The Stick (1988)

So, today, in a fit of ridiculous candor, I've decided to tell you all about a dream I had recently.  I never remember my dreams, so this is, indeed, as rare as hen's teeth.  Anyway, it went a little something like this.  I just moved somewhere new with my family.  It was somewhere sort of desert-y, maybe Arizona or somewhere in California (why I would move there is beyond me; nothing against the denizens of California, but it just ain't for me).  The apartment building we moved into was somewhat rundown, in a seedy area, but the apartment itself was like a one story, austere, white adobe kind of house on the inside, with windows soldered together like stained glass that leak like sieves in the rain.  Some young woman was there, a friend of a family member, and she was very flirty.  Nothing, naturally, came of this (it so rarely does in my dreams, boo hoo). 

Next thing I know, I'm coming home from being out somewhere, and I passed by an apartment with an old school stereo setup playing some decent music (garage style stuff I’ve never heard before) outside it.  The door was open, so I wandered in to tell the owner I liked the music.  Inside the apartment was like some ancient, independent publishing outfit (and by that, I mean it was like a closet with files, and folders, and papers stacked everywhere).  As I talked to this guy (did I mention I almost never dream about people I know?), the apartment became a small bar (not much larger than the original closet apartment).  It had a nice atmosphere, and the people filtering through were interesting.   I guess you could call them hipsters, though they felt earnest to me.  So, the actual owner of the bar/apartment (not the same guy I initially met) comes around, and he's very Eye-Talian and very wacky.  He brandishes a knife at me, but it's more absent-minded, not menacing.  He says some crap about finding myself or somesuch and throws a bunch of disparate toys on the bar for me to "assemble" like some 3-D Psych test.  I do something or other with the toys, and the owner gets elated.  He offered me a job.  As the day turns to night, some Mario-Adorf-ian fella comes in saying everyone at home is waiting for me.  And then I woke up.  Make of that what you will, but it's a bit like the semi-dreamy atmosphere of Darrell Roodt's The Stick, a film as ethereal as it is politically barbed (by the way, not that I’m saying my dream was political in any way).

The film takes the perspective of Cooper (Greg Latter), a soldier in apartheid-torn South Africa.  He's the sole survivor of a surprise attack by native rebels painted (or are they?) white like ghosts.  He's sent back out with another stick (read: squad) on a search and destroy mission.  But Cooper and his new team are in for some unpleasant surprises from within and without.

The Stick is as much a Vietnam film as it is an anti-apartheid film as it is a fantasy film.  The first two of these go hand-in-hand.  Naturally, Vietnam was not a race war, per se, but some of the soldiers in it did allow their bigotry to get the better of them.  It was a hopeless conflict against an enemy that didn’t “play by the rules.”  Now, I completely admit my ignorance of the exact intricacies of apartheid other than that it was an odious practice better off dead.  I know there were uprisings, but this film posits an outright war that has lingered far too long, its soldiers dead inside, disillusioned and desperate for escape from the grind of senseless killing for a future full of nothing.  This is reflected in Cooper and his antithesis, the unhinged O'Grady (Sean Taylor), a soldier whom the war has defeated but wrongly believes that he still has some control.  He displays this by being insubordinate and bloodthirsty.  He fronts that he's a cold killing machine (and partly he is), but his actions clearly derive from fear and exhaustion of a world that is insane and drives those who partake in to insanity.  He joins in the senseless slaughter of women and children, but he holds Cooper to blame for the frightened killing of the local Witch Doctor (Winston Ntshona).  O’Grady tries to abrogate his complicity in the events that now haunt and threaten him by putting it on someone else for the killing of this very special villager.  The soldiers are picked off by the spirits of those they persecuted and executed.  Even though Cooper did kill the Witch Doctor, he himself is left alive, not once but twice, to bear witness to the madness this world has become as well as to exist under the burdensome nightmares hands like his have conjured.

