Combat Shock (1984)*** (out of 4)Frankie Dunlan (Ricky Giovinazzo) returns home from Vietnam after some bizarre experiments were done on him and he's hit a string of bad luck. His wife is pregnant and also trying to take care of their deformed one-year-old son. Frankie has lost his job, all three are starving and the future doesn't look too bright but he heads out one day in search of something better.Buddy Giovinazzo's COMBAT SHOCK is without question one of the most raw, depressing and bleak character studies ever created. The director stated that the film was meant to be something in between TAXI DRIVER and ERASERHEAD and that's the best way to describe it. The movie isn't the best made film that you'll ever see and it's certainly very raw in regards to various technical things but at the same time there's just something so wrong and so off about the subject matter that you can't help but be drawn into its nightmare.The film certainly has a lot to say about mental illness as well as the troubles that faced vets when they returned home. The film is extremely bleak to say the least as there's not even a glimmer of comedy or even a brief smile to be bad. You certainly wouldn't want to show this film to anyone suffering from a depression because it would probably push them over the edge. The flashbacks to Vietnam are all that convincing and there are other technical problems with the film but at the same time this is a lot deeper and a lot more troubling than what most filmmakers would try on a $40,000 budget.Giovinazzo does a very good job in the lead role as he's certainly believable as this broken man who really is at the very end of things. He certainly comes across as a real person and this helps give the film a more realistic approach to the dark material. The direction is spot on and this is certainly true during the incredibly disturbing final fifteen-minutes of the picture.

Certainly lacking in wise-cracking rubber monsters and outlandishly- dressed brain-dead punks, Combat Shock - a serious, if extremely low- budget drama/psychological horror by writer/director/producer Buddy Giovinazzo - proves that Troma Entertainment occasionally took their movies seriously. The shell-shocked Vietnam veteran story had been done many times before, and certainly a lot better, but never quite as unsettling. Far from a masterpiece, and riddled with terrible production values, Combat Shock nevertheless is a glowing statement as to just what scraping-the-piggy-bank film-making can sometimes offer.After an event during the Vietnam War that left a village dismembered and massacred, Frankie Dunlan (Rick Giovinazzo - brother to Buddy), struggles to adapt to civilian life. Living in poverty, unable to find work, and saddled with a whining wife (Veronica Stork) and a deformed baby, he is about the have the worst day of his life. Owing money to a group of drug-dealing punks, led by Paco (Mitch Maglio), Frankie wanders the battered streets of his native New York, coming into contact with various low-lives and looking for any way to make a buck. Seemingly without hope, and terrified to go back to his starving family empty- handed, he resorts to an act of violence.You could imagine running a finger along the negative of Combat Shock and immediately needing to wash your hands afterwards. The movie seems awash with grime, and the streets Frankie wanders down have an almost apocalyptic quality. This is utterly depressing stuff, nearly entirely devoid of laughs, where the types of people Frankie befriends are gun- wielding junkies or child prostitutes. It's sometimes laughably pessimistic, a journey into utter depravity, and combined with some extremely amateurish production values and an occasionally plodding narrative, can be a bit of a slog to get through at times.Yet for all it's sloppy editing and wide-eyed, over-the-top thesping, it is at times extremely effective. The baby, horribly disfigured due to Frankie's exposure to Agent Orange, looks cheap, but the way it moves and sounds, combined with the dump that surrounds it, is just as disturbing as Eraserhead (1977). There is also a horrible moment when a junkie, unable to find a needle for his fix, opens his damaged arm with a coat hanger and pours heroin into his black, bleeding vein. Some will find it's relentless depravity too much to take, but there's a gritty honesty here, going deep into the dark heart of a post-Vietnam America, where traumatised Vets were hung out to dry by a country that had forgotten them.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Unhinged traumatized Vietnam veteran Frankie Dunlan (strongly played with jolting conviction and intensity by Ricky Giovinazzo, who also composed the wonky, yet still fitting and effective synth score) struggles to keep his steadily eroding sanity, lives in miserable squalor with his whiny, fed-up, and overbearing pregnant wife Cathy (a perfectly shrill portrayal by Veronica Stork) and his constantly mewling malformed baby (the result of Frankie's exposure to Agent Orange during his tour of duty), tries to find a job, and runs across a gang of local thugs while wandering around the dismal Staten Island neighborhood he resides in. Writer/director Buddy Giovinazzo delivers a pungent and unflinching evocation of severe urban decay that's rife with an overwhelming sense of pain, angst, despair, and utter hopelessness. Indeed, this picture's unsparingly bleak and depressing tone along with its fierce undiluted nihilism and pessimism give it a raw unsettling potency that's like a vicious kick right to the gut. The grimy locations, colorful array of lowlife characters, and the rough unpolished cinematography by Stella Varveris all further enhance the overall grungy verisimilitude. Packed with startling moments (a desperate and pathetic junkie uses a coat hanger to mainline heroin!), thick with a brooding gloomy mood and a harrowing grasp of the foul bitter reality of down-trodden American existence, and capped off by a shattering downbeat conclusion, this dark and ugly, yet still riveting powerhouse deserves its sterling cult reputation.

This is a difficult one to review because it's so slow to today's standards and it really looks low budget. But the movie had such a history that it really became a cult flick. It was Buddy Giovinazzo's first flick and he financed it himself. Nobody would take the picture to promote and distribute, not even Troma. He went to Troma but it never ended on the desk of Kaufman. One year later he went back and Kaufman liked it but then it was called American Nightmares, a title he didn't like and he changed it to Combat Shock trying to clock in on the success of Rambo and Chuck Norris. Sadly it didn't work out that way. The promotion looked like a Vietnam flick but it wasn't and it failed at the box office so it played at 42nd street. Another problem was that the place it was shot, Stanton Island, didn't like the way it was shown but it wasn't exaggerated. It just looked that way. And not only that, most of the people found it a really boring flick. But people talked about it...I admit, it is a slow builder and it is sometimes boring but it was made in the Reagan era and New York was bankrupt. By adding an ex Vietnam soldier story it did gives it a uneasy feeling. The flick starts with some real footage of the Vietnam war, then we see how he is trying to survive in New York without money and we do see the decay of the suburbs and drug fiends. Of course the acting is really bad but what did gives it a cult status is the end of the flick. The gruelling ending made it notorious. It isn't brute or whatsoever but it do stick with you. I can understand that a lot of people will hate this but I didn't like it either while watching it but the end makes it indeed one to watch. The effects used do add something towards the uneasy feeling. Cult indeed. And do see the wink towards Eraserhead...Gore 1,5/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 2/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5