All Rise...

Appellate Judge Patrick Bromley stars in the siege of 7-11.

The Charge

Against all odds they went to Hell and back.

The Case

There is a scene in 1993's Quentin Tarantino-penned True Romance in which Christian Slater's character Clarence, an all-around geek obsessed with comic books, Elvis and a particular type of genre movie, raves to a Hollywood producer (Saul Rubinek) how much he loves his Vietnam epic Coming Home in a Body Bag. Based on the kinds of movies Clarence is shown to love (I've seen True Romance a whole bunch of times), I suspect the movie that Tarantino is referencing with his fictional war film is Australian director Brian Trenchard-Smith's 1989 effort The Siege of Firebase Gloria, out now on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber.

R. Lee Ermey (Full Metal Jacket plays Hefner, leader of a platoon of U.S. marines patrolling Firebase Gloria when the Tet Offensive begins. They stay to assist in the fight, and countless lives are lost on both sides. That's pretty much the whole movie.

Yes, save for a few minutes of exposition here and there, The Siege of Firebase Gloria is essentially a 90-minute battle sequence. Coming at the tail end of a decade full of Vietnam movies—beginning with Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter and all the way through everything from Platoon to Hamburger Hill—The Siege of Firebase Gloria doesn't even attempt to to make sense of or contextualize the war. Some could argue that history dictates it's an impossible task anyway, but previous movies about the Vietnam war made gestures towards philosophizing on the effects of war on its soldiers or costs beyond the loss of human life. There are a couple of token beats in which the generals on either side of the fight are shown to be two sides of the same coin, but for the most part The Siege of Firebase Gloria reduces the war to a hyper violent action movie.

The good news is that Trenchard-Smith, an experienced director of cult and exploitation movies including BMX Bandits, Dead End Drive-In and Turkey Shoot, is very good at making hyper violent action movies. The movie is nonstop gunfire and explosions, bodies flying through the air and bursting with blood as squibs are detonated everywhere. At times it feels sensationalized—the kind of war movie meant to seem thrilling—and other times it displays an ugliness and a brutal reality not often seen on screen, such as when soldiers enter the barracks of wounded enemies and open fire on their injured or sleeping bodies. It's horrifying, and Trenchard-Smith shoots it with a detached eye. The effect is chilling.

But Trenchard-Smith also approaches the movie in much the same style as a jingoistic WWII movie; the visual language of the combat scenes is much more reminiscent of the Great War epics of the 1950s and '60s than we're used to seeing in a movie about the Vietnam war, which was largely defined by how different the terrain and combat style was compared to previous wars. I won't call the movie inauthentic, though, because of the participation of R. Lee Ermey, a former marine and drill instructor who fought in Vietnam and acted as technical advisor on some of the best movies about the war ever made. By some accounts, Ermey even contributed heavily to the screenplay, so I'll take his word for it. Whoever the writers are (William Nagle and Tony Johnston are the ones credited), they leave no war movie cliche left unturned—the voiceover, the dialogue, the slow-motion death scenes of the most important characters. The Siege of Firebase Gloria feels like the B-movie knockoff of other, better Vietnam films. In that way, it has its own charm.

Kino Lorber's Blu-ray of the movie presents it in a full 1080p HD transfer that's very, very grainy and taken from a source that has seen some better days, but boasts solid color reproduction and natural skin tones. The lossless stereo mix is serviceable but thinner than a movie with this many gunshots and explosions should be. The only bonus feature offered is the original theatrical trailer.

I really enjoyed The Siege of Firebase Gloria, but I'm an action movie junkie and a fan of both these kinds of exploitation movies and the work of Brian Trenchard-Smith. This pushed all of those buttons. There's definitely an audience for it, but it's probably movie fans looking for a lot less subtext in their war films. It's not a completely hollow effort—Trenchard-Smith affords time for losses on both sides and the reactions from the commanding officers—but it's a movie much more interested in blowing things up. And it does do that. It blows a lot of things up.

The Verdict

Not Guilty.

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