Bet the crew called it "Zoopers" for short
Somebody once told me that I haven't reviewed enough movies that start with the letter "Z", so here we go, "Z"-movie, just for you. (I'd have preferred Zombies Of The Stratosphere, but they didn't have that one) It's not a Full Moon movie, but you'd never know it from the cast and creative team. Tim Thomerson, Richard Band, Ted Nicolau, Charles Band...it's like a Full Moon all-star event. Well, not really all-star, but there's a lot of 'em here.
Thomerson stars as "Iron Sarge", an American sergeant in Italy in 1944. Most of his squad's been annihilated by the Nazis, but he ain't giving up yet, especially once he runs into a downed spaceship. The Nazis have captured that spaceship's only surviving passenger, and it's a good thing too, because if the Americans had found him first, who do you think it would end up fighting for by the end of the movie?
One of the interesting things about this movie is how the writers and actors (the actors reportedly improvised much of the dialogue) appear to have tried their best to imitate the dialogue and acting styles of films from the period. Even the music tries ripping off a couple of big band standards (not to mention John Williams' Imperial March) (which, in turn, was really just that funeral march that nobody can name, with a few extra touches). No, it's not from the forties (not that there were that many space-alien movies until the fifties), but they did their damnedest to give it that forties vibe.
The details - despite the cheesy-looking alien that's pointing right at you on the box cover - are surprisingly good for such a low-budget movie; that alien spacecraft looks great, and the costumes are good all around. It's PG, so you can't expect a whole lot of carnage (most people who "die" in this movie, instead of being killed, simply disappear) or sex (there's only one woman in this movie, and she's hallucinatory). But it's a lot of fun nevertheless.
Most fun of all, as usual, is Tim Thomerson. There's always a lot of praise for him here on alt.horror, and I think it's richly deserved; when George C. Scott said that the mark of a great actor (or whatever) was in the joy of his performance, few actors embody that quite like Thomerson does. I can't think of a single movie I've seen him in where he didn't appear to be loving the hell out of what he was doing. Even in a bad movie, he's irresistible to watch, and this isn't bad at all.
Directed (and co-written with Paul De Meo) by Danny Bilson, who would go on to get a story credit on a similarly period-drenched (eew, that sounds gross) The Rocketeer. He also directed a few episodes of that crappy TV show Viper, which were filmed in my hometown, moving out just in time to get shit-canned, of course, serves 'em right.
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