**SPOILERS** There's this Jack the Ripper-like killer loose on the streets of wartime Siagon who specializes in killing, after having sex with them, Vietnamese hookers who for some reason known only to himself have Eurasian children. What makes all this even more disturbing is that the killer is later identified by an US Army insignia he left at one of the murder scenes as being a high ranking, a full colonel, member of the US Military stationed in the city!
Put on the case is US Army investigators Sargent's Buck McGriff, Willem Dafor, and Apbaby Perkins, Gregory Hines, who's job is to apprehend the killer before the entire Vietnamese population of the city turn against the occupying US Army and join the Viet Cong in retaliation to what this American psycho is doing! This with the US Army & Marines in a life and death struggle with the Viet Cong and RNV, North Vietnamese Army, at the start of the full-scale 1968 Tet Offensive!
McGriff & Perkins do uncover a number of clues to who this murderer is but when they fallow them up they hit a brick wall in that no one, American & Vietnamese, is willing to point him out in fear of their lives. The only person they get any cooperation from is a French Nun Sister Nicole, Amanda Pays, who knew some of the victims whom her church looked after and cared for. Both McGriff and Perkins track down the #1 suspect in the hooker murders at Fire Base Conrad south of Saigon a Col. Dexter Armstrong, Scott Glenn.
***SPOILERS*** In the few minutes that we, as well as Sargent's McGriff & Perkins, have in observing this "Golden Boy" of the US Army, the youngest full colonel in the US Military, you suddenly realize why we lost the war in Vietnam! Col. Armstrong who's loved and worshiped like a God by the men whom he commands comes across as a dangerously unstable grade triple A nut-case! Not only to those poor Vet Cong prisoners that he interrogates but to himself as well! It soon and tragically becomes obvious to McGriff & Perkins that Col. Armstrong isn't the man that their looking for in him eliminating himself as a suspect in a most spectacular fashion! It's then that the truth comes out, due to the process of elimination, to who this GI serial killer really is!**MAJOR SPOILER**Someone who got screwed in the past out of a field commission because it came out later that he's not qualified to be an "Offier and a Gentelman". In that he knocked up an Asian woman who ended up giving birth out of wedlock to his and her Eurasian baby!
Lack luster at best crime thriller with both it's stars looking totally out of place in it. Willem Dafoe as Sgt. McGriff looks more like a grown up milk drinking Opie Taylor of the Andy Griffith show then a tough talking and hard as nails US Army Sargent who can have you shaking in your socks just by him, with his cold snake-like eyes and sinister wolf-like grin, looking at you. Gregory Hines as Sgt. Perkins seem so bored and out of it that you have the feeling that he's gulped down an entire bottle of downers or just want's out of the film as early as possible even if he has to be killed off for that to happen.
Put on the case is US Army investigators Sargent's Buck McGriff, Willem Dafor, and Apbaby Perkins, Gregory Hines, who's job is to apprehend the killer before the entire Vietnamese population of the city turn against the occupying US Army and join the Viet Cong in retaliation to what this American psycho is doing! This with the US Army & Marines in a life and death struggle with the Viet Cong and RNV, North Vietnamese Army, at the start of the full-scale 1968 Tet Offensive!
McGriff & Perkins do uncover a number of clues to who this murderer is but when they fallow them up they hit a brick wall in that no one, American & Vietnamese, is willing to point him out in fear of their lives. The only person they get any cooperation from is a French Nun Sister Nicole, Amanda Pays, who knew some of the victims whom her church looked after and cared for. Both McGriff and Perkins track down the #1 suspect in the hooker murders at Fire Base Conrad south of Saigon a Col. Dexter Armstrong, Scott Glenn.
***SPOILERS*** In the few minutes that we, as well as Sargent's McGriff & Perkins, have in observing this "Golden Boy" of the US Army, the youngest full colonel in the US Military, you suddenly realize why we lost the war in Vietnam! Col. Armstrong who's loved and worshiped like a God by the men whom he commands comes across as a dangerously unstable grade triple A nut-case! Not only to those poor Vet Cong prisoners that he interrogates but to himself as well! It soon and tragically becomes obvious to McGriff & Perkins that Col. Armstrong isn't the man that their looking for in him eliminating himself as a suspect in a most spectacular fashion! It's then that the truth comes out, due to the process of elimination, to who this GI serial killer really is!**MAJOR SPOILER**Someone who got screwed in the past out of a field commission because it came out later that he's not qualified to be an "Offier and a Gentelman". In that he knocked up an Asian woman who ended up giving birth out of wedlock to his and her Eurasian baby!
Lack luster at best crime thriller with both it's stars looking totally out of place in it. Willem Dafoe as Sgt. McGriff looks more like a grown up milk drinking Opie Taylor of the Andy Griffith show then a tough talking and hard as nails US Army Sargent who can have you shaking in your socks just by him, with his cold snake-like eyes and sinister wolf-like grin, looking at you. Gregory Hines as Sgt. Perkins seem so bored and out of it that you have the feeling that he's gulped down an entire bottle of downers or just want's out of the film as early as possible even if he has to be killed off for that to happen.