement developed and popularized by auteurs such as Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini with the sensational, primal elements which would quickly transform into a sleazy aura that became like a signature writ in giant, glowing, neon letters for exploitation hounds the world over, tucked into this new approach with gusto.  

Naturally, different filmmakers achieve different levels of success with this approach, and, if you know anything about Mattei you know he does his level best to hit all the right notes, though rarely do his compositions orchestrate the way I’m sure they were first envisioned.  I’m also quite confident that his motives were more monetary than artistic, and I have zero problems with this.  So, we get a lot of exterior shots of the Philippines standing in for Vietnam, and the footage from the streets adds the appropriate flavor to the proceedings.  The attitude is present with Hawk telling Morgan that he comes “from a country of assholes,” that America is “playing cowboys and Indians” in Vietnam, and most presciently, “After you get back home, you will forget all about me.  But I will still be here, drowning in a sea of shit.”  Shooman (Robert Marius) commands the Cobra Force, and is alleged to have destroyed a village full of women and children in bloodthirsty pursuit of the Viet Cong (a trope of Vietnam War films inspired by the infamous My Lai Massacre in 1968). 

Likewise, we get the populist components such as plentiful gun fights, chases, and brawls.  Hawk and Morgan break a suspect’s fingers to get him to talk (in broad daylight and full view of anyone wandering by).  What feels like a large chunk of run time takes place intercutting back and forth to scenes in a strip club (with French cut bikini bottoms and fashionably torn half shirts aplenty, but somehow no nudity) which feels more Eighties than anything else in this film, barring Huff’s dangly left earring.  Morgan and Hawk are flippant to their direct superior Captain Kirk (yes, really, and played by the late, great Romano Puppo) and everyone else they encounter, dress exclusively in street clothes, and don’t give shit one about any collateral damage they cause while doing their job.  The film does manage to balance these two perspectives (gritty, yet overwrought) fairly well, but it also piles on plot points nigh unto the breaking point.  In fact, once you add on the idea that a Russian spy named Vladimir has infiltrated the American armed forces, may or may not be a heroin dealer, and may or may not have had a hand in or is just spreading rumors about the village massacre and what any of this has to do with the initial murders, your head will be spinning, especially since the filmmakers don’t care about connecting scenes or ideas until it’s absolutely necessary.  Luckily, the aspects of the film that work (Mattei knows his way around action sequences, and there is a quasi-Noir angle that I enjoyed) do so well enough that the labyrinthine story and the writhing the script has to do in order to attempt resolving it become like frosting on the multi-flavored layer cake that is Cop Game.

MVT:  Huff loves giving everybody guff (yes, I made this sentence rhyme; sue me).  He is jaw-clenchingly anti-everything, so much of the joy in watching his character do his thing lies in how relentlessly hard-headed he is in every single way.

Make or Break:  Without giving away exactly why it’s so outstanding, there is a car chase in this film that I would attest can stand up to any in the history of cinema.  Okay, that’s an outright lie, but it’s so much damned fun, I couldn’t help loving every second of it.

Score:  6.5/10