The Boys In Company C

The Boys In Company C
US/Philippines – 1977
Director – Sidney J. Furie
Pacific Family Entertainment, 2002, DVD
Run time - 2 hours 5 min.

And so, my friend Daniel and I continue our brief foray into semi-obscure Vietnam War films.
This one was something of a myth when I first started studying the Vietnam War 10 years ago. Nobody gave a shit about Vietnam, and nobody gave a shit about a low budget indie feature about Vietnam. This movie wasn’t available anywhere which was tragic to a history nerd because it was supposed to be the earliest (fiction) movie that tackled the GI experience in the war. I couldn’t find it until years later on this low quality DVD that looks transferred from VHS, since then a newer and presumably nicer DVD has been released.

Boys In Company C predates Full Metal Jacket by a good 10 years, but you might think you’re watching an early screen test of the latter as a group of dumb kids line up and get their asses handed to them by a bunch of Marine Corps drill instructors led by R. Lee Ermey.
Each of the recruits is a narrow stereotype, and Ermey quickly gets them in line by sticking up for loner Tyrone Washington. Before induction Washington was a “street-wise” pimp who got drafted and now plans to ship heroin back to the States in body-bags (presaging American Gangster by a good 30 years.)

The boys all end up in Vietnam where each scene plays out as the height of irony, with all the legendary futility of 'Nam encapsulated in every scene. The men are nevertheless pitted against their distant, self-interested officers and resort to typical war movie stoicism. Alas, with all the ironic or wacky vignettes too little time has been devoted to generating much sympathy for any of them.
If it doesn’t have much new to offer the war genre, it is the first cinematic release to apply those clichés to the unique cultural milieu of Vietnam. Boys In Company C is if nothing else a historical hinge upon which the American war film turned from patriotism to cynicism. Its themes are nothing new, the men are still everyday heroes and victims of the “system”; only the system is no longer implicitly “good”.

In this way it might also be compared to some extent with Robert Altman’s 1970 classic M*A*S*H* (which was also a dig on Vietnam), for it tries with all it’s might to capture some of the same camaraderie and war weary insanity of its predecessor, right down to the big game at the end. In this case it’s a soccer game in which the boys are told to intentionally lose in order to make their South Vietnamese opponents feel good. For this humiliation they will earn their way out of combat into a plush multi-game circuit, but at the last minute tragedy strikes again in the form of more clumsy stoicism squeezed out under duress.

This gem was executive-produced by Raymond Chow, who founded Golden Harvest Pictures after he split with Shaw Brothers in 1970. Since then he has produced such classics as the China O’Brien series and the first three Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films among numerous Chinese titles.
Director Furie has done a few other war films including the Iron Eagle series and another ‘Nam picture called Going Back.

In addition to coat-tailing a line from the MASH marketing scheme, this poster seems to be trying to appeal directly to Vietnam Veterans with the sub-script.

A nice 1 sheet from Movieposter.com with images from the film.

US VHS box art, the 2008 DVD, some other thing, A Spanish DVD, and a UK DVD.

The Fog Of War

"We and you ought not pull on the ends of a rope in which you have tied the knots of war. Because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied. And then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you.

I have participated in two wars, and know that war ends when it rolls through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. For such is the logic of war.

If people do not display wisdom, they will clash like blind moles and then mutual annihilation will commence."

-Nikita Khruschev in a telegram to President John F. Kennedy October 26, 1962
as quoted by Robert McNamara in The Fog of War

Since Robert Strange McNamara just kicked off I should be recommending you watch Errol Morris’ excellent interview-mentary The Fog of War which is all about the Mac and his feelings of profound guilt concerning Vietnam and the Cold War, and WWII. Consider it recommended.

Thanks to reader regis, HERE is the movie online.

Fangoria #95 - Total Recall

This issue of Fangoria, #95 published August of 1990 is chock-full of fun articles. In addition to Total Recall (a personal favorite) it has an interview with horror staple Brad Dourif and a full color article on the Romero/Argento film Two Evil Eyes which believe it or not I still haven't seen. I should probably share those articles with you sometime too.





If you happen to be in Seattle this July 25th (2009) I'm having a BBQ at my house and we're gonna project Total Recall on the side of the house when the sun goes down (10pmish) so get your ass to Mars.

Behind Enemy Lines

Behind Enemy Lines
a.k.a. – Killer Instinct
Philippines - 1988
Director – Cirio H. Santiago
Media Home Entertainment, 1988, VHS
Run time – 1 hour, 23 min.

No, this is not the gung-ho Owen Wilson Gene Hackman vehicle of 2001. I liked that movie then because I knew nothing about the Yugoslav wars, but both of those things have changed.
This Behind Enemy Lines is all about the ‘Nam and is the product of Filipino ‘Namsploitation garbage-grinder Cirio H. Santiago, one of Roger Corman’s protégés in the days when he was farming production out overseas. Just in time too, thanks to Chuck Norris, ‘Nam was a popular product in the States and the Philippines was cheap and full of people who looked to Average dumb Americans sufficiently “oriental” to suspend disbelief. You’ve got to do a lot of that with Santiago.

