Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Clarissa Mora The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Edwin The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Michael O'Keefe This action adventure has American Lt. Commander Jeffords(James Franciscus), serving with the British Royal Army being sent on a dangerous mission to Malta. His top secret assignment is to take command of a flotilla of motor torpedo boats and use them to destroy a Nazi glider bomb depot on Sicily. Jeffords is distracted, but not totally, by a naked woman, Alison(Elizabeth Shepard), swimming in the sea. Romance will begin to flare, only to flame out, when the American finds out that the woman is the wife of his immediate commander(Ronald Allen).This movie is actually filmed in Malta; scenery is nothing to speak of. HELL BOATS seems to have no real ambition and could easily be described as both dull and unmemorable. If there is any redemption, it is Miss Shepard providing some sizzle in a wet shirt. The cast also features: Mark Hawkins, John Heller, Magda Konopka, Takis Emmanuel and Reuven Bar-Yotam.

Theo Robertson You'd have thought with the concept of total war it might have given film producers more scope to make a film that doesn't revolve around this cliché: a British woman is romantically involved with an American serviceman and a Brit and both male characters have to work together on an extremely dangerous mission in which either only one of them or neither of them will come back . Stop me if you've seen this type of movie before . In the film producers defence they can claim that women won't instinctively feel the need to watch war films hence they need an angle , usually a love triangle , to sell a film to the widest possible audience HELL BOATS continues this cliché and brings many other clichés to the party . Being a film that features the Royal Navy it means they have to be led by an American in order to boost its box office stateside . As can be expected the best looking member of the cast is the American as well as being the bravest member on the suicide mission . Guns when fired by the good guys never run out of ammo while Germans never seem to be able to shoot straight etc etc In it self there's nothing fundamentally bad about HELL BOATS . The problem lies that it's a victim of film studios churning out one war film after another which all use the same type of premise and plotting and nothing in this movie sets it apart from its peers . It's not helped either that channel 5 broadcast this movie then followed it up with the brilliantly cynical THE BRIDGE AT REMAGEN immediately afterwards

oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx I adore Hell Boats, unapologetically.The plot's engine or conceit concerns a naval officer (Lieutenant Commander Jeffords) planning to destroy a German glider bomb depot in Augusta, Sicily, with his flotilla of motor torpedo boats (MTBs). Whilst preparing for this attack in a Malta under tourniquet, he becomes part of a love triangle. You could point out that it seems like a film where there were opposing creative forces at work, so that the parting shot of the movie, the final line of the script, falls like seed on marble. You could point out that in this movie, fairly inert objects seem to have an alchemical propensity for explosive combustibility when hit by bullets and that highly trained military individuals don't understand lines of fire, that Wehrmacht soldiers pointing machine guns at the back of spies magically fizz out of existence during a crunch, that Jeffords has a mage-like ability to become invisible in front of the enemy. You could point all this out but miss the beauty and oozing anguish of the film.I just like the honesty of the film, the portrayal of lonely people living with death wishes, confronting raw sexual compatibility when unavailable, making sentimental love choices, envying, being hypocrites, behaving petulantly. It's all baked under the Mediterranean sun, shot beautifully, and scored wonderfully. The film is as much about what is unsaid or not shown and merely alluded to than what is heard and shown.There's something crazy about watching these three creatures with irises like arctic meltwater, treading over Malta's quiet places, under the sandstone shadows, in and about its crenellations. The film seems much more in keeping with the tradition of Marguerite Duras and India Song than with typical World War II genre movies; Malta almost feeling like Camus's Oran.What's also quite clear though is that the action that happens, whilst sometimes making a few elementary mistakes, often achieves with model work alone, a "Boy's Own" intensity, that makes following aerial bombs down in Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor seem academic.It's well worth pointing out that director Paul Wendkos was in the Navy in World War II, and this film clearly meant a lot more to him than his usual fairly undistinguished output. Composer Frank Cordell served in military intelligence in the Mediterranean theatre during WWII and it would be fascinating to find out if he also had some influence as he was very much an engaged artistic collaborator.Rarely is a film as human as Hell Boats.

no2-10 Superficially it's a war drama of the tiny motor torpedo boats which did much unsung work in WW2, but the naval battles merely provide an exciting story in which an even more special romantic drama is wrapped up. The difficult love triangle involves the stuffy, awkward Brit and his unhappy wife, complicated by the arrival of the flamboyant American. The three play their parts beautifully as the tension rises; husband suspects wife, she is agonisingly torn between the two, lover tries to win her over.Additionally there is an element of professional respect between the officers, which only serves to frustrate their base instincts, as the competent yet uncertain Brit tries to hold onto both a command and a wife he knows he doesn't deserve, and the daring yet sensitive American (a divorcée?) starts to see some semblance of bravery fighting to break out from the Brit's inhibited facade. Very like real life, the path of love does not run true, and the result is thus more realistic than one would expect from a movie. The madcap plans to outwit the enemy mimic perhaps, the deceptions played out in the romance.This may not be a totally memorable film, but it has some finely understated beauty, which quietly avoids using hackneyed stereotypes, and mawkish efforts at pathos.