Mercenari dell'apocalisse

This terrible film takes its plot from the usual sixties Italian War film (you know - half a dozen or thereabouts misfits sent behind enemy lines to take part in a suicide mission), marries it with some eighties music, then has the actors within constantly react to footage from another film. For the entire duration of the film. It's awful!

WW2, central Europe, senior officer Paul Muller needs a bunch of specialized troops to destroy a German command centre just over the Yugoslavian border. You know the drill - there's the hardcore leader of the group, the explosives expert, the fluent German speaker, the muscly, Rambo guy as this is the eighties, and another guy whom I wasn't quite sure had a special skill. He was a pilot when we first meet him but didn't do any flying after that.

They also pick up a female partisan but as this film is purely a cardboard cut-out of films that weren't that great in the first place, why bother going on with the plot? There's a bit of reflection, a bit of romance, some truly terrible action sequences, blah blah blah. What's more annoying is that the film that the stolen footage is lifted from looks great! A full-on epic war film with a huge cast of extras, loads of tanks and planes, and loads of action - where's that one hiding?

Some chuckles can be had from the crappy acting of the extras and Maurice Poli's performance is like he's doing a pantomime in Glasgow rather than being an explosive expert in WW2, but I wasn't a fan of this plot the first time around, so the eighties version doesn't work for me either. The Rambo rip-offs, however, do float my boat.

The soundtrack's good though.