Der letzte Haufen der 7. Division

I consider my taste in movies to be quite traditional (i like stuff like Lord of the Rings), yet i have completely enjoyed the two biggest Yugoslavian war films, The Battle of Neretva and this. Partizani is a big scale war adventure about Serbian partisans and Nazis exchanging blows in 1941.

A triangle drama between the rebel leader (Rod Taylor), a reluctant nazi (Adam West) and an upper class chick (Brioni Farrell) is woven into the story, but it never gets in the way of the action. And there is plenty of it, involving planes and tanks. The equipment is unfortunately wrong, but the tanks manage to look a bit Wehrmacht.

I really liked Rod Taylor in this movie, he is aged but not tired. He carries the simple warrior role with his charisma. Adam West is more wooden but adequate, and Brioni Farrell is competent and never annoying. The musical score, involving a bit of Mikis Theodorakis, is good and sentimental in an Ennio Morricone way.

This is a high class, big budget film that shouldn't disappoint any friend of war adventure. Better than mediocre Hollywood, and one of the best to ever come out of continental Europe.

As with the Italians, the Yugoslav film industry made quite a few WWII movies, always detailing the struggles of the "Partisans". Like THE BATTLE OF NERETVA, this tells of a major German offensive to erradicate the enemy and their struggles against the invaders.

It's 1941, and the Partisans are on their own. Marko (Rod Taylor), fresh from an education in America, returns to his homeland and discovers how brutal the Nazis really are. Instead of returning to the States, he stays in Yugoslavia and organizes a resistance movement. On the other side, we have Captain Kohler (Adam West, of all people) who discovers that his childhood sweetheart, Anna (Brioni Farrell aka Xenia Gratsos) is among the Jews he's transporting to the POW camp. Marko's men attack the boat, and Anna helps Kohler escape. She's taken by the partisans, though, and soon finds herself in love with Marko. The rest of the movie involves partisan encounters with Kohler's troops, culminating at a huge river battle a few months later.

This movie boasts a pretty decent international cast. Rod Taylor is pretty good -- but way too old -- as the vengeful Marko. Adam West makes a pretty good adversary, although his German accent fluctuates and is just as bad as Brando's in THE YOUNG LIONS. Peter Carsten (BATTLE OF THE EAGLES) has a large role as a tough, ruthless German Panzer officer. Branko Plesa, also of BATTLE OF THE EAGLES, appears a few times as a German General. Bata Zivojinovic plays Marko's old friend, who leads the partisans but really has little meat to his character. Brioni Farrell is great and beautiful, too.

The combat scenes are all very well done. They involve tanks (more modern, though, but any tank is a good tank), era-accurate fighter planes, extras and a lot of big explosions. The cinematography is wonderful and gives the movie a very bleak look. The musical score often doesn't fit the movie, but I liked it anyway.

Overall, not too high above average, but one of the best Partisan films I've seen so far. Worth renting, even buying, for an entertaining 100 minutes. The video from White Knight looks incredibly good, just as good as any MGM release of an older movie, especially considering that it was released in the early 1980s. 6/10 overall.

In Quentin Tarantino's ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, Leonardo DiCaprio plays an actor named Rick Dalton who, in 1969, is already a washed-up, has-been former Western television series star with a number of forgotten Western and War Movies under his belt...

Including and especially "The 14 Fists of McCluskey" that shows quick footage from this film, HELL RIVER, which is technically impossible since the low-budget Yugoslavian WWII exploitation came out five years after Dalton's time in the Tarantino universe: Then again this obscure Rod Taylor curio, originally and more fitfully titled Partizani aka Partisans (there are only two rivers shown, and neither are hellish), doesn't really exist in HOLLYWOOD since it's become a fictional movie for its fictional star...

On the other hand, an early-seventies Rod Taylor, also a has-been... who gained fame a decade earlier in THE TIME MACHINE and THE BIRDS... was anything but fake. The epitome of a real man and/or man's man, he sure looked it. And by 1974 his screen presence was far less handsome and more rough, rugged and overall world-weary...

