"During the Swinging Sixties a forgotten few walked in to hell." This tagline comes up on the screen following a montage of the carnage that is to come and with a cacophony of screams and gunfire. This obscure Vietnam War film was filmed in England in a forest on a tiny budget. It still manages to be highly authentic and is a savage war film. You wouldn't necessarily think that this was filmed in the English countryside if you turned it on half-way through. The film has great cinematography in that regard. Director Lindsay Shonteff certainly paid attention here and that makes this more than the brainless, conveyor-belt action-flick that the VHS and DVD covers reduce it to. It has many short-comings - the editing is poor, there are a few plot holes (Why does it take so long to get to the village the second time?) and some of the actors at times speak brazenly with British accents, while the Viet Cong look like they were employees taken from the local Chinese take away. But overall this is an absolute gem, and one that I have watched many times.
The action is raw and the sound effects are superb. I rate this as having some of the most realistic combat sequences in the Vietnam War library. It does feel almost like real-footage at times. It is bloody and it is brutal; we see a young GI's guts fall out of him after he steps on a mine. Another is shot right through and the bullet puts his spine out. A suspected Viet Cong has both of his arms shot so as to cripple him, and a couple of GI's are butchered and strung up like pigs in a slaughterhouse for their buddies to find. As well as being realistic and bloody, the action is also constant. It does not let up, especially after the hour-mark it is just one fire-fight after another. The dialogue is realistic, too. It's highly profane, and not the type of talk that you'd want your mother to hear. But doesn't that make it honest when depicting a bunch of young men in war sitting around bored, waiting to go out and get their head blown off?
The original title is "How Sleep the Brave". The title I've watched it under is "Combat Zone", but it is also called "Once Upon a Time in Vietnam" and "The Forgotten Parallel", the latter I believe was a cheap VHS rip that some film company made for a quick buck, cutting the film down to an hour in the process. Personally, my favourite is "Once Upon a Time in Vietnam". The performances from the virtually unknown cast certainly deserve a mention. Christopher Muncke as Captain Hansen is a formidable leader, in charge of the rather laughable outpost that is Camp Granada (It is essentially two tents in the middle of a huge field, testament to the budget) but he commands every scene he is in. I was surprised to find when I read his profile that he had never been in anything big before or after this. He nearly gave R. Lee Ermey a run for his money in a few scenes. Lawrence Day, Luis Manuel, Thomas M. Pollard and Daniel Foley are better than would be expected, and all gel together very well and deliver Robert Bauer's profanity-spectacular script.
I mention "Platoon" in my summary because it would be very difficult not to be reminded of it. Oliver Stone's masterpiece about the horrors of war and the struggle to maintain sanity and decency amongst the savagery that is inflicted is one of the greatest films ever made, and "How Sleep the Brave" tackled similar themes before it and had it had the budget, who knows what may have been. I'm sure Oliver Stone would approve of this film, if he has ever seen it. Overall, "How Sleep the Brave" ("Combat Zone" in UK and Ireland on a slightly shorter runtime) is well worth tracking down and checking out, for fans of war films. It's obscurity, grainy-look and its sounds and imagery of war give this film the look of a nightmare.
End-note: having read that the "Combat Zone" DVD release cut the film to pieces, I watched both releases for comparison. This DVD release, now the most common out there, does cut it down but not much. 1) Captain Hansen's speech to the new grunts at the beginning is cut slightly and 2) there is an entire scene at the hour mark where the men sit around talking about Hansen and the elephant incident at the beginning , people burning draft cards at home, and Stess jokes around with Orvill's dead body.
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