Ski Troop Attack

In the Battle of the Bulge, four American ski troopers try to avoid the Germans and win the war.

It's a typical cheap Roger Corman picture from the period. The sound is bad, the music for the score screams it's the 1960s, and cinematographer Andrew Costikyan struggles in vain to get some interesting shots of men in white ski outfits against the snowy lands of the Dakotas. It was a trouble-plagued shoot; one snowbank that was supposed to collapse on cue did so prematurely, leading Corman to order his crew to stop it.

War movies had certainly changed since the 1940s, with their Willie-and-Joe attitudes of "Let's get it done so we can get home alive" to bickering with the Military Academy lieutenant, and shooting the German fräulein in her Midwestern kitchen. Film-making for Corman in this period was a matter of looking under sofa cushions to find money for film stock, and his ability to hold his crew together was predicated on the hope that if they got through this shoot, somewhere down the road someone would see they had worked on a movie before, and ask no further questions. the only thing sustaining Corman was that the big studios had eliminated the programmer, so teenagers could either stay home with their parents and watch TV or go to a Corman picture and make out with their girlfriends.

And not only drama, but also action flick. Yes it is very short, one hour and three minutes, and character study very effective for such a short length time. I spent a good time. Roger Corman will do it again in the war film genre, several years later, with SECRET INVASION, with a bigger budget - because Corman did not make only small budgets features - so this one could be seen as a kind of first draw for SECRET INVASION; though the plot is not the same. The woman character is surprisingly good, with an unexpected sequence with her. I guess this film should be more shown to audiences. Corman fans or not...

The heroes in this low budget WWII feature are normally a reconnaissance unit, but eventually decide that they can do a lot of good by destroying a bridge vital to the Nazis. The story deals with the camaraderie between the guys, as well as the tensions between them: the lieutenant in charge (Michael Forest) often butts heads with his problematic sergeant (Frank Wolff).

Always looking to save money whenever he could, producer / director Roger Corman filmed this one in South Dakota after the production of "Beast from Haunted Cave" finished shooting. He utilized much of the same cast & crew that worked on "Beast", including stars Forest and Wolff. While the story is not a bad one, per se (the script is by Corman collaborator of the period Charles B. Griffith, and you could usually expect some good dialogue from him), it's largely an unremarkable one. It's not lacking in atmosphere, fortunately, and the action scenes are decent. Despite the efforts of a capable cast (also including Sheila Noonan, Richard Sinatra, and Wally Campo from "Beast"), the scenery is the real star of this thing. You do get a true sense of people working against not just human opponents, but the elements, as well.

All in all, "Ski Troop Attack" is passably entertaining, but not as memorable as other Corman / Film Group pictures around this time.

Corman himself appears on screen, uncredited and dubbed, as the leader of the bad guys.

Six out of 10.

Another moment when the low rating for a film at IMDb doesn't make sense.

A tight, taut, tough-minded little war movie, this is Corman on a low budget at his absolute best. Most of Cormans problems in his early years derived from a lack of knowing where to cut scenes and move on, and a fatal dependence on the performances of inadequate actors. The editing here is very crisp - even the use of documentary footage is handled well, although its grain admittedly never meshes with that of the film as a whole. And while the acting remains unexceptional, it never becomes excessive in an amateurish way, and it fits with the overall gritty realism of the picture.

Corman benefits here from a surprisingly strong story and script that leaves its thematic issues open to interpretation. The issues receive temporary resolution by the end the hard way - through combat, as is most often the case in a war.

I'm not saying this is a forgotten masterpiece, but it is certainly worth a view, and at 63 minutes hardly threatens to tax one's patience.

This is a very average war film. We follow a small group of soldiers on skis.

For low budget, this works very well. Of course, what Corman and others call low budget is still much more than most of us will ever get our hands on.

We get the story of 5 men, but it soon becomes 4, so 4 characters are followed through. They stray just slightly off the common stereotypes, but not much. We have the leader and second in command at some odds, with a split between the other two men aligning with the two leaders.

We get the excitement of the film feud with the two other men as well, much as minor characters cajole each other in films like "Escape From Fort Bravo" and "Warpath". This one has the Norhterner-Southerner reference, and we feel either both will perish, or both will survive.

The uniforms and vehicles are different, and the scenery makes this unique in war films. Not a great film by any stretch, but not close to the worst.