Troma's War

Great Troma movie. The last guy who commented on it has obviously never watched a Troma film before. The thin plot, nudity and guts all come together to form a solid story. The cheesy humor is another staple in the making of a great "movie of the future" I mean, an evil general with AIDS? GENIUS! If you don't enjoy Tromas War, you probably don't love Bloodsucking Freaks either, which makes you a moron. If you've never watched a Troma movie before, don't comment on them as if your film tastes are so advanced. Although, you really don't need to know the whole story behind the company to enjoy this film. Lloyd Kaufman and Micheal Herz have done it yet again. Thank you.

WAR! is another quickie exploitation film churned out by the Troma Team. Like all of Troma, the film is heavy on the bad taste (even comes with AIDS jokes) nudity, action, etc. etc. At the end of the film, all the film's heroes and heroines face the camera and cheer "America!" I guess this is so we don't boo and hiss the film too bad. I saw TROMA WAR's in the best possible enviorment for a Troma film, the old Times Square, in a run down theatre with a wall made up of tarp, along with a local lunatic who decided to sit in his seat in the lotus position and face the audience during the film. Now it's all Disney and Yuppie-Moneytraps on 42nd Street. Too Bad.

Forget Coppola´s "Apocalypse Now" and Spielberg´s "Saving Private Ryan" because this film is the ultimate contribution to the genre of war movies! Typically Troma, you´ll find lots of cheesy F/X and bad acting in it, however this shot is not as awful as many other flicks produced by this company: "Troma´s War" is REALLY entertaining, what´s absolutely no guarantee for the other works of Lloyd Kaufman´s firm. The humor is not too silly this time, although there are many politically not correct jokes about Aids or Siamese twins. The violence in this film is business as usual, so prepare for cut off ears and fountains of blood! With its exaggerated patriotism "Troma´s War" is also a nice parody on all those soldier-movies like "Rambo" or "Delta Force", which were very popular in the Reagan-ruled 1980s. And some nudity of pretty silicon-chicks doesn´t hurt either..! I liked this movie even more than "Combat Shock", that is alleged to be a touching anti war-drama, but after all only a cheap and boring film! This one doesn´t take itself too serious and that´s no mistake!! So if you´re going out tonight to rent a Troma-flick... take this one!!!

Author: plazma_dragon wrote 'The makers of this film tried to combine a comedy movie with an action movie'.

no, that's not what they did. what the wonderful folks at troma did in this film is to take all the conventions of all Hollywood action films set in the contemporary era, and push them to their logical extremes.

the action film is inherently illogical - that's exactly why we watch them. in the action film you identify with the hero and blow away a criminal as soon as you can, and move on to the next criminal to blow away.

in real life, if you shoot someone you think is committing a crime, you may miss and get shot; you may only wound him, in which case you have to listen to his squeals of pain, and later, in most states, he has the right to come back and sue you for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon - no joke. and if you do kill him, then you have to justify it to the police, and sometimes to a judge, and you have to listen to his mom weep in agony, and then she sues you for 'wrongful death' and you have to wonder - was causing so much pain to others and one's self really worth it - a question that may haunt you the rest of your life. finally, there's the possibility that he may shoot you - setting aside your possible demise, there's the problem of getting crippled for the rest of your life. you can sue the criminal, but if he's just the corner thug, you'll never see a penny.

this doesn't mean that you don't shoot the criminal - you may need to - if he's threatening a loved one, and i got a good shot, i certainly would. but what all this does mean is that you're stuck with all kinds of consequences that never happen to Stallone or snipes or Jackie Chan.

troma takes this basic principle - shoot the guy and move on, hero - to the extremes. any of the airliner survivors who show compassion are deemed wimpy and abandoned. the Rambo-wannabe wades into a whole regiment of enemy soldiers and doesn't get shot. the pacifist priest is sadistically tortured and shot in the goriest fashion, condemned to die by a neo-Nazi for being Jewish - even though he's clearly not - simply because the Nazi thinks everyone he kills must be Jewish, since he's a Nazi and Nazis kill Jews.

as for the nudity - it is rumored that steven seagal actually used to have it in his contract that there would be at least one female nude scene in any movie he made. nude scenes are pro-forma to the genre - but since this is troma's war, of course they need to be done as ineptly as possible.

one can say that 'this is not my kind of comedy', and leave it alone. however, don't for a minute think these people don't know what they're doing.

personally i think this movie is a jaw-dropping, over-the-top satire of the best kind. i hold back one star because there's no doubt the editing could have been a little tighter.

If you begin to watch a Troma offering, you know you're in for basically deliberately inept, silly (lazy? Never!) film making to the extent that it's 'so bad it's good' is expected, since because that is surely the intention of the Troma oeuvre, anyway:

So, if not to be another why waste ya time to watch, then first I would suggest you set it up as a fun billing along with others, not of the classic Arnold/ Sly more serious war is macho genre, but rather those of similar - but unintentionally so, though - dross of the likes of the S. Seagal and/or C. Connors entries into the genre.

Then as settling in for the inevitable ineptness, parts I found fun were the constant jewellery wearing air crash survivors (dangly spangly earrings especially) and the fact that the island army is surely made up of extras who were told to bring their own approximations of military outfit gear: the incongruities displayed are legion.

Of them, you can then also get a fine appreciation of the stunts people in executing their chops, be it jumping (mostly backwards) over objects (sandbags, oil drums, other 'dead' compatriots) or putting themselves in the correct position to plummet, 'shot and dead', from high places, trees especially: and, around the middle an amusing Arnold accent take rant in favour of the corrupt (US!) system… but then soon after a quite rather prescient almost 'conspiracist theory' the terrorist threat is really from inside from the system elite rejoinder from the hero (i.e well written scriptwriters): Then, throughout the interminable battles, there is a great wailing guitar background soundtrack to enjoy, too by which to get you finally to the end, at which point having so sat through such deliberate tosh, I would implore you wait around until the last end credit has rolled: it's a great denouement to the 'seriousness' of all that's gone before, making it, really, inarguably, surely one of Troma's best entries.