Sam Panico
In Italy, an American military patrol discovers a crashed spaceship and its alien crew. It also finds itself up against a Nazi flank packed with soldiers and tanks. Also: Hitler gets punched in the face.Written by Paul De Meo (Eliminators) and directed by Danny Bilson (who also wrote The Rocketeer), this is a film long on humor and crazy ideas but short on plot. If you like Trancers, well, you'll like this as it shares a lot of the same actors. Tim Thomerson is great as the near-mythic Sarge, a man who never dies no matter how many times he's shot. If you've ever read Sergeant Rock, he'll seem pretty familiar.If Empire Pictures was around today, they'd be talking about a shared universe where characters from ReAnimator would battle Jack Deth from Trancers and The Dungeonmaster. Oh man - don't forget RoboJox, Dolls, The Eliminators and Klaus Kinski from Crawlspace!
dukeakasmudge
Zone Troopers is a movie that I'm glad I got to watch but that's about it.Watching it once was enough for me.The entire time I was thinking I'd like to see the aliens fighting along side the Americans against the Nazis & it does happen but when it does, there's less than 10 minutes left in the movie so it was like when you wait awhile for something to happen, only to think after it's over, I wasted all this time, just for that??? The aliens lazer guns, ray guns, whatever you want to call them were weak looking.When they shot them at the Germans & the Germans vanished into thin air, it was weak as well.I don't know what I was expecting but even for a low budget movie I expected something better.Not all of the movie was bad though.There were a lot of times where I either laughed out loud or chuckled.I didn't HATE Zone Troopers but I wasn't all that into it as much as I expected to be either.When I read the description I thought this movie is going to be AWESOME & after watching it, I'm just sitting here like....... It did have a 1950's Sci Fi vibe to it for a movie made in the 80's which I think was pretty cool (Maybe that's why the lazer/ray guns effects were so weak.It was done on purpose to give it that 50's Sci Fi effect.I might have to give it a 2nd look someday) Even though I wasn't all that into it, I'd recommend checking it out if you were thinking about watching it.It's worth checking out at least once
MartinHafer
For some reason, IMDb does not list the estimated cost to make this film--something that they almost always give for each film. However, it doesn't take a genius to see that this film was done on the cheap--sort of like an Ed Wood or Roger Corman flick. You've only got a very small number of actors fighting for the Germans and Americans--even though it's supposed to be WWII (and this was a relatively large tiff). The acting is also only fair and the film didn't seem to go anywhere despite an interesting idea. Here's the idea--American and German soldiers are killing each other when, out of the blue, an alien lands! Now the idea of aliens disrupting WWII is a great idea and the writer Harry Turtledove did a wonderful series of alternative histories based on the premise. But in Turtledove's case, there are LOTS of aliens and lots of action, whereas in "Zone Troopers" they obviously had no budget, so you only get the bare minimum of everything. An interesting idea but nothing more.
PhilosophicZombi
7 1/2 out of 10I was scanning some titles at a local video store when I happened upon a bizarre little film called Zone Troopers. A group of American soldiers in WW II stuck behind enemy lines, run across a crashed alien spacecraft. The box art looked promising, but my expectations were low. Surprise! This movie was actually entertaining. Sure there were some gaping plot holes, the script wasn't exactly academy award material, and the alien costume left a little to be desired, but I had no trouble getting into this film. It never got boring, I even became attached to a few of the characters. This won't top anyone's movie list, but it's definitely worth a watch. For Full Moon fans out there you'll be happy to know that Tim Thomerson, the "Dollman" himself, acts as the Sarge in Zone Troopers, easily my favorite character of the bunch.
AD
