Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Senteur As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Matylda Swan It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

Comeuppance Reviews Set during 1942-43 during the prime years of World War II, Battle Force tells many separate tales, but the main two concern Maj. Mannfred Roland (Keach), a Nazi who has fallen in love with a Jewish actress, Annelise Ackermann (Eggar). The fate of their relationship is in limbo as Roland fights in North Africa and can't be at home in Germany to protect her from the evil Nazis (by comparison, he's a "good" Nazi). The other story tells the tale of Gen. Foster of the U.S. Army (Fonda). His son John (Lovelock) is something of a screw-up who can't please his demanding father. So he follows in his footsteps and enlists in the Army. The whole film is narrated by Orson Welles and features a lot of stock footage of the war. Will this truly be "The Biggest Battle" of them all? When we originally came across the Continental big-box VHS of this movie, how could we resist it: it's called Battle Force, and the tagline screams "THE MOST AWESOME BATTLE EVER SEEN!" Plus look at the cast. It's insane. And we didn't even have room to mention Orson Welles as the Narrator . How could it lose, right? Well...it's not that this movie is bad, really, but it's extremely stodgy and old-fashioned. It seems like the type of Sunday afternoon programmer your grandparents might watch to while away a rainy day. Yes, there is some war action, including some shooting and explosions (giving credit where credit is due, they're some quality blow-ups), but somehow it's not really enough. There are way too many cooks in this broth. There's a ridiculous amount of characters, plus the stock footage and narration, and the result is pretty much a jumble. Which, unfortunately, is not terribly engaging to the audience.We generally love Umberto Lenzi. We think he's great, but his war movie output (that we've seen, anyway) doesn't seem to rival his poliziotteschi work like Violent Protection (1976) or his classic exploitation horror stuff like Cannibal Ferox (1981), Eaten Alive (1980) or Nightmare City (1980) - not to mention his excellent giallo period of the 1970's. I wonder what Henry Fonda would think if he knew he was working under the demented genius who created the above titles? Regardless, a direct parallel can be made here: just as the equally-staid WWII drama The Second Victory (1987) is put out by AIP, who is normally known for much wilder and more entertaining fare, so is the case here with the rest of Umberto Lenzi's work. Why both AIP and Lenzi decided to "go boring" for their WWII jaunts is an interesting coincidence indeed.The movie is well-directed by Lenzi, and it is ambitious and expansive, but there's no humor whatsoever, and it all comes off as flat and uninvolving. It's all well and good to play "spot the star" but that's not really a coherent way to make a movie. Perhaps sensing this, we must quote the writer of the back of the VHS box. At the very end of a multi-paragraph description, the final pitch to rent or buy this movie to a potential buyer or renter is this: "Fans of tank warfare will appreciate the large numbers of tanks and other armored vehicles employed in the well-choreographed battle sequences. The military hardware in the film is quite elaborate, including a "Big Bertha" railroad gun." And that's it. That's the capper. It seems this movie would be the perfect Christmas gift to that member of your family who inevitably is a "fan of tank warfare". And just the words "Big Bertha" are enough to pique our interest.In the end, it seems only die-hard fans of any of the personalities involved with this project would get much out of Battle Force.For more action insanity, please visit: www.comeuppancereviews.com

