Ski Troop Attack

A central paradox of the Battle of the Bulge was that with all that snow it was the most photogenic but probably the most miserable to actually participate in. It's characteristic of the sardonic tone of Corman's war movies that the obligatory female turns out not to be a sweet young fraulein but a fervant Nazi who still believes the war was started by the Poles.

In a snowy German forest, stranded GI's observe stock WWII footage and evade the enemy. Aside from some testy exchanges with a frosty fraulein, the stick-figure characters bark war-comic banalities (though the script's feverish dialogue and structure might have made a swell comic!). The troop's captain is constantly baited by his smug, war-happy sargeant. One assumes a showdown will ensue, but the budget must not have allowed for even modestly choreographed fistcuffs. The equally anticlimactic finale has the soldiers destroying a bridge that's "an impossible target from the air." (??!) Bereft of stuntwork or even a passable master shot, the lucky viewer is left with a jumble of grimacing-face close-ups and mismatched model train footage that even Al Adamson would disown. Roger Corman always blames this dog's shortcomings on production snafus...yet a rookie director employed most of the same cast,crew, and locations for BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE (shot back-to-back with SKI TROOP), and that schlocker turned out OK. Corman's apparent strategy was to grab as much footage in as little time possible and hope to cobble together something watchable in post. As a result, many scenes look interchangeable, and there's little dramatic flow. You can make a good cheap war flick with a tiny cast (BATTLE OF BLOOD ISLAND, '60) and scant action (UNDER FIRE, '57), but this sucker should be avoided like a cloud of mustard gas.

In the Battle of the Bulge, four American ski troopers try to avoid the Germans and win the war.

It's a typical cheap Roger Corman picture from the period. The sound is bad, the music for the score screams it's the 1960s, and cinematographer Andrew Costikyan struggles in vain to get some interesting shots of men in white ski outfits against the snowy lands of the Dakotas. It was a trouble-plagued shoot; one snowbank that was supposed to collapse on cue did so prematurely, leading Corman to order his crew to stop it.

War movies had certainly changed since the 1940s, with their Willie-and-Joe attitudes of "Let's get it done so we can get home alive" to bickering with the Military Academy lieutenant, and shooting the German fräulein in her Midwestern kitchen. Film-making for Corman in this period was a matter of looking under sofa cushions to find money for film stock, and his ability to hold his crew together was predicated on the hope that if they got through this shoot, somewhere down the road someone would see they had worked on a movie before, and ask no further questions. the only thing sustaining Corman was that the big studios had eliminated the programmer, so teenagers could either stay home with their parents and watch TV or go to a Corman picture and make out with their girlfriends.

Roger Corman has a track record that no other filmmaker can match. While he's produced and directed well over 500 films, mostly VERY cheap ones, only one of his movies ever lost money*...so he is an expert at economical filmmaking as well judging the taste of the viewing public.

This is a WWII action picture filmed, of all places, around Deadwood, South Dakota in the Black Hills. It looks good in the movie but is an odd choice that's awfully far from Hollywood. Corman chose this place because he was offered financial incentives by the local government to film there. It stars Michael Forest, a guy who is still making pictures into his 90s, as he recently appeared in a Star Trek fan fiction film that is surprisingly watchable ("Pilgrim of Eternity") as well as a film released in 2020...though I have to admit that "Unbelievable" is total garbage and Forest must have needed the money!

As for the film, it's just okay...at best. While Forest is pretty good, the rest of the cast is pretty forgettable and the story never is all that interesting. I see it as a time-passer or film Corman-lovers should see...all others...you could do better.

*Amazingly, the only film Corman made that lost money was "The Intruder"....one of his BEST films. I strongly recommend you see it!

A man on a mission film made in a couple of weeks after the wrapping of Beast from Haunted Cave, sort of like how She Gods of Shark Reef was made in the remainder of time in Hawaii after Naked Paradise wrapped, Ski Troop Attack is pretty much the refuse of a production schedule. That it's narrative ambitions are fairly modest ends up being a benefit to the whole thing, though. I mean, get a group of dudes, put them on a mission, carry out mission is not a hard formula, right? Well, Corman and Charles Griffith don't do it particularly well, but...there are worse out there.

Lieutenant Factor (Michael Forest) is leading a small group of American soldiers deep into German territory in the middle of winter to do reconnaissance on the area. His second in command, Sergeant Potter (Frank Wolff) is a hothead who starts the film opening fire on a passing German patrol, killing them all despite Factor's orders that the mission shouldn't involve fighting unless necessary. That's...about the limit of characterization we're going to get. The other members of the troupe never have any real imprint or prominence.

The core issue with the film isn't the characters, though, it's the haphazard structure. There's no actual mission other than recon. They have a couple of encounters, but there's no building to anything. There eventually is something, the blowing of a bridge, but it doesn't appear as an idea until very late in the film. Until then, it's a series of mechanical events as the group finds a bit of trouble and gets themselves out. This could work fine if the character work was detailed and the vignettes were designed to bring out their characters in new and interesting ways. But, that's not really what happens. It's really just scenes that happen in war movies with thin characters playing around in them.

The biggest is when, after an attack, the men find an isolated house where Ilse (Sheila Carol), a dedicated German wife to a German officer. They have to hide. She doesn't want them around. Things are tense. They end up...killing her. It could be a whole thing about harshness and realities in war, but nothing is given any time to consider any consequences, and we're off to have more adventures. Including the boys having Christmas in a cave.

The plot, such as it is, eventually develops when Factor decides that they've finished reconning the sector they're supposed to but wants an answer as to how German tanks are getting to American lines. Factor decides to attack a key bridge in the next sector, and the men have a mission. Really, this should have been the mission from the very beginning. Each event should have been a step towards their goal. Instead, most of the film is just a series of random, war-related events with cardboard characters.

The finale of the film is an extended bit of suspense and a chase in the snow that feels like a predecessor to On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and it's all decently well done. Corman was always good for a well-filmed chase and action sequence to finish a film. It's just kind of an empty exercise, the biggest emotional catharsis we get when Factor gets to have an "I told you so" moment with Potter when it's all over.

Is this good? I wouldn't say so. It's too thin, the structure too random, and almost none of the events actually feed from one to the next. Performances are fine, nothing to write home about, and when the film finally does get something like a plot, it's decent. Thin, but decently executed.

As a leftover to fill a few days in a schedule, there are worse things out there. This isn't good. It's not even okay, but it's far from the worst.