Night Wars

The movie was alright..The used car man was hot! The salesman..those eyes. They don't make men like that in the 2000's. He is played by David Ott. Are there any other films featuring him (topless hopefully).

The car chase doesn't last long enough.

He's cute.

Acting is OK but he is quite the comic relief.

At first glance he looks like the late Michael Hutchance from INXS.

Would like to see him today.

Thought I caught him uncredited in Vanilla Shy but that is some years later.

Possibly has short role in "Sex and the City"

Nine years ago, Trent and Jim managed to escape from a POW camp in Vietnam. They had been captured and were being tortured by a soldier named McGregor, who had been part of their platoon but turned over to the communists. During the escape, they were unable to save their friend Johnny, and were forced to abandon him. This has left a lasting shadow of guilt over the men now that they have returned to civvie street. Trent is married and has a stable job, while Jim is an alcoholic and lives alone. Now, Trent and Jim find that they are both having recurring nightmares about the event and when they wake up, they are cut and bruised, and sometimes bring things back with them from their nightmares. And they are beginning to see Johnny on the streets, and driving around. It seems that McGregor, and their pal Johnny, have unfinished business with them...

This made me think of Chuck Norris vs. Freddy Krueger, in that the "Missing in Action" series meets "A Nightmare on Elm Street". Vietnam Vets return to the war to bring a man home through the dream-world. Certainly not as bad as the low-budget and obscurity suggests. The performances are decent and the dream sequences are quite good. I really enjoyed it, but the ending did leave a lot to be desired. I think Prior just lost control of the film by then as there appeared to be some confusion over where the dream-world ended and reality began. Wes Craven did it better, but "Night Wars" still has an appeal to it.

My review was written in September 1988 after a screening at Selwyn theater on Manhattan's 42nd Street.

"Night Wars" presents an extremely goofy approach to the familiar theme of Vietnam War vets' malaise, treated in supernatural terms. Pic is a standard-issue quickie, more for video than theatrical fans.

Brian O'Connor and Cameron Smith are the vets who have nightmares and hallucinations relating to their leaving behind platoon mate Chet Hood back in Vietnam. Problem is that the nightmares are for real, with wounds inflicted while sleeping still there upon wakeup and even Hood's severed finger materializing for real.

Another war buddy, Dan Haggerty, is now a shrink who rather laughably doesn't believe the heroes' tales of their predicament and gives them a sedative instead of keeping them awake. When machine gun fire from the Great Beyond kills Matthews' pretty wife Jill Foor, Haggerty is a believer.

Silliest scene has O'Connor and Smith putting on camouflage makeup and outfits, arming themselves to the teeth and lying down on a bed together to sleep -they're to do battle with their renegade nemesis Steve Horton, but visually it's campy.

Director David Prior's action scenes are perfunctory, but the acting is okay, except for a very hammy turn by Horton. The supernatural content linking dreams with reality is unconvincing, used in "anything goes" fashion.

Trent (Brian O'Connor) and Jimmy (Cameron Smith) are two Nam vet buddies who escaped a POW prison camp only to face worse horrors at home when the past literally comes back to haunt them. They're harassed by a soldier they left behind and a sadistic traitor who helped torture them, and when they're attacked in their dreams, they emerge with real scars (a la A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET). The two deck out in cameo and carry high-powered machine guns into their dreams to fight back after one's wife is raped and killed by a ghost. Dan (GRIZZLY ADAMS) Haggerty is the top-billed guest star. He plays a psychiatrist who tries to "help" by holding them at gunpoint, drugging them and tying them up in his office!

The premise is somewhat new, but the unconvincing Nam flashbacks look like the stars are playing War Games in the woods behind their house, the dialogue ("Let's do it!," "I'm scared, man!") is annoying and the action and horror scenes just aren't very exciting.

Prolific director David A. Prior also combined the war and horror genres in THE LOST PLATOON (1989) and also directed KILLER WORKOUT (1987), MARDI GRAS FOR THE DEVIL (1992) and MUTANT SPECIES (1995) in between all his cheapo action movies. He scripted from a story he wrote with his brother Ted Prior and William Zipp (both of whom acted in his previous films).

Oh, dear, this one is awful! I once bet a Navy Chief Petty Officer, a Marine Gunnery Sergeant, and a couple of enlisted guys a case of beer if they could get through it without "losing it," and I let them decide for themselves what "losing it" meant. I won the beer.

One learns a number of interesting things about infantry combat in this little retcher - for one thing, the Viet Cong ought to sue the makers for defamation (it was shot in Mexico, and most of the bad guys are remarkably un-Asian types who the credits reveal have names ending in "ez.") Let's start with the a new martial arts technique - get your opponent face-down and pull his hair back and voila! his neck breaks. Evidently that's what my little sister was after lo those many years ago...

The idea, of course, is a post-traumatic-syndrome exploitation flick. One views a patrol of good guys, evidently Woodstock castoffs, stumbling through the Vietnamese jungles falling over one another - "combat separation" here evidently refers to "get 12 guys into the camera's viewfinder simultaneously." One shot down the trail would have shish-kebab'd these goofs out of their misery. And what misery it was...

Here we have the hero, in the middle of a desperate firefight, ducking behind a tree and for some reason popping the magazine out from his .45 - perhaps to see how many "bullets" were left - I use the term "bullets" advisedly since the camera closeup reveals, in all its brassy glory, the crimped end of a blank cartridge. Appalling.

The climax involves our heroes stuffing a cheap hotel room with enough ordnance to sink an aircraft carrier, then, as do all who are minutes away from furious mortal combat, falling asleep. I shall leave the denouement for those stubborn enough to last that far...

Three thumbs-down, but a decent effort for the truly masochistic.