My father is notorious for picking out terrible movies from the bargain bin at the rental store. My friends and I like to go through the stuff he's hand-chosen and give it a watch just for laughs.
This movie was one of those.
But we didn't get normal laughs out of it, oh no. They were roaring laughs of incredulity and surprise. One thing we kept thinking was "how does this movie exist?" One friend made an excellent point: it's only considered a film because it's BEEN filmed. It carries no natural facets of film-making...there's completely unnecessary twists (and I mean UNNECESSARY) and scenes that go on for far too long (think 5 minute fist fights where both opponents are tired, but just don't stop until they both fall over), and you can't tell it's supposed to be in Vietnam until they tell you it's Vietnam. The Vietnamese looked like a couple Philippino guys.
The story is that this war exists solely for financial gain. They maintain that this is a complex storyline on the back of the case, but I see no signs of this. It's just vaguely explained in some scene that I was too busy laughing about. And while we're on the subject of accurate warfare, let's talk about the fact that there's hand-to-hand combat way too often, there's INTRIGUE (or attempts at it, anyways), and weird chase scenes that smack of a 30's silent film. The tagline is "they told 'em war was hell...they were right!" This leads me to believe they actually thought this to be an accurate representation of war. It's almost an appalling concept.
There was a point at which I was actually trying to figure out if this was an elaborate joke that one man made on his spare time, or that the movie was supposed to be a comedy but it was too subtle. It was at this point that there was a dramatic scene with explosives and running, but the music sounded exactly like - I swear to god - an aerobics video from 1986. The music literally never matched the scene it was trying to help along. And it was directly before this that some unexplained Australian character came along and said "cut through the dingo s***!"
Maybe his character had been explained earlier, and I was too busy laughing to notice.
I'm positive this movie is one of two things: an ingenious comedy, or probably the worst movie I've ever seen.
