Hi, ha ha, it’s Burl to review one of those Charles Band
productions from the 1980s! I actually saw a few of these things in the theater
if you can believe it, pictures like Ghoulies,
The Dungeonmaster and of course Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn!
Looking back it seems incredible that such cheeseball little movies ever saw
the light of a cinema projector, but these were different times!
I don’t know what sort of theatrical release Zone Troopers got, but I don’t think it
ever made it to my neck of the woods! I didn’t even bother catching it on video
ever, so when I recently spied a VHS copy for sale in a Times Square video
shoppe – ha ha, I was just there for the regular movies, I swear! – I snapped
it up! (Turns out the movie just got some kind of on-demand DVD release or
something, so maybe that’s why someone dumped their VHS!)
It’s a WWII story, set in Italy in 1944 during the
hard-fought Allied campaign up that benighted peninsula! There’s a big
Wehrmacht assault at the beginning which thins the squadron of Yanks down to
four: The Sarge, Mittens, Joey and a newly-arrived war correspondent named
Dolan! This is pretty much our cast for the rest of the movie, though there are
some Nazis (with a special appearance by Hitler, ha ha!) and some aliens. And
of course there’s the main alien, who’s been trapped by the Germans and who
looks like a mime with the head of a spider! And he eats cigarettes for dinner!
The doughboys save him and manage to reunite him with his
alien friends (who don’t have bug heads, but certainly possess frosted tips),
and they get some help in vanquishing the Wehrmacht! Not all of these old boys
make it through the adventure, though, so the ending is bittersweet!
This movie is pretty beloved in some circles, and I guess it
has a nice pulpy feel, a modicum of ambition and a little more wit and
intelligence than your average cheap programmer! Certainly it outdoes most of
the other Empire pictures of the day! I was prepared to really like Tim
Thomerson’s performance as the Iron Sarge, since he’s perfect for the role and
also is someone I’ve met and hung out with, and who was a nice guy, very funny!
But he overdoes the squarejaw routine here, and his performance is pretty
lifeless, never conveying the legendary aura the Sarge is clearly supposed to
have!
I actually preferred the performances of the guy who played
Dolan, the correspondent – he was a doughy middle-aged guy, but he had an
appealing surfer’s drawl that I thought fit the part well! You believed he
might be a writer! The fellow who played Mittens was good too, and the scene
where he slugs Hitler in the jaw is pretty delightful! The alien, meanwhile, is
kind of forgettable, and not a terribly good trick effect! It was created by
John Buechler, but it’s no Cellar Dweller, ha ha!
The movie’s certainly not unenjoyable, but there’s not that
much to it! It’s hard to rate a movie that rises above expectations but falls
short of possibilities, so I’ll just give it two Kilroy drawings and leave it
at that!
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