The Last Guerrilla

Expected better with a cast including Rod Taylor and Adam West. The film seemed to lack a script or direction. Slow paced. It was watchable, just not very good.

In 1941 Yugoslavia . Partisans and Nazi army fight in the hardest , most tragic and greatest battles of Yugoslavia , WWII.At the beginning of the film Partisans attack a German riverboat with a lot of Jews held by the cruel Nazis , there a German officer , Adam West , escapes thanks to a beautiful Jew , Xenia Gratsos . Adam getaways to carry out a merciless vengeance . Later on , Partisans attack other regiments without warning that lead to tragic losses the Germans , which infuriates the German commandant Peter Carsten , as he executes massacres , and punitive expeditions against innocent population . Partisans led by Rod Taylor counterattack which will lead to the utter failure of his partisan followers . After that , the partisans are ambushed during their retreat to Bosnia . At the end the Yugoslav partisans and Nazis battle it out a place called Hell River , taking place the major offensives .

Average WWII movie with decent but really miscast actors , rudimentary effects and it involves tanks, arms , ammunition , and fighter planes . It displays breathtaking battles with big explosions , chaos , hell , suffering , mayhem , fates , heroic deaths and a cast of thousands . An enough budget war movie lost continuity with US cut and bad edition . Confused and bewildered movie with poor action , though it has some spectacular as well as noisy fights , regularly made battle scenes , unrealistic developing , poverty-row equipment and a lot of of the German armored vehicles are really American , as the planes shown are not actually German planes but U P47S. Yugoslavia army provided soldier-extras , costumes , weapons , fighter planes , tanks , trucks and other vehicles they had access to . It includes a silly ski-troopers attack in which the German soldiers are ridiculously killed and a large line of tanks rolling through a ruined and debris-strewn village . It stars some known actors , such as Rod Taylor as an aging partisan against two nasty German officers : Adam West and Peter Carsten .

It packs an atmospheric cinematography and a passable soundtrack, though it often doesn't fit the action .The motion picture released on TV as Hell River and also titled Battle of Belgrado was middlingly directed by Stole Jankovic. The film belongs to a motley group of Yugoslav movies made in the 70s about WWI and WWII with big budget , international stars and produced during Josip Broz Tito dictatorship , such as "Battle of Neretva river" by Veljko Bulajic with Yul Brynner, Franco Nero , Orson Welles , Sylva Koscina ; " Veliki transport" or "Mission Heroes" by Bulajic with James Franciscus , Steve Railsback , Edward Albert, Helmut Berger; " The day that shook the world" or "Sarajevo" with Maximilian Schell , Christopher Plummer , Florinda BolKan ; and "Sutjeska" by Stipe Delic with Richard Burton plating dictator Tito , Irene Papas , this film was made for the 30th anniversary of this battle and considered to be the most expansive movie in the history of the Yugoslav cinema.

In murrica, it's hell hill. In yugoslavia, it's partizani. The partisans! A period piece, during world war two. Yugoslavs have formed a resistance, to fight back against the nazis. Rod taylor (time machine, the birds) is marko, head of the resistance group. Adam west (batman!) is kohler, the german soldier who keeps facing marko in battle. Anna had been close to kohler before he was pressed into service, but now finds herself fighting with the yugoslav locals. Wins and losses on both sides. Then, it's a showdown at the river. Directed by stole jankovic. Now showing on the tubi channel. Not sure why it's rated so low on imdb, but it's not so bad!

A Yugoslav raised in America (Rod Taylor) fights the invading Germans as a leader in the National Liberation Army, aka Yugoslav Partisans. Adam West plays a German captain who's sympathetic toward the Serbians because he's actually Austrian and in love with a Jewess (Brioni Farrell).

"Hell River" (1974), also known as "Guerilla Raid" and "The Partisan" (amongst other titles), is a Serbo-Croatian WW2 film that originally ran 3 hours on Yugoslavian television. This shorter version was released for other markets.

Loosely based on the true events, it comes in the tradition of "The Guns of Navarone" (1961), "The Heroes of Telemark" (1965) and "Hornets' Nest" (1970) and is similar to the future "Force 10 from Navarone" (1978) and "The Eagle Has Landed" (1976). Sure, it's not on the level of the better ones, but it's quite well done and not far off. The longer version is no doubt more compelling.

Interestingly, a few seconds of "Hell River" are featured in Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" (2019) as the fictional movie "The 14 Fists of McCluskey," an Italian flick Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) starred in because he couldn't get significant roles in America.

The film runs 1 hour, 42 minutes, and was shot in Serbia (Sabac, Lazarevac, Mountain Zlatibor and River Drina by the border of Bosnia).

GRADE: B-/B.

I saw this under one of its many titles, "Hell River", and was pretty unimpressed. It has a few things going for it--for one thing the photography is quite crisp, unlike many 1970s Euro-made WW 2 "epics", which tended to be either washed-out or muddy--and the music is at least appropriate and doesn't drown out or overwhelm what's on screen--but there are a lot more cons than pro's. The performances aren't particularly good, especially Adam West, wildly miscast as a Nazi officer; he is stiff as a board, has no chemistry or connection with anyone in the cast and slips in and out of an embarrassingly bad German accent. Rod Taylor is stalwart as usual, but he's simply too old to play an action hero. Xenia Gratsos, here billed as "Brioni Farrell", matches West's wooden acting and is rather plain-looking to boot. The plethora of action scenes are done in a very by-the-numbers fashion and tend to be unrealistic, i.e., when the partisans attack a German armored column the Germans are mowed down by the dozens but only a very few partisans fall, despite the Germans opening up with everything they had.

All in all it's not as bad as a lot of the cheap WW 2 crapfests the Italians ground out like sausages in the 1960s and 1970a--my God, what a tsunami of stinkers they were--but it's nothing to write home about. Watchable, to a degree, but not memorable.