Operation Warzone (1988) User Reviews

Operation Warzone is a misfire.

[tarbosh22000 · 4/10 · 14 April 2011]

Get ready for yet another romp in the jungle courtesy of David Prior and AIP. In this particular Vietnam war scenario, Sgt. Holt (Matthews), Cpl. Butler (Zipp) and Cpl. Adams (Holton), among other soldiers, are bravely fighting in the impossible conditions of the 'Nam jungles. During a firefight, they rescue two Tunnel Rats, Jenson (King) and Hawkins (Cianetti). It comes to light that there is a mysterious, unseen man, dubbed "The General" that has classified documents that could supposedly end the war. Much of the madness can be traced back to Washington and the corrupt George Delevane (Spinell). In a Firehawk-like situation, the soldiers don't know who to trust, and there could be a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top. Will Holt and the boys make it home alive? Or will the behind-the-scenes dealings get the better of everyone? Mindless shooting. Exploding huts. Endless machine gun firefights. Uninteresting explosions. Brain-numbing stupidity. Inexcusable boredom. Zero character development. Unexplained Australians. Goofy chases. Prerequisite torture sequence. An unnecessary fistfight scene that is so absurdly extended it makes the "put on the glasses" scene from They Live (1988) look like a blip. These are some basic snapshots that should give you some idea of the "we have to sit through it" vibe of Operation Warzone Matthews, Zipp and Holton are all AIP regulars, doing many things both in front of and behind the camera. It seems, contractually, Zipp cannot be in a movie that doesn't take place in a jungle. So he must have been right at home. Holton looks completely different that he did in White Fury (1990). In 'Fury he's a snot-nosed little punk, and here he has an adult mustache and appears at least ten years older - but 'Warzone came out two years BEFORE White Fury! How quickly they grow up...or something like that. The legendary and excellent actor Joe Spinell is on hand, and his presence is much appreciated, but it's what we call a "sit-down" role. In other words, in many instances, from Mickey Rooney in Maximum Force (1992), to Henry Silva in Violent Breed (1984), to Spinell here (just to name a few), the movie production will hire a name actor to do some scenes over the course of a day or two, give or take. But all the actor's scenes are sitting down. They never leave their chair. It just kind of exposes the penury of a given production. Here Spinell gives his sit-down role, which is better than many of the other actors' more action based scenes, but the bottom line is the movie definitely could have used much more Spinell.

Another thing worth mentioning is the highly inappropriate music. Although the movie is set in 1960's Vietnam, a happy, upbeat, jaunty 80's synthpop song that sounds exactly like Wham!'s "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" blasts onto the soundtrack. I know it seems incredible, but it's true. What were they thinking? That being said, Steve McClintock's closing credits dirge "Shadow Of A Doubt" is catchy and one of the best things about Operation Warzone. You gotta hand it to AIP. Almost all their movies have at least one catchy, memorable, original song. It's really a fairly dependable thing. No matter how "bad" the movie is, at least there will be a song. When is someone going to release a CD, "AIP's greatest hits"? It would be amazing! Dumb on top of dumb on top of dumb, Operation Warzone is a misfire.

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I can't believe this movie exists

[glap-rap · 1/10 · 10 May 2005]

My father is notorious for picking out terrible movies from the bargain bin at the rental store. My friends and I like to go through the stuff he's hand-chosen and give it a watch just for laughs.

This movie was one of those.

But we didn't get normal laughs out of it, oh no. They were roaring laughs of incredulity and surprise. One thing we kept thinking was "how does this movie exist?" One friend made an excellent point: it's only considered a film because it's BEEN filmed. It carries no natural facets of film-making...there's completely unnecessary twists (and I mean UNNECESSARY) and scenes that go on for far too long (think 5 minute fist fights where both opponents are tired, but just don't stop until they both fall over), and you can't tell it's supposed to be in Vietnam until they tell you it's Vietnam. The Vietnamese looked like a couple Philippino guys.

The story is that this war exists solely for financial gain. They maintain that this is a complex storyline on the back of the case, but I see no signs of this. It's just vaguely explained in some scene that I was too busy laughing about. And while we're on the subject of accurate warfare, let's talk about the fact that there's hand-to-hand combat way too often, there's INTRIGUE (or attempts at it, anyways), and weird chase scenes that smack of a 30's silent film. The tagline is "they told 'em war was hell...they were right!" This leads me to believe they actually thought this to be an accurate representation of war. It's almost an appalling concept.

