The creation of the Ultra-Neutron Bomb really has young
firebrand Jack (Glen Hartford)
cheesed off. After browbeating his
diplomat dad Mark (Jace Damon) and
threatening to reveal this new horror to the whole world, the young man is
kidnapped and held for ransom by the Sheik (Marvin Miller). Government
stooge Jim (Walter Cox) has a
not-so-brilliant idea: get Las Vegas showgirls, give them ten days of combat
training, and send them off to Syria to rescue Jack. Enter Jan (Bainbridge Scott) and the Hell Squad.
It’s kind of amazing to me that Kenneth Hartford’s Hell Squad
(aka Commando Squad aka Commando Girls) was released in 1986,
because this is a movie dated by at least a decade or two in all of its aspects. The score consists of library pulls which are
recycled ad nauseum, and their style screams of low rent Sixties fare. The sets are spartan to the point that they
look like the set dressing for a school play, and the film is also conspicuously
setbound (even the exteriors feel like they were shot indoors; they couldn’t
afford a fan to blow the characters’ hair while they pretend to travel in
topless vehicles?). The comedy is as low
brow as low brow gets (Colonel Balin [Lee
Coy] gawps at the ladies’ breasts through binoculars while standing just a
few feet away from them), and it’s the type of good-natured burlesque-y
chauvinism that was grinned and shrugged off for a long while. It even has a genuine Scooby Doo ending. There is
endless moralizing from characters about this new weapon, which is interesting
since the film’s premise is militaristic, but this was also at a point when
nuclear proliferation was a big issue.
At a time when macho films like Rambo:
First Blood Part 2 and Missing in
Action were the standard for action films, Hell Squad plays like a throwback.
However, I tend to think that this is more due to budget restrictions
and Hartford’s talents and
proclivities than it is to some kind of quasi-counterprogramming or nostalgia
trip.
The core concept of the film is a good one. The idea of a group of women kicking ass and
taking names had certainly been done before (Ted V Mikels’ The Doll Squad,
to name but one), but these women are more of a single unit than they are
unique individuals creating a platoon.
To my mind, for as empowering to women as this is on its surface, this
is still very much a male fantasy film.
Men love watching women being aggressive, and I think (bearing in mind
I’m no psychologist) this relates directly to sexuality. Women who are physically forceful and/or
violent are imagined (and let’s be honest, it’s true sometimes) to be more bold
in their sexuality. This means that they
are perceived as not only more sexually open but also as more dynamic (let’s
call it) in the sack. This film plays to
this basic assumption, but it never takes it that extra step to actually have
the women seize men sexually. No, they
kill men (and get to slap a few around a bit), and then go home and take
communal baths. While this plays on a
hard/soft dichotomy, it also relates back to this being a film out of
time. The filmmakers are much happier to
be voyeurs on the women (the baths, they all gather in their swimsuits to await
the announcement of who made the squad [not that it matters, since the
characters are all anonymous], a scene actually stops just so the camera can
tilt down to leer at a couple of girls’ jugs, and so forth) in an R-rated, cheesecake
kind of way. This lack of
non-battlefield action undercuts what the film advertises itself as
(consciously and subconsciously), and it robs it of any impact it may have had.
I love the sort of unorthodox teams that films can give us,
such as the bikers who took on the Viet Cong in 1970’s The Losers. Naturally, it
doesn’t make any real world sense to take a person or group of people who have
some basic skill (bikers, showgirls, florists, whatever), train them to kill,
and send them into a danger zone. If
these scenarios actually occurred, the powers that be would almost certainly
simply take available agents, soldiers, and so forth, and mold them to fit a cover
story (that is, after all, their job).
But we kind of like it the other way around. To take normal folks and force them into
these new roles, again, it plays into an audience’s fantasies. We all want to believe that we’re
special. We all want to believe that we
could whack villains and score women like a James Bond, and movies like Hell Squad are meant to give us a bit of
that hope. After all, if a bunch of
Vegas showgirls can kill terrorists and rescue hostages, couldn’t we all?
But for how offbeat this film is, it almost completely fails
to either maintain interest or satisfy in any way. There is a cyclical nature to the story’s
structure that kills any building of tension and momentum. The girls go to their hotel room. They all get in the bath and shoot the shit
for a while (none of which means anything to anything). The phone rings. Jan is told where the girls need to hit the
next day by an anonymous male voice (shades of Charlie’s Angels). The girls
go out and kill the Arabs they’re told to kill.
They come back to the hotel. The
terrorists mistreat Jack for a few seconds.
Back to the women in the bath.
There is little to no variation in this routine, and it quickly wore
down my patience (and the paucity of actual naked showgirls did nothing to
bolster it, I can tell you). Add to this
that the violence in the film is utterly sanitized (I don’t think there’s a
spot of blood in the entire film, and that’s even with a tiger attack [don’t
get your hopes up; it’s not as exciting as it sounds]), and you get an
extremely bland execution of an intriguing idea. None of this is helped by the dirt poor
acting abilities of everyone involved (with the exception of Miller, who made quite a career for
himself with his unique voice), which is akin to watching people describe grass
growing. If you want to see women in
strong action roles, you’d do better to watch an old episode of G.L.O.W. (Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling).
MVT: The idea at the film’s heart is a good
one. It could have been the foundation
for a fun movie. But it’s produced like
a cake full of air. It looks good at
first glance, but there’s nothing inside.
Make or Break: Around the third time that the squad return
to the hotel and gather in the bathtub it becomes apparent that this is as high
as the bar is going to be set for this thing.
And you could likely step over that bar without the slightest worry of
tripping on it.
Score: 4/10
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