Cinco para o Inferno

I found 'Five For Hell' immensely enjoyable. I purchased it for .79 cents on amazon marketplace and anxiously awaited it's arrival. When I saw this film I was consuming large amounts of bourbon and I must say, this greatly increased the enjoyment of what is unfairly called 'The Worst film ever made" by the previous reviewer. If you are a fan of fun, guys on a mission type War films, which avoid dramatic elements, and are loaded with excellent action sequences; then 'Five For Hell' is just the ticket. This film is not high art by any means. And for the record it is done in the vein of most Italian Exploitation/Action/War flicks. Pick this baby up and stop off at your local liquor, gun store. I suggest bourbon and shotgun and at least 3,000 rounds of ammunition. I would also suggest Castellari's 'Ingolorious Bastards' if you find this film appealing.

HG

A cheap and fitfully amusing WW2 film from our Italian cousins. This one riffs on THE DIRTY DOZEN quite extensively in the predictable story of a behind-enemy-lines mission, in which a group of goofs and oddballs are sent to retrieve some vital documents from the Nazis. Will they succeed? Nobody seems to care really, but when the emphasis is on goofy action throughout then you won't either.

The film stars spaghetti western regular Gianni Garko as the protagonist; he plays your usual English dubbed hero, happily mowing down squads of Nazis and performing various feats of derring-do. His adversary is none other than Klaus Kinski, who must have worn more Nazi uniforms throughout his career than even Curt Jurgens and Anton Diffring; what a sigh of relief he must have breathed when he hung his up for the last time.

In a slightly bizarre spin on the usual formulaic action, a lot of comedic scenes involving trampoline action have been inserted into the mix. I'm familiar with this trampoline stuff from THE THREE FANTASTIC SUPERMEN film and all the similar ones that followed; unsurprisingly, director Gianfranco Parolini worked on both productions. However, it doesn't really fit into a WW2 movie as well as it did in a superhero film; the result is an odd concoction to say the least...

To watch this film is to follow five misfit American soldiers directly into hell, where they beat you up, take your wallet and abandon you.

In my WWII film and literature class, I show Five for Hell's opening credit sequence, which lasts about 15 minutes (pacing, people, pacing), as an example of war movie making at its worst. While the film is about a commando raid, the soundtrack is about a young woman who goes to Los Angeles to become a go-go dancer. Commander Baseball has clearly never thrown a ball in his life, but I guess that doesn't matter when you are going into combat against an army of Bond movie henchmen. Quite possibly a war crime, Five for Hell is a visual root canal.

While Germany worked furiously on secret weapons like the V-2 rocket and jet engines, America matched them with the invention of a portable trampoline and lead filled baseball. See machine gun nests knocked out by a gymnast that flies higher than the Luftwaffe! Exclaim as a GI takes out Nazis with sniper-like precision with a baseball! Gasp as Klaus Kinski acts like he always does in most any film... sleazy! This Italian made Dirty Dozen clone has its up and downs. For the most part it flows through as any low budget Italian WWII film. Expect inadvertent humor at times that are supposed to be serious and many flubs. Note that the movie is based around a collapsible trampoline and weighted baseball and the commandos that use them. Dancing commandos at that! Watch for the Fred Astaire like moves of the trampoline wielding commando that dances to the movies theme on the radio. Note that few woman can escape the fate that awaits theme in a scene with Klaus Kinski in any film. Almost as an apology to the general awfulness of this film the climax is actually well filmed and runs well as good WWII actions scenes. One of the more amusing Italian b-grade war films.

This Italian action/adventure set during the Second World War is essentially a riff on the then recent American smash hit The Dirty Dozen (1967). Its story is broadly similar where we have a specially selected group of five American soldiers being chosen to go behind enemy lines to steal some heavily guarded battle plans from a well-protected German stronghold. But the question you need to ask yourself is could that earlier Hollywood blockbuster have been improved with the inclusion of scenes involving its crack commandos jumping off mini trampolines, using baseballs as weaponry and indulging in extended tap dancing routines? Well, this is the film that essentially answers that particular question. I'm not going to give you the answer though as I think it's best a person decides for themselves on such matters.

This one features the go-to bad guy actor of the day, Klaus Kinski, in a role of a ruthless Nazi and the delectable Margaret Lee as a German double-agent. The five-man army, on the other hand, were decidedly less distinctive than this pair. The film itself is reasonably entertaining in a lots-of shooting kind of way but it is also very by-the-numbers too. The final assault on the German base drags somewhat until it becomes a machine gun fest. So I reckon it could have been a bit more interesting really but in fairness, like its title characters, it still gets the job done.