Films That Witness Madness

review

COMBAT SHOCK

SPOILER WARNING!!!

Take COMING HOME, THE DEER HUNTER, ERASERHEAD, TAXI DRIVER, MEAN STREETS, a half-quart of cheap booze and a few tabs of LCD and dump them all into a blender. Make yourself a nice slurry and feed it to Bill Lustig. The turd he squeezes out the next day? That's COMBAT SHOCK, a sleazy, slimy and utterly batshit crazy flick about a disturbed Vietnam vet slowly reaching his breaking point. This is not a film that should work on any level but it does. Everything that would be considered a hindrance to any other film - so-so acting, obvious budgetary limitations, a mind-numbing synth score, terrible special effects - works wonders here, creating a work that is part nightmare and part human drama. It is a "feel worse" movie and it's inevitable climax left a bad taste in my mouth for hours after the credits rolled.

Frankie is really down on his luck. A Vietnam vet and former POW, he's having a hard time adjusting to civilian life. Unemployed and broke, Frankie's struggling to provide for himself and his family. His wife is an obnoxious, overbearing load and their first child - they have another on the way - was born deformed as a result of Agent Orange poisoning. Frankie is also deep into debt with a local thug and on the outs with his father. His war flashbacks are getting worse every day and his buried memories of the massacre of an entire village of Vietnamese civilians are beginning to come back. Frankie needs to find work and find it fast but the unemployment line is long and he has virtually no skills. His friend has taken to robbing people for drug money, something Frankie finds morally reprehensible but soon begins to consider as a viable alternative to starving. Everything in Frankie's life seems to be conspiring against him. After a run-in with a pre-teen prostitute and a pretty serious beat down, Frankie comes into possession of a gun and...

Well, can anything good come from that?

In my review of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, I wrote:

"This film hates you. It is designed to make you squirm and it is designed to make you tear your hair out."

The same is true of COMBAT SHOCK. I don't think I've seen a more depressing film in the past ten years. While REQUIEM FOR A DREAM dressed it's nihilism and despair in visually stunning robes, COMBAT SHOCK is bleak and desolate. Even the more visually inspired moments in the film - like wartime flashbacks projected on Frankie's blank, twitching face - are emotional black holes. It's hard to imagine anyone, even those people that consider themselves exploitation connoisseurs who have simply "seen it all", shrugging this film off. By the time we reach the film's final reel, our protagonist - up until this point the object of our sympathies - has become something completely foreign to us. He is revealed to be a monster guilty of destroying an entire village of women and children and this revelation, news to us and a suppressed fact to himself, sends him into self-destruct mode. He shoots his pregnant wife, screaming at her as she lays squirming on the ground, and his deformed child. He tosses the corpse of his child into the oven and pours himself a glass of sour milk. Then he mercifully grants us closure.

Writer / director Buddy Giovinazzo has made a film that exists in a class all by itself. I can't really think of another film like it. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good film but it is a film of genuine power. There are some visuals that cannot be escaped from. The image of the crying, deformed child out-creeps David Lynch's similar mutant child from ERASERHEAD and the surprisingly powerful wartime scenes are littered with nauseating viscera. Giovinazzo's over-use of slow motion aside, COMBAT SHOCK's visuals are spot-on, creating a truly soul-deadening world full of morally bankrupt drug addicts, thugs, prostitutes and pimps. The slow, lazy narrative allows Giovinazzo ample time to skirt along the edges of the city, down alleyways and over bridges. I've seen slums before, both on film and in person, but never have I seen a rundown neighborhood used so well in a film. We can feel Frankie's torments reflected in his surroundings. There is no hope anywhere. Everywhere we look is decay and desolation.

COMBAT SHOCK is a testament to the low budget film done right, a work of singular purpose that overcomes it's limitations and genuinely delivers.

Highly recommended.

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