Nothing Like a War to Make Heroes of Us All

Most grizzled war veterans will be quick to tell you that "war is hell." But these vets obviously never fought a war like Troma’s War. The most financially ambitious Troma film to date, War has been re-released in all of its uncut, pyrotechnic glory on DVD and VHS! Now, for a nominal fee you can bring War to your own home and find out why critics praised it as being "funnier than Platoon!"

A Tromaville Airlines flight goes down somewhere over the Caribbean Ocean, crash-landing on an unmarked island. The few survivors are a crew as motley as any Gilligan’s Island made for TV movie (that includes the one with the Harlem Globetrotters). You’ve got your tough-talking hero and heroine, the evil capitalist pig, the James Bond type, the psychotic redneck ex-marine, the blind girl, the priest, and the new wave band "The Bearded Clams" among others. Their first worry - when they’re going to be rescued - is quickly forgotten once a rag-tag group of commandos begins to hunt and kill them. This isn’t any old uncharted island - it’s a training camp for a subversive infiltration squad that is getting set to invade the shores of America. Our intrepid crash survivors find themselves in the position of having to defend themselves and stop the invasion. The bad guys - a hog-nosed commando, a Courtney Love look-alike, and a pair of evil siamese twins - find that the crash survivors are a paramilitary force to be reckoned with. Several long and bloody gun battles later, we are reminded of a time when war was glorious and made you feel good.

What can I say about Troma that I haven’t already said? No one is safe from their scathing wit. Children, religion, the elderly, the blind, money-grubbers, war-mongers . . . all fodder for the Troma meat grinder. It’s really quite funny because the same people that are disgusted by Troma films are the ones that are the brunt of their scorn. Troma will never let up and I’m often surprised at how they can continue to shock and amaze even a jaded viewer like myself.

Another impressive aspect of Troma’s War is the financial and technical scope of the film. Made in 1988 with the hordes of cash brought in by The Toxic Avenger, War doesn’t hold back in the pyrotechnics, weapons rental, and blood squib departments. No expense was spared when making this modern warfare epic. Hundreds of extras (or maybe one hundred extras used several times over), stunt falls, and an actual hovercraft that they BLOW UP!!

This ambitious project - just the antidote the country needed after three RamBozo movies - deserves a look-see. Why? Because any film that has at least 285 on-screen deaths (give another five or ten for refrigerator trips) gets my automatic stamp of approval.

- Punky McScrubb