There was a point at which I was actually trying to figure out if this was an elaborate joke that one man made on his spare time, or that the movie was supposed to be a comedy but it was too subtle. It was at this point that there was a dramatic scene with explosives and running, but the music sounded exactly like - I swear to god - an aerobics video from 1986. The music literally never matched the scene it was trying to help along. And it was directly before this that some unexplained Australian character came along and said "cut through the dingo s***!"

Maybe his character had been explained earlier, and I was too busy laughing to notice.

I'm positive this movie is one of two things: an ingenious comedy, or probably the worst movie I've ever seen.

This is a LAUGH RIOT!

[odanny · 4 July 2004]

Oh my gosh, if you want side splitting laughter you HAVE to rent this movie!

Of course, finding a copy of this one might be an incredible challenge, but if you have the time, look for it. Look everywhere, search every video store, look at every garage sale, scour every pawn shop, leave no stone unturned. At first glance I thought this was a spoof, but when I soon realized that these "actors" were trying to seriously portray Vietnam-era Army soldiers (with mullet haircuts!) it instantly got my attention. What I next witnessed was 60 minutes of the most incredibly cheesy, laugh-out-loud low budget portrayal of combat, that I can't help but think of the look on someones face after watching this movie and thinking they were paying for a movie they expected to take seriously!

This movie is, absolutely, undoubtedly, without any reservation the worst movie I have ever watched. This you can't miss!

War is Hell. So is This.

[Zantara Xenophobe · 1/10 · 1 May 2003]

I truly believe that David A. Prior respects Vietnam veterans 100%, I really do. He tries time and time again to show them in a heroic light, kicking enemy tail like no one's business. Unfortunately, when he tries to make a straight-up war movie, he falls flat on his face. I have not seen all of Prior's war movies, but I have seen `Hell on the Battlefield,' which was hell in my easy chair. Like that movie, `Operation Warzone' is a boring bust, low on plot, laughable on action, and downright pointless. Prior is at his best when taking the war element and adding some sort of supernatural element to it, like he did with `Night Wars' and `Lock 'n Load,' two movies I very much enjoyed. I also liked his `Invasion Force,' which was fun to watch and had a clever final shot to boot. But this . . . . this is bad stuff.

I will attempt to type a plot, but it is so paper thin it is hardly worth bothering with. Three soldiers are in the Vietnam War, battling the Vietcong. They save two more soldiers from death and the five of them battle more enemy troops for what seems like days on end to the viewer. Finally, something happens. Well, actually nothing happens but more bad shooting, but we are introduced to some more allied troops. Thing is, they are searching for a soldier known as `The General.' No one knows who he is, only that he knows where and when a secret shipment of goods will be delivered. We also find out a politician in Washington has some troops trying to find The General to extort the coordinates out of him so they can sell the information to the Vietcong. So for the rest of the movie we see our heroes getting captured and interrogated over something we don't care about at all. Prior's method of not telling us The General's identity is almost interesting, but by using process of elimination it is not hard to figure it out for ourselves. It couldn't end soon enough for me.

Where does this movie go wrong? And easier question would be: Where does this movie go right? And the answer would be: Nowhere. You want bad action? You got it! You want bad actors? You got 'em! You want bad dialogue? It's yours! You want to be bored out of your mind while your intelligence is insulted? Well, then this movie is for you! Let's start with the fighting. First, we have a lot of shooting between our heroes and the Vietcong. The Vietcong all wear nice looking beige uniforms and white socks, walking around in woods that simply make it clear we are filming in California and not in a jungle. No matter how much they shoot at the heroes, they can't hit a thing and might as well have painted big red and white bull's-eyes on their chests. You find this out ten seconds into the movie, so at no point do you fear them. The same could basically be said for the enemy American soldiers they face later. But it's the fistfight scenes that are truly laughable for any bad movie buff. If you tied the Kool-Aid Man to a rope on a pulley and had Quasimodo hoist him up and down every hour for a month you still wouldn't have as many pulled punches as you can find in `Operation Warzone.' Oh, and this definitely sets a record for the number of sucker punches in a single movie. Every ten minutes one of the Americans has to cheap shot a fellow American for one lame reason or another. You're got bad pyrotechnics that are supposed to be special effects. I thought the effects in Prior's `The Final Sanction' were bad, but this takes the cake. Dime store firecrackers that are supposed to be grenade explosions can wipe out bad guys a few yards away, yet when the same explosions happen RIGHT UNDERNEATH the feet of our heroes, they are merely knocked down and spring back up a few seconds later.

