All Rise...

Appellate Judge Patrick Bromley is a Twilight Zone Trooper, leading the fight against twist endings.

The Charge

They take war to a new dimension.

The Case

As a video store kid of the 1980s and '90s, I'm a big fan of both Empire Pictures and Full Moon Features, the two companies run by filmmaker/low-budget CEO Charles Band. I know that Full Moon has had quality control issues in the last 20 years and that both that company and Empire are responsible for some terrible movies. I'm not blind to the realities of those catalogues. But as someone who grew up loving genre movies and often seeking out the offbeat and straight-up weird titles Empire and Full Moon put out, I began to notice connections between the movies without even understanding what they had in common. I started to pick up on a particular sensibility in the movies and eventually came to recognize them as being part of the same universe—in the case of Full Moon, quite literally.

I mention all of this so as to appropriately disclaim what some might see as an unreasonable affection for a movie like Zone Troopers, long hard to come by (save for one of those DVD-Rs made available by MGM a few years back) and now arriving on Blu-ray as part of Kino Lorber's growing "Studio Classics" line. I could not be more excited about owning this movie in high def. Take everything that follows with the appropriate grain(s) of salt.

The great Tim Thomerson (Air America) stars as "The Sarge," leader of a unit of American soldiers fighting in Italy during WWII. While fighting back the Nazi threat, Sarge and his crew—which also includes Joey (Timothy Van Patten, Class of 1984), Mittens (Art LaFleur, Cobra) and alcoholic Dolan (Biff Manard, The Wrong Guys)—discover an alien ship with its otherworldly passenger still on board. Unfortunately, the Nazis also discover the ship. It's now up to Sarge and his men to rescue the alien and stop the spacecraft from falling into Nazi hands, all while avoiding capture themselves.

In many ways, Zone Troopers is a reunion movie for Trancers, the cool little sci-fi action movie that's part Blade Runner, part The Terminator, all awesome. Released the same year as Trancers, Zone Troopers is written by the team of Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo, who would later go on to co-create the CBS incarnation of The Flash and write Eliminators and The Rocketeer. Charles Band and Empire Pictures produced both Zone Troopers and Trancers. Thomerson, LaFleur and Manard act in both. It's almost like Band gathered up the cast and crew of one movie and dropped them into another one—which, come to think of it, is more than likely what happened.

Here's a little test to see if you stand any chance of enjoying Zone Troopers: if you can get past the alien design, this might be a movie for you. The creature, designed by John Carl Buechler, is essentially a little person inside a furry bug suit. It is a very unconvincing special effect, but training oneself to watch low-budget B-movies like this often means suspending disbelief well past the realm with which we are typically comfortable. Besides, this isn't a movie about the alien—it's a movie about how the soldiers react to the alien. In that arena, Zone Troopers excels. Danny Bilson, the movie's co-writer making his directorial debut, stacks the deck with character actors and wisely lets them do most of the heavy lifting. While Van Patten never quite finds his groove, there's something charmingly old-school about his performance—he's playing a very specific archetype from old war movies (the sweet, sensitive kid) and does it well. And any movie with Tim Thomerson playing a grizzled army sergeant demands to be seen sooner than later.

While it never quite mixes tones and genres quite as well as Trancers did, Zone Troopers was exactly the kind of movie that played all over HBO on Saturday afternoons in the '80s. It's got action of the PG-rated variety, a sci-fi/fantasy angle (because every movie in the '80s did) and a self-aware sense of humor that never exactly turns to the camera and winks but still lets us know that the filmmakers knew exactly what movie they were making and had enough of a budget to realize a lot of their ideas. If you're a fan of these Empire movies, there are lots of reasons to like it. Richard Band contributes a score; Ted Nicolau (who would go on to direct TerrorVision for Empire and the Subspecies films for Full Moon) is the editor. This was Empire's first movie shot in Italy, where Band would soon purchase a castle and use it as a studio to shoot most of their movies until the end of the '80s.

Now it's on Blu-ray, which I could never have predicted. Kino Lorber's 1080p transfer looks pretty good, offering solid color reproduction and detail and not much visible print damage (there's some, but nothing that becomes distracting). The DTS mono track is a bit thin in the action sequences but gets the job done, presenting the dialogue clearly and never drowning it out with the big band music that fills the soundtrack. While a number of these recent catalogue titles released by Kino come without any special features, they included some fun supplements on their release of Zone Troopers. Bilson and De Meo offer an engaging and informative commentary, while star Thomerson sits for a brand new interview about making the movie. Also included is the film's original theatrical trailer.

Zone Troopers is exactly what you think it is: a low-budget and very entertaining love letter to old war and science fiction films. If you're a fan of either one—or a student of off the beaten path genre movies of the '80s—you're likely to enjoy yourself. While most of these old Empire titles have been released by Scream Factory lately, I'm happy to see Kino Lorber put care into the title and deliver not just a movie that was hard to come by for a number of years, but package it with some good bonus material, too. Zone Troopers is unapologetically goofy and unapologetically fun. I wouldn't have it any other way.

The Verdict

Cheap fun.

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