Roodt's direction is sharp.  He orchestrates the film's action dynamically, and his compositions encompass the grandeur of the locales, isolating the soldiers against the backdrops, making them small and petty.  One could argue he overdoes the crane shots, but it's for a purpose.  It symbolizes the ghosts of South Africa omnisciently bearing down on those who attack it.  The director also does an exemplary job of balancing the war and supernatural elements.  It never throws the audience into pure fantasy.  There's almost always a possible explanation for what's going on.  But by depriving the viewer of that explanation, at least partially, he strengthens the power they have.  Much of the film is a bit too predictable to fully elevate it beyond very good.  But it's message is strong and delivered with enough violence and action to make the bitter pill go down a little smoother.  It's just a damn shame it's something that needs to be said at all.

MVT: Roodt's direction is strong and sure-handed.

Make or Break: The opening ambush gives you a taste of everything the film has in store. 

 

Score: 7/10

Phantom Soldiers (1989)

The My Lai Massacre is, arguably, the most infamous occurrence of the Vietnam War, a conflict that was unpopular in America to start off (and, certainly, I would imagine in Vietnam, as well).  On March 16, 1968, between three-hundred-and-forty-seven and five-hundred-and-four civilians were killed in two hamlets of the Quang Ngai Province, including infants, children, and women.  The massacre was set off, at least in part, by a bloodlust the soldiers of Charlie Company felt due to recent, heavy casualties of their brothers in arms.  These losses were perpetrated largely by booby-traps set by the Viet Cong, engendering a hatred for the enemy and their guerilla tactics.  Using specious reasoning and sketchy intelligence, the soldiers performed some of the most inhuman acts possible, partly in the name of vengeance/payback.  Despite protests from certain of the men and reporting of the extent of the carnage to superior officers, the My Lai Massacre was covered up for roughly a year before it was exposed to the world.  Of all the soldiers charged with criminal offenses, only one was convicted, and he wound up serving about three-and-a-half years under house arrest (that doesn’t feel balanced, now does it?).  At any rate, the massacre is the jumping off point for Teddy Chiu’s (under the alias Irvin Johnson) Phantom Soldiers (aka Commando Phantom).  In fact, a character is even named Barker after Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker, the officer in command of the My Lai operation.  Once this set up is done, however, the film essentially becomes a Missing in Action film, for better or worse.

A platoon of silent, black-clad, gasmask-wearing soldiers march into a small Vietnamese village, leveling the place and murdering everyone in sight with everything from bullets to nerve gas.  Investigating the titular troopers, Lieutenant Mike Custer (Corwin Sperry) and his men are captured behind enemy lines.  Meanwhile, back in the States, Mike’s brother Dan (Max Thayer) is a Texas Ranger, busting up drug cartels on the border.  He receives news of his brother’s disappearance and decides to go to Nam incognito and get his brother back.

It’s a little startling, though just a little, that American war films from the Seventies through the Eighties that were set in Vietnam very often focused on going back and winning the war.  Barring the righting of a perceived wrong in the minds of the more jingoistic, many of these films also centered on rescuing those soldiers who were MIA and forgotten about by all but their family members.  The two are not entirely mutually exclusive, both being seen as slights against the young men and women who gave their lives (literally and figuratively) in an “unwinnable” war.  Those who came back were not universally hailed like those who served in World War Two, and this only compounded the sour resentment of the veterans.  Likewise, this sort of film plays to the viewers who didn’t serve but still had strong feelings about America’s defeat.  Dan, then, is both a veteran and a patriot.  When not wearing his Stetson, he wears baseball caps, one that’s camouflaged and a blazing white number with the NFL logo on it.  He’s an all-American in every way.  He dislikes injustice, and he asserts at least twice that, “Nobody’s above the law” (I cannot imagine from whence this bit of dialogue came).  Dan has no real feelings about the rightness or wrongness of the Vietnam War, except in that his brother is involved in it.  Once he gets in-country, Dan winds up machine-gunning a slew of Viet Cong from a helicopter.  They are, after all, the enemy.  Yet, Dan’s first priority is his brother, so this bit of violence can be looked upon as survival rather than as any sort of soldierly duty.

