The 10th Mountain

This is a war film about a Fillipino officer who takes command of a a squad of four men to fight the Germans.

This is not low budget. You can tell lots of editing, costumes, wardrobe, props, etc. went into this. This is only low budget to the big corporations. A lot of people spent a lot of time on this.

And they did a good job. There's nothing wrong with the production value or acting. The camera and sound men did a better job than many big budget production people.

All more is the pity, that it was wasted on what had to be the worst script the company could find.

I've been involved as an actor in a few local film endeavors, and this reminded me of those. I was present at the board meetings to decide on what the movie should be about. It's mind boggling, the way they come to decisions. Of the scripts and scenarios presented to them, they always chose the very worst one.

Production people insist on the worst scripts to waste their effort on. They always use the excuse of "budget", but that's a lie. It takes a big budget to produce anything. As a result, we would get a silly script like this one.

Kudos to the actors for doing their job for what they must have known was a horrible script. I don't even know where to begin. Suffice to say, it looked like it was written by a ten year old whose only views on war were what he saw in Hollywood movies. Clichés abound. Some of this looks like a rip off of "Saving Private Ryan", which makes it hard not to laugh at it. Indeed, it has the look of a movie made for a worst film festival. I gave it three stars because at least they didn't make it too long, keeping it under fifty minutes, so at least the movie flowed at a good pace.

And that makes this even worse. I can forgive a low budget, or troubles with finding a great location, or poor action scenes, but when all of these look immaculate, it only heightens the poor script. Not just an ordinary script, but a completely poor one, with the most forced dialog you will ever seen.

Very well done. It is really good. I know it took a year to edit, but it made all the difference. I say give these 2 young men a budget for their next one, and let them do their stuff. You would think you were in Germany, but you are really in Clairmont. Most of the actors were first timers....you wouldn't know it. It was at the Long Beach Action Film Festival and did well.The Sargent played an important role, and laid it on thick. Lead actor was believable, I liked the German interpretor. Editing had clean crisp cuts with good transitions. Special effects very good, you wouldn't know that those were rubber guns and rifles.What was really funny? That there were kids playing in that field and didn't even blink, sometimes we would have to wait for them to walk through.