His bulbous nose had expanded along with about twenty pounds added onto an already stocky-muscular build, so he resembled more of a character actor than leading man, which fits here since he's far more a character-type piloting the story than the kind of movie star female-audiences were supposed to fall for - which doesn't stop Greek beauty Brioni Farrell from much too quickly doing so...

Back to Tarantino's HOLLYWOOD where Al Pacino plays a Jewish agent talking pop culture shop to his hopeful client in DiCaprio's Dalton: He mentions the series BATMAN, which, as we all know, starred Adam West...

What you may not have known is while Rod Taylor and Brioni Farrell are shown as archive footage in the Rick Dalton "14 Fists of McCluskey" picture during Pacino's expository diatribe, Adam West himself is one of the main stars in HELL RIVER as Austrian Nazi officer Kurt Kohler, who knew and adored Farrell's Anna Kleitz since childhood... That is, the still-handsome leading man/former caped crusader is almost the love interest here...

His part is interesting enough (albeit ultimately neglected as a love triangle), as are scenes where he's repeatedly given orders to kill the enemy partisans, which makes him the most torn character on board, not wanting his true love to die with all the others, including a group of Jews freed during the prologue (along a river) after trying to only save the girl...

And then her saving him quickly following a surprise attack, led by Rod Taylor, whose tough mercenary named Marko seems to only let this woman who saved a Nazi live because... well, she's downright gorgeous...

As most of the picture has the duo traipsing alongside the fleeing Jewish herd while protecting them during bouts of gun-blasting and tank-roaring, explosion-riddled sequences that, despite the anemic budget, does actually look legitimate...

The kind of studio war flick that Tarantino's "14 Fists of McClusky" was supposed to be (it would make no sense if it were a cheap foreign-made throwaway, as shown on fake movie posters possibly created and/or approved by Sony Pictures, since Dalton's game-changing career choice has him eventually and quite reluctantly starring in Italian Spaghetti Westerns and action flicks, which he was obviously and even notably a completely stranger to), and far from the shoddy Yugo-production HELL RIVER actually was...

Even some of composer Vojislav Borisavljevic's original soundtrack plays during a scene where DiCaprio's Dalton takes a flame-thrower to a group of Nazis, all created for the fictional movie within the fictional movie taken from this actual one...

Which, while no classic, isn't a waste of time to catch a grainy yet watchable copy of streaming on Amazon Prime: the best moments include Taylor's Marko separated and alone, surviving behind-enemy-lines in various war-torn, Nazi occupied, blown-out towns...

One where he grew up, giving the legitimate dramatic actor a chance to prove he could balance pathos with bravado. So don't blink or you'll miss one of many important connected elements in Tarantino's ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD. Only HELL RIVER is far more than just a passing billboard or theater marquee. Oh and the end of the end-credits includes even more Adam West!

I saw this under one of its many titles, "Hell River", and was pretty unimpressed. It has a few things going for it--for one thing the photography is quite crisp, unlike many 1970s Euro-made WW 2 "epics", which tended to be either washed-out or muddy--and the music is at least appropriate and doesn't drown out or overwhelm what's on screen--but there are a lot more cons than pro's. The performances aren't particularly good, especially Adam West, wildly miscast as a Nazi officer; he is stiff as a board, has no chemistry or connection with anyone in the cast and slips in and out of an embarrassingly bad German accent. Rod Taylor is stalwart as usual, but he's simply too old to play an action hero. Xenia Gratsos, here billed as "Brioni Farrell", matches West's wooden acting and is rather plain-looking to boot. The plethora of action scenes are done in a very by-the-numbers fashion and tend to be unrealistic, i.e., when the partisans attack a German armored column the Germans are mowed down by the dozens but only a very few partisans fall, despite the Germans opening up with everything they had.

All in all it's not as bad as a lot of the cheap WW 2 crapfests the Italians ground out like sausages in the 1960s and 1970a--my God, what a tsunami of stinkers they were--but it's nothing to write home about. Watchable, to a degree, but not memorable.

Expected better with a cast including Rod Taylor and Adam West. The film seemed to lack a script or direction. Slow paced. It was watchable, just not very good.