Importantly, the American soldiers in the film are clearly distinguished from the Phantom Soldiers.  They do not fire on unarmed noncombatants.  They play by the rules.  They get irritated that the villains are making them look bad (and, y’know, that they’re blatant murderers).  Conversely, the Phantom Soldiers are ruthless, sadistic, and quasi-superhuman.  In their first scene, the Phantoms are shot and beaten with gun butts, but these things have no effect on them, shrugging them off like gnats a-buzzing.  Their uniforms are meant to inspire fear and call back to several reference points.  First, the gas masks are reminiscent of those creepy ones we’ve all seen in photos of the soldiers in the trenches and the civilians at home during both World Wars.  Two, the masks evoke images of death in their implacable brutality and lifeless visages.  Three, they recall memories of Star Wars in the audience with their similarity to Darth Vader and his stormtroopers, not only in the skull-like faces but also in the Nazi-esque helmets.  Their actions in the film, and the explanation behind it all is a way for Americans to say, “See?  We were the good guys here!”  It’s the sort of exculpation of America and some its soldiers that, I would suggest, they needed to have in order to deal with their involvement in Vietnam and to vindicate themselves to those who hated them for it.  Naturally, it’s also a power fantasy to reinforce that America is the best ever.

Phantom Soldiers excels in the action department.  The scenes of carnage are exciting, well-shot and edited, and impactful.  They are also overlong (and, I’m sure, fans of action films will argue that this is impossible) to the point of stopping the story dead in its tracks.  Some would say that’s just fine and dandy in this sort of movie (and to some degree, it is), but for my money, it also winds up becoming a vague blur and, ultimately, pretty boring.  It’s simply too much of a good thing, which I hate to say, because of the insane amount of talent involved in these sequences.  The actual plot, then, just meanders along, bopping from action beat to action beat, barely holding together just to fill the spaces between explosions and gunfire.  Thayer does a solid job as the good ol’ boy maverick, but even what charisma he musters isn’t quite enough to compel an audience along through the whole of the film.  He does blow things up real good, though.

MVT:  The action.

Make or Break:  The opening sequence is rock solid across the board, despite the remainder of the film not quite paying off on this potential.

Score:  6/10    

Dog Tags (1988)

A group of American soldiers (and one German guy, played, I believe, by one Robert Marius) are rescued from a Vietnamese jungle prison by American operative Cecil (Clive Wood).  During exfiltration, the men are ordered to reclaim some important papers that were being transported in a now-downed helicopter.  But the helicopter’s cargo may be more valuable than mere documents (okay, it’s gold).  All of this is told in flashback to writer Christopher Hilton (Christopher Hilton, perhaps better known as a voice actor for such films as Five Deadly Venoms) by one of the survivors.

Romano Scavolini’s Dog Tags (aka Dogtags - Il Collare della Vergogna aka Platoon to Hell) is a film about the ugly truth of humanity.  Like Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust, it frames this discussion through an observer/audience surrogate character who unveils this truth after the events.  In that film, Professor Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman) reviews the footage left behind by the “victims” of the jungle slaughter as it’s reconstructed.  In this film, Hilton interviews Tanoy, the only known survivor of the events from so long ago.  Both films construct a truth from the evidence of the past, and in this sense, the films are about storytelling and about revealing said truth through storytelling.  Dog Tags even structures its tale in acts (Prologue, Act One: The Facts, Act Two: The Getaway, Act Three: The Chase, and an Epilogue), plainly telling us that this story, though conveying truth, sticks to the framework of classic storytelling.  It’s presented to us as a fiction in order to relate fact (it even gives us a quote from a United States Senate hearing about the preceding premise in general; whether these hearings happened or not, and whether this subject was actually discussed is inconsequential here [personally, I find it all very easy to believe, so mission accomplished], as it’s the intimation that it’s true which matters).

