Phantom Raiders

Back in 1992 B-movie action hero Miles O'Keefe was interviewed on TMC's Joe Bob Brigg's Drive-In Theatre. Briggs mentioned Phantom Raiders, a Filipino movie notable for having a 30 page script, the average movie script being around 120 pages. O'Keefe said he was told "Don't worry about the script, we'll fill up it up with action. We'll fill up the rest of the pages with action." Briggs said he hadn't seen the movie and asked did they fill up the rest of the pages with action to which O'Keefe replied "I don't know, I never saw the movie either! All I remember was being handed a machine gun and running through the jungle and shooting this machine gun and Filipinos dying all the time. I don't remember anything about a story." Miles' memory was accurate, because that's pretty much all the movie is. An apparent attempt to fuse the traditional Filipino girls-in-bikinis-with-machine-guns genre with the Reagan-era cold-war action flick; this Rambo rip-off features O'Keefe killing Filipino extras for 85 tedious minutes and almost no dialogue. The film is dated 1988 but it has the look and feel of a movie from the 1970s. Interior scenes are poorly lit so it's kind of difficult to view what's going on when characters are indoors. Exteriors are supposed to represent a Communist terrorist training camp in Vietnam but are probably around ten acres of Filipino jungle. Dubbing of the actors' voices isn't quite in sync with mouth movement, giving the impression of a foreign language film even though the actors are speaking English.

A bare-bones Region Zero DVD was released in Hong Kong by Digiview Entertainment recently, O'Keefe is credited with the wrong character on the jacket. It's available either from Hong Kong sellers on ebay or maybe from street vendors who don't speak English in the Chinatowns of major American cities. It's not clear if this movie ever had a theatrical or video release before now, Digiview probably found a master tape gathering dust in a warehouse somewhere and Miles O'Keefe probably wishes it stayed there. The rating for this is 1 out of a possible 10, solely because IMDb doesn't allow for no stars..

This movie has to be one of the worst movies ever made. It is so bad that it makes ATTACK OF THE KILLER TOMATOS look like a movie that should have won the Acedemy award for best picture. Oddly enough, there is a plot. The plot? To go after a Coloniel from the Vietnam war who is now training Vietnamese terrorists.

The acting is next to awful. The explosions are wonderful. 90% of the movie involves shooting. After awhile that becomes extremely boring. That is not a good sign in this type of movie. I was beginning to wonder where all of the "enemy" was coming from. This movie could have been made as a one hour TV show and accomplished the same. I really was confused at the end, when the compound was under attack and had mysteriously grown in size from what was shown in the first act. To make matters even worse, at the beginning of the film, when two forces met, accidentally, the dead wouldn't plop to the ground. Instead one could witness them laying down ever so gently. In short, i definitely lost the run time in life that i will never get back. A waste of time and film and other resources.

An interesting oddity this one in that after about the one third mark, the script writer appears to have gone home or at least so it seems, as there is hardly a line of dialogue spoken for the rest of the films duration! Instead we are subjected to a tide of incessant gunfire, explosions and the same Phillipino extras pretending to bite the dust repeatedly!!!! Whilst on paper, the said formula of all out, non-stop action with a huge body count might sound great to any action film fan, the result here is sadly, decidedly tedious at best.

My advice: Skip this one; There's far more interesting movies of its kind out there.