ZONE TROOPERS (1985)

  

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

Though I rate ZONE's mythicity as poor, nevertheless it's an entertaining little romp from Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo, who would later receive plaudits for their work on Disney's ROCKETEER and the 1990 FLASH TV-show.

In 1944 Italy, an American army patrol is caught behind enemy lines by German troops. Only four men survive the onslaught: topkick Sergeant Stone (Tim Thomerson), military war correspondent Dolan (Biff Manard), older private "Mittens" Mittensky (Art LaFleur), and naive young private Joey Verona (Timothy Van Patten). It's not unreasonable to consider Verona as the filmmaker's self-insert, for he's passionate on the subject of "the sense of wonder" as incarnated by the sci-fi mags he reads.

As the troopers try to make their way back to safety, they stumble across a special project by the German occupying force: that they've captured a fallen spaceship and its alien pilot, and are seeking to learn the advanced secrets of the extraterrestials. When Stone is convinced that this could be a real threat to the Allies, he wants to dynamite the ship. Verona shows more compassion, rescuing the alien pilot despite its repulsive appearance. This proves far-sighted as well when the pilot's alien buddies come looking for him, and end up helping the grunts against their goose-stepping foes.

The dialogue is pure "scrappy dogface" stuff out of the more formulaic cinema about WWII, but if one invests in the calculated artificiality, it adds to the fun. The whole appeal of the story is to put four ordinary soldiers into a rare cosmic adventure, even though the escapism is muted when one of the four doesn't make it home.

Dolan refers to Verona as "Buck Rogers," though the proximate comparison might be "Captain America," since one of the dogfaces gets the pleasure of slugging Adolf Hitler himself in the kisser. I don't know how steeped the filmmakers were in comics-lore, but I don't think it a coincidence that the battle-weary sergeant has a surname very reminiscent of the longest-running WWII hero in comic books, the redoubtable Sergeant Rock.