The Secret Force

The only two countries that seem to have the ability to disguise their movies as American are Canada and Italy. This South African-lensed thriller tries to do so, but it constantly shows its true origin - license plates, courtrooms, accents, and other local peculiarities keep popping up, sometimes so blatantly that I'm shocked nobody noticed. Certainly the same people were blind to microphones bobbing into the frame, shadows and reflections of cameramen, and chunks of dirt and crud sticking onto the camera lens! Then the story... ai yi yi! The villains and their various schemes are so overdone and unbelievable that you would swear it was a bad parody of "government conspiracy" movies. It's no wonder no U.S. distributor picked this up when it was first released... though now that it has slipped into the public domain, you can find it at any large warehouse store with a DVD bargain bin.

But I learned a fair bit:

• If you only have enough dialogue and plot to cover a 2 minute long cartoon, don't worry. You can just get every character to repeat every line three or four times and take long pauses in between the words. The audience won't find this tactic really annoying, even after 85 minutes. (You'll note that I'll be referring to this point regularly throughout the review.)

• Women who are in the same room as a police mini-interrogation need to ask someone else who was there to find out what was said.

• American cops drive South African police vehicles. In fact, the whole film is guilty of trying to pass off South African locations as American.

• Government officials target small groups of Vietnam war friends for mind-control, so that they will randomly mow down civilians. What purpose this achieves is unknown.

• Crazy, shrieking women actually do know everything about what the Government is up to.

• Top secret government experiments are carried out in standard hospitals. No military or police are ever present to ensure any secrecy.

• The tagline and title of a movie do not have to have anything to do with the events of a film.

• When the back of the video case talks about a Rambo-style arsenal, it really means just one shotgun.

• Police allow a highly-armed mentally insane man to stand around while they get one of his untrained friends to try and talk him out of killing people. Apparently this is standard protocol if the friend asks politely.

to stand up for this film, it is what it is. At the time I was making movies for an Afrikaans producer in South Africa who was catering to the black film market. I made several of those pictures for him and they were successful. He wanted to make an integrated picture so I wrote Paranoia for him. We shot that picture but we didn't have the money to finish the pix and back in l a we found Peacock films who finished and distributed the picture.

The usual pix for that market in SA were 70 minutes long shot in 1 week costing 10 thousand dollars. I shot the pix as Paranoia and Peacock re title it a released it as n action picture. It doesn't work as an action film but then it's not The Manxhurian Cndidate either. Netflix bought the picture, I wish they had bought The King's Messeger.