Reviews

This movie has more going for it than a B grade script and a bunch of B grade actors. It's got swamps and hillbilly types who look like they came straight to the set without stopping off first at make-up. Diane Varsi is an X-rated, truly titillating Daisy Mae type who holds nothing back from the camera, or from Robert Walker Jr. The scenes of violence are almost accidentally realistic and moving. It's as if the director, writer, and cast were drinking with Sam Peckinpah and Robert Aldrich every day after filming. As the movie progresses, and the plot spins out, the characters seem to all gather a mix of momentum and resignation which effectively adds to the miasmic, depressive swamp-like feeling of the movie.

Some movies are just bad. This movie is bad, and it's good, and it's so bad it's often good. Like Dick Clark on acid (or moonshine)!

I remember the night my Mom and I sat up until 3:00 am and watched this on the late,late show in Denver. It must have been around 1972-73. I recall it had a very powerful sobering and clarifying effect on my then adolescent (15 yrs.) patriotic fervor; and this after growing up watching nearly every war movie and bit of W.W. II footage released at that time. The movie clearly sends a message and picture of the paradoxically courageous and senselessly destructive nature of WAR - any war. War is insane. Sometimes the soldiers are insane, more often the situations. But men die in war - like insects or saints, they die not for any abstract cause or creed like Liberty or Country or Family or Civilization; but more often and more truly for their comrades and friends next to and behind them.

The acting, the actors, the messages of this film are so powerful even today you will rarely see it at any movie rental shop, let alone on network or cable T.V.