Ski Troop Attack

Being a night owl has its benefits when it comes to stumbling across movies. Awhile back, I flipped through the channels and found that one of Chicago's two PBS channels broadcasts public domain movies every morning at 2 a.m. Now in most cases, there's a reason they are public domain, but hey, if nothing else it saves me the $6 or 7 I'd have spent on those cheap DVDs you see at any number of stores. Like 1960's Ski Troop Attack, a good bad movie if there ever was.

Directed by cheapie director and B-movie master Roger Corman, you have to know what you're getting into when you see Ski Troop Attack. At just 63 minutes, it's short even for a short movie. But filming on what had to be a miniscule budget over a two-week period, Corman churned out a pretty bad B-movie that is so bad, it's actually pretty good. In other movies, like 1964's The Secret Invasion, Corman showed he was actually capable of making a quality movie, but four years earlier, he had this not-so classic WWII story.

It's winter 1944 in the Ardennes, and Lt. Factor (Michael Forest) is leading a four-man ski patrol behind German lines. Joining him are Sgt. Potter (Frank Wolff), a tough NCO who loves nothing more than a good fight with the Krauts, Pvt. Ciccola (Wally Campo), Pvt. Herman Grammelsbacher (Richard Sinatra), a Southern yokel who went through officer's training, and Pvt. Roost (second unit director Paul Rapp getting a shot on the other side of the camera), the radio operator. Out on patrol, they're caught up in a German advance, the Battle of the Bulge, and must decide what to do; head for their own lines or continue scouting behind the advance and radioing the info back in?

The positive of all this is Corman shot the movie in South Dakota in black and white and got some great footage of snow-capped mountains. The negative is that with the lack of budget/script/story, we get a lot of footage of the patrol skiing across these mountains. There's not a real flow to the story, just the patrol wandering around trying to avoid German soldiers, who never total more than 5 or 6 men, once again with the small budget. Late in the movie, Lt. Factor and the patrol do decide to blow up a key bridge with a German squad close behind them.

If you needed to introduce someone to a B-movie, this would be a good place to start with the cheapness of it obvious at all times. The German officer following them never gets a close-up, and we only hear someone talking in German, apparently a voiceover. The action scenes are similarly bad, a character shoots, a German soldier yells and falls, all blended in with archival war footage. There is a real doozy with the guns used with the patrol firing single-action rifles, but when fired, they sound like heavy-duty automatic machine guns.

Another gem is the jazzy, completely out of place music that plays almost constantly and loudly no matter whether the scene calls for it. Wolff's Potter almost falling to his death? Cue the saxophone solo! To be fair, it's not like the script helps the actors overcome any of these deficencies. Lines here are really only meant to move the patrol along. My personal favorite; 'Go help him, I'm going to climb that tree!' No joke, someone actually says that.

As negative as it all sounds, I did enjoy this movie in spite of all its cheesiness. Roger Corman never set out to make Gone With the Wind or Lawrence of Arabia, he was making low-budget B-movies that could be shown at drive in theaters across the country and around the world. If you stumble across this one, plop yourself down and enjoy the epic badness of it all.

Ski Troop Attack <---opening 5 minutes (1960): */****