User Reviews

**SPOILER ALERT** Almost unknown little action movie that's some twenty years ahead of its time in showing the public how prisoners are treated in an enemy or allied POW camp.

In conditioning a group US servicemen and one woman to the rigors of prison life their not only tortured and humiliated by their captors but water-boarded and driven almost insane with ear-splitting sounds and music to deprive them of their sleep. These are the very same tactics we read about and see in both todays newspapers and on TV. Tactics that are being imposed on enemy combatants in both Gitmo-Guantanamo-and Abu Ghraib prison by the US military and CIA.

The group of US Military volunteers going under this inhuman and degrading treatment by Cpt. Becker, Anthony Zerbe, didn't know just what they were in for. It's that the Captain was not only an egomaniac but a psychotic as well. Brutally breaking down the helpless prisoners Becker found the only woman among them Lt. Casey, Lisa Eichhorn, a real challenge for him. In that Casey was by far the toughest of the bunch of POW he was in charge of.

After failing in everything he and his men could do to brake the plucky young womens will Capt. Becker came up with this "brilliant" idea of having Lt. Casey raped like in a real held by the enemy prisoner scenario with him of course doing the raping! When this got out to those fellow POW's who were imprisoned with Lt. Casey it lead to a prison uprising that sent Capt. Backer and his tin pot dictatorship, or Becker's World as he liked to call it, blowing up in his, and his fellow goons, face!

The passive prisoners lead by Major Logan, Tom Skerritt, took control of the prison, or Camp Becker, as Becker's men were out in the jungle looking for Major Logan. It was Major Logan who escaped and killed one of Becker's goons, Tuang played by George Chenug, earlier in the film.

Lt. Casey who despite all she went through by being raped beaten and humiliated by Becker and his men refused to break under the pressure. Left for days standing up in a "tiger cage" Lt. Casey, reused by Logan, still refused preferential treatment and went out in the unfriendly jungle to take on Becker and his men. Casey did this literally, she almost lost her right arm from a blast from a M-16, singlehandedly!

Besides the usual blood & Guts action scenes, that happened in the last fifteen minutes of the movie, it was without a doubt Lsia Eichhorn's portrayal of the gusty Lt. Casey that made the movie "Opposing Force" worth watching. Lt. Casey's courage wasn't in her, at the end of the film, Rambo-style ability to take on and defeat Capt. Becker and his men at their own game. It was her courage and determination to take everything Becker & Co. could dish out at her and refuse to break under it and still end up being he last man or in Lt. Casey's case woman standing!

Lisa Eichhorn does some quite good work here, her emotional responses to the (SPOILER AHEAD) rape. Rape is always a tough thing for a movie to tackle, as the visceral horror is just too close for comfort. This scene, like most others I've seen, are a little hard to watch. However, I just never found her all that believable as an Air Force officer. Tom Skerritt was his usual journeyman, quality, believable work without flashiness. This one has a number of obvious plot holes, but then I guess there wouldn't be much to have a movie about otherwise. I found it somewhat timely now that we seem to regularly have women captured in wartime. I think we need to have a national dialogue on whether this is acceptable, rather than sweeping under the rug the fact that we ask young women to run the risk of sexual torture. I accept a fair amount of the original feminist agenda, but I think this goes too far. In my opinion, (oink, oink) women are just too important to waste in war. As to the movie, Grade: C-

It's like playing a video in that one can stop the running of it, or fast forward or reverse it. Since really the only reason to watch this is to see Lisa Eichhorn get abused in various ways, I was able to zip from one such sequence to the next one. If you're interested in the plot, which I guess I can't call a rip off of "GI Jane" since the latter came along about a decade later, but that's what it feels like: Ms Eichhorn (who apparently is best known for not playing the Shelley Long part in "Cheers") is "Casey," an air force officer who has volunteered for some super macho training course, apparently meant to remind us of the real life SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) undergone by various commando types. Naturally she's the only woman taking the course. After the commander of the base (like the Scott Wilson character in "GI Jane") kindly warns her that he can do nothing whatsoever to protect her as the only woman involved, she's off to the races. Eichhorn has a kind of nice sisterly persona to her, but I didn't detect any of the inner steeliness that a woman would need to join the military in the first place and then volunteer for a course like this. Casey pairs off with an avuncular middle-aged major played by the usually reliable Tom Skerritt who unfortunately seems to be "phoning in" his lines here, like most of the rest of the cast. In due course they get "captured" (not much instruction in "evasion" is offered) and then this movie comes to life somewhat with the arrival of the Anthony Zerbe character, who deserves a new paragraph break.