jaibo Il grande attacco, also known in various versions under the English titles Battle Force and The Greatest Battle, is by consensus a muddled WW2 Action picture with some good battle scenes and a confused plot. It maybe that the film is a lazy effort on the part of its writers but it also, in its incoherence, manages to say something about war and history which is inexpressible through a more formally consistent narrative.A disparate group of people – an American general (Henry Fonda), an Irish-American war correspondent (John Huston), a German officer (Stacey Keach) and a famous German-Jewish actress (Samantha Eggar) meet in Berlin on the day that Jessie Owens wins an Olympic gold medal and the German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, refuses to shake the athlete's hand. The characters gossip casually about this and go their separate ways, with Fonda and Keach swapping souvenir Olympic medallions as a measure of their friendship. Six years later, these and a number of other characters are enmeshed in the second world war, the film consisting of various seemingly random sequences involving the characters in some kind of dramatic situation or undertaking a battle mission. Some of them are killed and some are still alive in 1943, where the film arbitrarily ends. But a coincidence means that the now dead Keach's medallion is in the hands of Fonda's American hero son (Ray Lovelock, of Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue 'fame').Taking the film at face value and allowing it not to conform to classical narrative structures, it seems that the arbitrary and the coincidental are the rules of the game here. There is no narrative arc or learning curve to most of the characters' lives; they are driven to undertake their roles in the war, through either loyalty to their homeland or to their professions, without even really coming to a consciousness of their situation. This is most striking in Keach's story: he marries Eggar and fights and dies, heroically, for the German side in Africa; at home, his wife is sexually harassed and persecuted by the Gestapo until she commits suicide. Keach dies without knowing that the ideology he has been fighting for has killed the woman he loves.Another sub-plot features Edwige Fenech as a French woman driven to prostituting herself to German officers by poverty. She isn't a bad person, she's eaten with self-loathing through her circumstance and is genuinely shocked when the Germans execute a Resistance fighter who has tried to hide in her apartment. Nevertheless, she herself is shot dead by the Resistance who are under the misguided impression that she was behind their compatriot's death. Her murder is quick and brutally achieved and her death doesn't teaches anyone anything. Life in war, for her and for most of the characters, is meaningless, degrading, dangerous and comes to a sudden end, as if life were a drive which simply stops when it meets an opposing, amoral force. Earlier in the film, Fenech has been helped by German officer Helmut Berger, here playing a character somewhat similar to Brando's in The Young Lions. Berger is fiercely loyal to Germany but doesn't seem ideologically Nazi nor does he seem to have lost his humanity – he looks seriously disturbed as he sees the death around him. Yet like Keach he never learns anything but how to die, which he (like an American soldier he'd previously shot) begs for. That Fonda's son doesn't kill Berger at the latter's request means nothing, as Berger croaks whilst drinking the water that Lovelock tries to force down his throat.There is a brief respite from the film's grimness at the end, as Fonda learns that Lovelock has survived thus far and been commended. Yet this is a bitter sweet given that this takes place after Fonda's visit to his other son's grave, who has been killed a few months before. More telling is the moment where Huston and a young cameraman are killed filming a battle – the camera is shown strewn in the sand, as if in a reflexive moment Il grande attacco realises and admits that the process of filming battles is futile.There's no point in arguing that this is a great film. There is something rather distasteful about its predominant concentration on the lives of the officer classes (Fenech's character is the only exception) and it may be that Il grande attacco really is not worthy of serious consideration. Yet its inconsistency and randomness adds up to a curiously consistent vision of war as a meaningless serious of events for those unlucky enough to be caught up in its history and unconscious enough not to comprehend their predicament. Director and co-writer Umberto Lenzi was, during the same period as this film was produced, producing some of the sleaziest and sickest of the giallo, crime and even cannibal films of the age; perhaps this is better understood as part of that movement in Italian cinema that produced films which deliberately undercut the meaning-making inherent in the Hollywood model, producing a provoking vision of a universe of cruelty, absurdity and violent death which shows that the world is more made up of swirling, futile vortices than character-building, consequential journeys.

Michael A. Martinez I don't understand how Luciano Martino and Mino Loy were able to raise the money to hire so many big-name actors of the time (such as Orson Welles, John Huston, Henry Fonda, and Samantha Eggar) but they still had to rely on plentiful stock footage from earlier war movies like THE BATTLE OF EL ALAMEIN and LEGION OF THE DAMNED. Umberto Lenzi's directing is good as usual, with lots of emphasis placed on the well-edited action scenes. The budget for such scenes seems quite minimal however, with a lot of the same actors dying over and over again, and a few really shoddy toy tanks exploding (though a few shots of these tanks were lifted from other movies).As for the cast, just about everybody that had anything to do with the Italian movie industry shows up somewhere in the movie, from familiar dubbing voice Robert Spafford as Patton to future director Michele Soavi as Fonda's dead son. The photography and music are all top notch, yet this movie has gotten ad reviews accross the board. Why? Because it has little or no plot to speak of. There are so many characters and so much going on in the film that it has no focus or direction. Eggar's character has no point in the movie other than she makes it slightly longer, and Edwige Fenech gets one lousy scene as a French prostitute. Eventually, most of the actors end up in Africa fighting on one side or the other and (surprise!) the Germans lose and all the German characters die, the end. But who goes to watch a good old-fashioned war movie for the plot anyway? There's plenty to enjoy if you like watching German soldiers lying in the road pretending to be dead so they can shoot the American soldiers that run up to help them. It also contains a number of memorable scenes like when Stacy Keach gets lost in the desert and falls over after about 1 minute of walking, and a very goofy case of bad communication when Ray Lovelock attempts to call up his father and the two barely manage to get through even a few words...The ending really comes out of nowhere though, but it's made especially funny as John Huston seems to just get bored of the movie and walk off saying "seeya around" right into the camera! Definitely not a movie to miss...for fans of the genre.

emm For a low-budget movie set during World War II, it does have a rough and violent edge. Above all, BATTLE FORCE surrenders to a non-existent plot and storyline that's been duped hundreds of times repeatedly. Don't expect much here as there's no specific meaning. Explosions and body counts are nothing new! Adding to the troop casulty count is of Orson Welles' annoying and interrupting narration, making it feel like a made-for-television documentary. War movies are instant classics in the grade "A" Hollywood circuit, and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN triumphs realism today. Despite a fairly good replica of those WW2 days, BATTLE FORCE is another run-of-the-mill production without enough substance. Anyone who grew up watching Hollywood war dramas in their lifetimes probably avoided this one while history was made.