Normally, I would make a statement on how a Prior movie contains good music by Steve McClintock and Tim James. They do the music, but even they can't force praise out of me. Their jovial tunes are so completely out of place here that I just so hope they were purposefully sabotaging the work, saving their good stuff for a film much more worthy of their talents. Worst of all is the blatant insult to the intelligence (MAJOR SPOILER ALERT!!!) In the end, when a bunch of people come together to stop the evil American commander and his men, they are joined by two characters who were clearly killed in the first half of the movie, but are now suddenly alive. No explanation is given. I have run over many possibilities of how they were present in the end, but barring voodoo there is just no way it could have happened. (END OF MAJOR SPOILER ALERT) There is absolutely no reason to bother with this movie. No actor or character makes a mark (I choose not to mention their names and embarrass them), no scene is exciting, and no dialogue is worth repeating. And it is not worth any more of my time. And it is certainly not worth any of yours. Zantara's score: 1 out of 10.

Watching this movie reminds me of my childhood when I was playing war with plastic toy guns

[jordondave-28085 · 1/10 · 18 September 2023]

(1989) Operation War Zone WAR

Super duper low budget co-written and directed by David A. Prior meant to be a serious war film, about corruption happening among people working for the pentagon, for the intentions of continuing the war efforts happening in Vietnam, so that money can be made for certain high official people.

All this is, is adults playing soldiers on a national park or on someone's back yard- you can decide, using toy guns with sparks coming out and fireworks that are supposed to be grenades with sound effects too. Theirs also a lot of guys wearing rented green outfits who're supposed to be chased running through trails, beautiful enough than some of the dangerous ones I've been through in terms of the woods. One might get a big chuckle out of watching this, that was supposed to be serious....and I almost said comedy, but I don't find any of this funny except a waste of time!. The only thing I got out of this was that it was reminiscent of my old days when I was a child and played with toy guns against other kids around the neighborhood, It sure brought back some memories. This one gets a big fat ZERO!!

Great muzzle flashes!

[davidecasteel · 8/10 · 9 April 2011]

This AIP war movie is a genre for which I have a very simplistic method of rating: I count the number of muzzle flashes displayed in it, and note something about their beauty. I do not expect realism, good acting, proper tactics, or even much plot. I sit back, watch the action, and enjoy myself. I do a lot of laughing, but that's what I expect and I get a good time out of it.

As for details, this film had 884 muzzle flashes, which makes it a solid 6-star movie on my scale (8 stars is max, and no actual film has ever achieved that--it takes 3200 flashes to do that). There are about 20 films that have achieved the 6-star rating or higher, but what sets this one apart is that about half of the flashes (almost 400) happen in the very first 5 minutes of the movie (and the action is at night). The flames are quite spectacular.

The plot (such as it is) has several interesting twists that I found unexpected and, therefore, interesting.

great underrated war movie!

[hambuger15 · 10/10 · 9 November 2006]

I can't believe everybody's trashing this film,its a unique Vietnam war movie in which a platoon of American soldiers take on both Vietcong and turncoat American soldiers.Its about a us platoon who find a CIA agent in the jungles of Vietnam who has information about a corrupt US general who sells weapons to the Vietcong in order to keep the Vietnam war going for a long time and if he discloses the information the US could very end AND win the Vietnam war thereby preventing one of the greatest US military tragedies!The "real"Americans defeat both the VC and turncoat Americans,put a stop to the Iran-contra like affairs and the US literally wins the Vietnam war! (through stock footage announcing that the Americans have conquered North Vietnam)

Hokey war film

[lor_ · 24 May 2023]

My review was written in July 1990 after watching the movie on AIP video cassette.

This made-for-video feature re-fights the Vietnam War with the novelty of trying to win this time. It's not much but a diversion for action fans.

The late Joe Spinell phones in his role as a general at the Pentagon who's spearheading an illegal arms shipment. "General" is also the codename for a guy who has key information about the arms.

The heroes consist of army intelligence officers and a gung-ho sergeant who quite improbably get the info and use the arms in a major offensive in an attempt to win the war. What this has to do with historical reality is mainly wishful thinking.

AIP regulars Fritz Matthews (who also produced) and William Zipp are okay in the heroics department. California-lensed film lacks any credible atmosphere. Most confusing element is the opening battle (prior to any exposition) between heroes and Hispanic actors portraying Viet Cong.