Review of Troma's War

Finally, on DVD, represented in the brilliant director's cut version that no one should miss!! This is Troma's answer to the Rambo kind of films that were doing well all around. This should have been as big a worldwide hit in theaters all over the world, if it weren't for the censors who always kindly cooperate with the big conglomerates, but while Rambo got it's R-rating with it's countless bullets, shot wounds, amounts of senseless violence and streams of blood, Troma's War wasn't treated with the same courtesy. While not more excessively violent or bloody than any of the drek that the big studio's poured out over the audiences, Troma's War was submitted to countless cuts, making it a rather senseless film, of which all the guts (literally and metaphorically), storyline and message were deleted, with the predictable result that no one really could care for the film anymore. A bloody shame, since it is – when seen in the original director's cut – so much better than the poor substitudes with the bid budgets spent on ridiculously overpaid mediocre actors from Hollywood. Troma's War in it's entirety is a masterpiece, a brilliant film that seems to pretend to be the Rambo-kind-of-film, and should please audiences that like that stuff, but in the meantime is so much more than that: it is an intelligent film with a layered texture, a superb story and a lot of fun. Furthermore, the film features the first appearance of Troma's soon to be Superstar Joe Fleishaker. And it is the first movie to address the aids problem, long before any of the bigger studios even dared to touch it, again proving how much ahead of it's time Troma has always been. The director's audio-commentary is, as is always the case with Lloyd Kaufman's tracks, a wonderfully insightful feature, worth the price of the disc itself, and it explains in depth the evil works with which the big guys in the film-making world go to great lengths to put the independents out of business. But Troma's War still goes on – 35 years and counting! Get this film, it is a historically significant one.