3/10
A Roger Corman Shoot In Dante's Ninth Circle
13 November 2019
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.
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