Missão Bomba 10:10 - Uma Batalha Infernal

Apparently either Yugoslavia was ahead of the rest of the world by about 25 years in fashion terms in WW2 or WW2 carried on in Yugoslavia until at least 1967. As a piece of science fiction, where WW2 didn't end in 1945, it might have worked as a plot twist to cover up the low budget, though even with that plot twist I'm pushing the boundaries of "what -if?".

In addition to the 60s clothes and styles, even the cinematography is firmly rooted in 60s TV series so even that can't hies all of the other faults. It isn't even bad enough to be good enough to watch ironically as a B-movie. It's just bad full-stop, a Z-movie at best, a waste of 5 minutes before you change channel, assuming you even last that long.

Does this review contain spoilers? It's hardly worth asking, the whole movie contains built-in spoilers simply by the fact that it exists, a mini-black hole in the world of cinema, sucking in viewers so they may never ever forget it once they've gone over the non-event horizon.

Clearly the producers were not bothered about faithfulness to the period.Both Montgomery and the female lead look as if they had just walked out of a boutique.Her hair seems to be modelled on that of Audrey Hepburn.The plot seems to be based on the Reinhardt Heydrich assination.There is a slight twist at the end.However the use of a dud bomb as the assassination tool is laughably silly.

Bomb at 10:10 has George Montgomery as an American flier in World War II in a Nazi prison camp in Yugoslavia who escapes with one other and is trying to make it back to the Adriatic coast and then Italy when he hears that the former camp commandant at his Stalag is now the governor of an area he's passing through. Montgomery decides to give him a little payback for the bad time he had as a prisoner.

Montgomery is the only name you will recognize in this cast of Yugoslav players. No doubt he did this one for the paycheck as Marshal Tito was opening up his country in the 60s to western film companies and trying to get a Yugoslavian film industry going.

When he makes contact with the Partisans it seems as though they have an unexploded bomb that Army Air Force dropped. They view it as the method to killing the commander in a Reinhard Heydrich type affair.

That together with a little romance between Montgomery and the commandant's daughter is what this silly film is about.

It is true that are Army Air Corps did do missions in the Balkans once we were established in Italy. But the only Americans on the ground were OSS people. One of them was Sterling Hayden who had he been caught would have been executed as a spy. Now his exploits in Yugoslavia might have made a great film, but of course he had his run-in with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Maybe one day he will be the subject of a film and I'm sure it will be a lot better than this one.

This film is a piece of crap even by 1967 standards. It really came straight from the dung heap. The script and directing are ridiculous.

The evidence that this was going to be a bad film came in the very first few seconds when the film opens with two men escaping from a POW camp. Instead of wearing their military uniforms, as they did in German POW camps, they were both wearing the blue-and-white striped "pajamas" that Jews were required to wear in concentration and extermination camps. In the very next scene, the American hero is shown wearing normal civilian clothing that fit him just fine, with no explanation as to how he came into possession of them.

Along with the females all having 1960s hairdos, and the commandant of the POW camp also being the ranking occupation authority of the city, it just got worse from there.

Poor B- film with George Montgomery. His preceding film in 1966 was 'Hallucination Nation' - the title alone gives you some of the quality pf Mr Montgomery's work in this period. The cinematography is amateurish and the dubbing (of both voices and sounds) grates. The acting is way below par.

I (semi-)viewed this film on a March Saturday afternoon during Covid lockdown in 2021. I part-read a weekend newspaper and part-surfed the internet so that the whole enterprise would not be a complete waste of time. The first 5 minutes was a harbinger of the experience to come.

Please avoid - even if you wish to sate your sense of curiosity.