B movie director Larry Buchanans' made for TV remake of 1958's "Suicide Battalion" may be best left to Buchanan completists (if there is such a thing). Overall, it's too low budget to work, and Buchanan fails to ever make it genuinely interesting or exciting. Even the action scenes are nothing great. The running time is brief as it is (78 minutes), and would have been even shorter had there not been so much use of stock footage. This viewer would be hesitant to say that the film is actually worth sticking with, but helping somewhat is at least one colourful performance, by Texas native Bill Thurman (best known as Coach Popper in "The Last Picture Show") - playing, appropriately enough, a character named Tex.
The story is about a squad of demolition experts sent on a volunteer WWII mission to ensure that the valuable documents left behind in an abandoned headquarters do not fall into enemy hands. That means blowing them up GOOD. Unfortunately, it takes over 55 minutes into this movie before the mission even begins! Until then, there's just too much talk and a needless romantic subplot between intrepid Ronald Paxton (47 year old John Agar, in what sadly turned out to be his last starring role) and a war correspondent named Laura Grant (played by gorgeous Joan Huntington). Richard Webb ("Out of the Past") co-stars. Lovers of schlock from this period will note the presence of Jeff Alexander ("Curse of the Swamp Creature", "Horror High") as a Nazi and Annabelle Weenick ("Don't Look in the Basement") as a goofy Italian madam who teaches her prostitutes how to speak English.
If you're curious about this one, I would advise going in with VERY low expectations.
Four out of 10.
