2k warped reality11/29/2022 ![]() Back in the fray, Ransome is taken captive by a Russian operative, Jakoda (Alex Vitale), a KGB agent who is working with the NVA. However, back at the US base, Ransome is ordered to head back into the combat zone to investigate claims of a Russian military presence in the area. Harriman persuades a reluctant Radek to rescue Ransome. He uses this radio to make contact with the US base. Separated from US forces, Ransome nevertheless finds a working radio when he, and the villagers traveling with him, stumble across the corpse of an American chopper pilot. Left for dead, Ransome is rescued by a young South Vietnamese boy, Lao (Edison Navarro), and is taken in by South Vietnamese villagers, led by Frenchman Le Due (Luciano Pigozzi) and including Cho Li (Karen Lopez). However, one of the team survives: Harriman’s prize soldier Ransome (Reb Brown). This betrayal comes at the hand of rival Air Force Colonel Radek (Christopher Connelly), who is jealous of the Strike Commando unit’s many successes. Going so far as to utilise footage cribbed from The Last Hunter, Mattei / Fragasso’s Strike Commando is no exception to this, though the core of Strike Commando narrative is cribbed from a more recent American model, George P Cosmatos’ Rambo: First Blood, Part II (1985).Ĭredited to Mattei’s well-worn Anglicised pseudonym ‘Vincent Dawn’, though in actuality co-directed by Mattei and Fragasso, Strike Commando opens with the betrayal of Major Harriman’s (Mike Monty) highly trained special forces team (the titular ‘Strike Commando’ unit) in an excursion behind enemy lines. (In fact, promotional materials for the film exist which bear the more on-the-nose title Cacciatore 2, though it is unclear whether the picture was ever formally released under that title.) Many of the subsequent Vietnam War-set Italian combat films owed a considerable debt, in terms of narrative or sometimes in the staging of specific sequences, to Margheriti’s The Last Hunter. Its narrative clearly modelled on that of Apocalypse Now, with a heavy dose of the love triangle from Sergio Leone’s Duck You Sucker ( G i ù la testa, 1973) for good measure, The Last Hunter was marketed to Italian domestic audiences as a loose sequel to The Deer Hunter: where Cimino’s film had been released to Italian cinemas as Il cacciatore, the Italian title of Margheriti’s picture was L’ultimo cacciatore. In 1980, Antonio Margheriti’s Vietnam War-set combat film The Last Hunter (1980), shot in the Philippines, was one of the ‘macaroni combat’ films to trigger this trend in ‘Namsploitation’. (This, of course, neatly sidestepped the fact that many of the earlier Italian war films had, in using The Dirty Dozen as their key source of inspiration, involuntarily been shaped by a film that used its Second World War setting to comment on the era of American military involvement in Vietnam.) Further to this, the production of Apocalypse Now in the Philippines had created a local filmmaking infrastructure ripe for exploitation, and Italian filmmakers were quick to jump on this, using the jungles of the Philippines as a stand-in for Vietnam. However, many of these films – including the likes of Gianfranco Parolini’s Five for Hell ( 5 per l’inferno, 1969) and Maurizio Pradeaux’s Churchill’s Leopards ( I Leopardi di Churchill, 1970) – have nevertheless earned a cult following in the years since their initial releases.Ī sea change occurred in the early 1980s when, influenced by the one-two punch of Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Italian combat films lost interest in the Second World War and became instead fixated with the Vietnam War. Like the commedia sexy all’italiana, the macaroni combat films were never as popular with either domestic or international audiences as other exportable filoni of Italian pop cinema – chiefly, the westerns all’italiana (‘Spaghetti Westerns’) or gialli/thrilling all’italiana (Italian-style thrillers)of the 1960s and 1970s. Essentially Commando comic strips brought to life, many of these pictures were vaguely – or not so vaguely, in some cases – reminiscent of Robert Aldrich’s iconic combat picture The Dirty Dozen (1967): in other words, they featured ensemble casts in ‘men on a mission’ narratives. Italian combat pictures (or ‘macaroni combat’ films, as they are sometimes called) had been fairly popular since the 1960s, often starring ‘over the hill’ English-speaking actors in Second World War-set stories. Starring former Captain America Reb Brown, the 1986 ‘macaroni combat’ picture Strike Commando, now available on an exemplary Blu-ray release from Severin Films, is one of a number of pictures that Italian film director Bruno Mattei – that auteur of so many awful-but-oh-so-watchable Italian exploitation films of the 1980s and 1990s – made in the Philippines with producer/co-director Claudio Fragasso, and writer Rosella Drudi. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |