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Review

You could be forgiven, if you watched the wrong five minutes of this movie, for confusing it with a run-of-the-mill low budget '80s actioner about a ragtag bunch of unlikely heroes taking on what seems to be an unstoppable force. Come to think of it, that's exactly what Troma's War is, but with an edge of Tromatic satire to tie the whole thing together.

A plane filled with tourists crash lands on a deserted island only to have the survivors make the unpleasant discovery that the island is actually filled with terrorist commandos. Naturally, a few of the survivors just happen to have some combat experience and, soon enough, the whole gang (from the stereotypical Jewish mother type to the airhead rock band) is firing submachine guns wildly at their multi-ethnic terrorist assailants. Troma was evidently working with a somewhat larger budget than nornal as the explosions, bloodshed and bullets are abundant (if often played for comic ridiculousness.)

What makes Troma's War such an effective satire is how closely it hues to the genre whose politics it's mocking: within one day all of the plane's survivors are armed and covered in greasepaint; the day is, at some point, saved by the women who were supposed to be left behind. In fact, other than the terrorists tendency to fart and be covered with very Troma-esque face boils, the film makes every effort to stick to the genre it's sticking it to. Clearly, the filmmakers made Troma's War to be a serious (if patently absurd) satire of '80s jingoism and a few plot twists compound to make clear that this actioner does not endorse Reagan's approach to foreign policy and, in this goal, they are moderately successful. But, where the film excels most is simply in the Tromatic ridiculousness.

 -- Daniel Reed

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