Somewhere in “North” Vietnam an American patrol led by Robert Patrick is searching for a POW camp but they are caught just as they find it. The sun rises over the same rickety sets and cast of extras as ‘Nam Angels and finds our “hero” and his surviving boys stuck in tiger-cages and watched over by a sadistic Russian who Patrick will undoubtedly fight one-on-one by the end of the film. But for now Patrick escapes and gets back to base where he yells all his lines and recruits some more guys to go back and have another chaotic and ultimately boring firefight that seems to indicate the merciful end of the film.

No such luck. Patrick is wounded and the team flies to Thailand to regroup. A bearded guy shows up to cast an authoritative pall over next several assaults on the shantytown POW camp. The first of these multiple, yes, multiple raids takes place while Patrick is recovering from his wounds with the help of a pacifist American nurse who doesn’t have a warlike bone in her body, until now.

Sufficiently reassured of his manliness Patrick suits up for yet another daring daytime raid to get the Russian, god bless the broad daylight frontal assault. For a movie with such terrible dubbing we can hear every crunching clattering step these assholes make. The subsequent boom-fest and chase scene do indeed end with the long awaited Cold War analogue between Patrick and the Russian, ended in 30 seconds flat by Patrick’s vein-bulging hatred of all things living.
This is confirmed after the battle when he coldly guns down his nurse girlfriend.


It’s remarkable how in every one of his ‘Namsploitation junkers Santiago manages to take the fun parts -like the goofy borderline racist heroics- and drag them out into utter mindless boredom, or blast through ‘em in a few short seconds. I’ll admit, this is an improvement over Caged Fury, but with the awesome insanity of Future Hunters already long gone, and Nam Angels just over the horizon, Behind Enemy Lines shows that improvement is a contextual term.

There are at least six other films that go by this name including the David Carradine vehicle I reviewed under the title P.O.W. The Escape, and some other Nam P.O.W. thing that came out in the 90's. Blame it all on Chuck Norris.

The Abomination

Cover image from Amazon. Since I never saw the cover I assume this is what you'd find on the market if you could get this video at a reasonable price.

The Abomination
United States - 1986
Director – Bret McCormick (as Max Raven)
Donna Michelle, 1988, VHS
Run time – 1 hour, 40 min.

There are sadly a great number of philistines out there who like to cast aspersion on this film, fortunately you and I are smarter and more attractive than all of those throwbacks, and we know better. Our friends at Metal Thai (Thailand’s first and greatest webzine for Metalheads!”) captured this movie in one sentence; “When the carnivorous creature grew inside the Cody's body, he became to the brutal guy who killed the people to feed the monster!” I doubt I can improve much on that description, but I’ll try and flesh out the details a bit here…
Opening with a ten-minute montage recap of every good splatter scene in the whole movie The Abomination wears its eviscerated heart on its sleeve. (Plus that means you get to watch them twice!)

Cody is an average 20-something Texan boy, working as a car mechanic and living at home with his chain smoking evangelical mother. TV evangelist Brother Fogg has convinced her that the tumor in her lung is an infestation of evil. One night she hacks and spits up a big pulsing bloody lump that she tosses in the trash, but it slithers into Cody’s room and into his mouth while he’s sleeping. Soon Cody is also hacking up bloody throbbing nuggets, all of which compel him telepathically to provide meat food in large and expanding quantities.

Bye, bye Mommy, say hi to Jesus for me.

Grown huge feasting on the devil’s work, The Abomination quickly infests Cody’s house filling any enclosure suited for the awesome practical puppet effects used to create the flesh hungry gore-beast. Wet leathery tentacles bursting from every drawer it feeds on anything that comes too close, dragging it into a gullet big enough for an entire human body to be sucked up and go slipping down its toothy throat screaming and thrashing the whole way. The cozy split-level soon becomes a charnel house where Cody grins sardonically as his mother and girlfriend are each dismembered and eaten. He pitchforks buckets of viscera into the snapping meat holes that strain the joints of every blood caked cabinet. This is truly become the demon seed of evangelism, the flesh eating offspring of idiot faith.

The Abomination is a gut-churning experience in homemade extreme gorror at its finest. Even though it suffers from the usual super-indie problem of generally lousy production, every minute of The Abomination is worth watching simply for the unsettling audacity of meat eating god monsters. Think Bad Taste meets a gospel Deadly Spawn in Texas and you have some idea of what this baby is like.

Sadly, The Abomination is an impossible to find VHS only gem. Thankfully I live quite close to Scarecrow Video, and although I refuse to enter the place because I don’t think I could control myself, my friend Daniel is kind enough to bring these things over to my cave now and again…

I found the Metal Thai website thanks to an image search that turned up the gorgeous UK VHS cover above, and a bunch of other great images from The Abomination.