Hilton first comes to this particular story through a guy named Jack, a radio operator who was stationed in Nam at the time (whom we never see in this capacity, or if we do, he’s never identified to us in the film, and he plays no part in the plot outside of also being an observer).  Tellingly, Jack has overdosed on heroin as the film opens, so we never get to see him in the present, either.  What this does is informs us that what he encountered during his tour of duty was too much for him to deal with emotionally.  To paraphrase Colonel Nathan Jessup, he couldn’t handle the truth.  Likewise, the characters in the film cannot handle what’s happening to them.  This isn’t a Kelly’s Heroes type of War/Caper film.  Many of the characters in Dog Tags die, and they die very badly.  Primarily, they are picked off by booby-traps, of which there are tons in the film.  In fact, I can think of very few direct interactions between the soldiers and any actual Viet Cong.  The enemy is mainly faceless, absent in body, if not in spirit.  The one exception I can recall is the scene where Glass (Peter Elich) is told to wade into the tall grass and get the Viet Cong skulking there. Faced with the situation of killing one with a machete, Glass hesitates, cracks, and then turns on his comrades.  Like the jungle the men traipse through, the Viet Cong threat is ever present, overwhelming and surrounding the soldiers on all sides.  There is no escape from the enemy in the same way that there is no escape from the jungle.  Pushed to the brink, the men either die or go insane (often both).

If it wasn’t bad enough for the men to be stuck in a Viet Cong cage, it’s far, far worse for them in the open jungle.  Things were bad in the cage.  The men were at each other’s throats, but they survived.  Once freed, things degenerate swiftly, and between the paranoia of the unseen adversary and the weariness of the soldiers being faced with another mission when they clearly aren’t up for it, the men become animals, become corrupted.  Once the gold is discovered, the soldiers’ avarice shines through, and their humanity is lost completely.  This is best exemplified by Roy (Baird Stafford) whose leg is injured by a booby trap hidden in a river.  His leg becomes gangrene, and it has to be amputated as the infection spreads.  The amputation scene displays the totality of the notion that this is a place which humanity has fled.  As his fellow soldiers set to work on the leg, we get a shot from Roy’s POV.  His companions’ faces are gaunt, feral, and sickly.  They could as easily be preparing to remove his leg as his life.  The contrast to this evaporation of humanity is Mina (Gigi Dueñas) and her family (including her brother Tanoy and her elderly father).  The family are taken hostage by the soldiers out of fear that they’re in league with the Viet Cong.  We are never told explicitly whether or not they are; it’s the tension of the situation that counts.  At any rate, Mina services Roy with her hand as his health fails.  She does this without a word, without a readable emotion on her face, but the empathy she feels for Roy in this circumstance is clear.  While the men are losing their minds with anxiety and greed, Mina performs an act of kindness that is both compassionate and empty.  Mina and her family have lived in these conditions far longer than the soldiers.  They understand that this is the state of the world (and not just their localized world in a case of the specific highlighting the general), so a modicum of physical pleasure is all there is to make life bearable, and even then it’s as transitory and meaningless as the act itself.

I was surprised as hell when I watched Dog Tags.  I had expected something along the lines of Enzo G. Castellari’s Inglorious Bastards or Bruno Mattei’s Strike Commando, essentially a loud, dumb, fun action film with a lot of explosions.  And while there are a lot of explosions (and it should be said, they are large and extremely impressive) and a thin, gritty texture of exploitation in Dog Tags, the film maintains an utterly serious tone from start to finish.  This is a grim, bleak, cynical film that reflects on its ugliness rather than revels in it, much of the runtime filled with strained, formidable silence.  I won’t say that Scavolini’s film is as powerful or as slick as something along the lines of The Deer Hunter or Apocalypse Now, but I do think it deserves to be in the same conversation with them.

MVT:  Scavolini does a remarkable job crafting tension in almost every moment of the film while doing it on a believable scale for a War picture.

Make or Break:  The first booby-trap that’s tripped comes swiftly, unheralded, and it delineates the stakes of the film for both the characters and the audience.

Score:  7/10