Mr Zerbe is a personal hero of mine, now 74 with over a hundred titles on IMDb to his credit, mostly on TV and almost inevitably as the bad guy (although he did get to be the wise old "councillor" in a couple of the "Matrix" flicks). I've been enjoying his unique brand of smarmy menace since the 1970's. His characters sneer at any kind of "back story" or "motivation," they're just out to do you as much dirt as they can without even letting you have the consolation of thinking you're getting a rise out of them. Here he's "Becker," in charge of the training course (fascistic military types need a German surname, of course) who manages to function with no oversight from the brass whatsoever and (like Colonel Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now," also filmed in the Philippines) has gone off the deep end with his subordinates playing right along; maybe there was something toxic in the water supply? Of course he has it in for Casey from the get go; his scenes with her are pure Grand Guignol and worth the wait, especially with that handy fast forwarding. He has her "waterboarded" at one point (I don't recall even hearing that term until the Bush administration), stripped, de-loused, locked in cages etc. and in the piece de resistance, has her bound and gagged on the floor so he can "have his way" with her; this latter is rather minimally filmed, but sometimes less actually is more. (By the way the male soldiers in the course are also abused in various ways, but let's 'fess up, we're not watching it to see them.) This finally pushes the major over the edge; he leads the others in revolt, lots of people get shot etc. The violence is handled curiously flatly; overall there's a cheap made for TV quality to the whole enterprise; even the Philippine jungle that was such an important component of those Pam Grier prison flicks seems pretty tame here. Beyond the actors already mentioned, Richard Roundtree as Zerbe's chief underling has some fun barking invective at the captives; he has even more acting credits than Zerbe, but who knows him as anybody but Shaft? So bottom line, if you have about half an hour to kill (and don't have to pay separately for it), there's enough watchable material in "Opposing Force" to occupy about that much of your time...

The basic story line has been reviewed by nearly all the others, so I'll more or less skip that. But it is an interesting concept. It deals with the training of military personnel to deal with becoming a prisoner of war. Escape and evasion, refusing to answer questions even under the threat of torture and basic survival under primitive circumstances are all covered in this syllabus. When the film was made, the US had no women working anywhere near a combat area, but of course, that has now changed. With women now in combat situations, and having already had a couple of them become POW's, the question becomes how the heck to train them for possible capture? I'm not suggesting that POW training include rape or even stripping of the POW, but males going through the course are routinely stripped of every stitch of clothing. Should women be treated any differently? No....and yes. If the military gives the green light to clothing deprivation for female POW's, I believe that the captors would spend their time ogling naked women who were, (they'd think) put there for their enjoyment. It's a very sticky question, and one that is bound to arise. So far, the real captors of US women haven't sexually molested them, but it's only a matter of time. Recently, Americans have been accused of sexual torment of Iraqi POW's, not including rape. But had there been some female POW's who knows what might have happened. This film brings that question into specific relief and begs to be answered. Time will tell. It IS ironic that this film, so topical now, was made a while back!

(1986) Opposing Force PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR DRAMA

This is yet, another one of those movies where the idea or theme should be appreciated than the execution. It has Lt. Casey Catherine (Lisa Eichhorn) agreeing to participate in a dangerous POW training exercise set up by General MacDonald (John Considine). What is usual about this exercise, is that it has always been participated only by men, and apparently Casey happens to be the very first woman to agreeing to the exercise. And by the time 10 men and 1 woman dropped to the secluded forest area. For some strange reason, Casey and major William J. Logan ended up being paired up with one another, and became the first people who ended up in the "safe zone". Only they were then dragged out of their anyway, and placed into the caged fortress along with the captured others. And then for the next 40 odd minutes or so... they are then subjected to humiliation and rigorous exercises, all are ordered to strip down (with nothing more except the shoes on their feet) and wear orange moo moos, instructed by the commander, Stafford (Richard Roundtree) and a Vietnamese named Tuan (George Kee Cheung) taking orders from a wannabe tyrant, Becker (Anthony Zerbe). As a result of Becker letting his authority go to his head, as it is supposed to be a training exercise, he then takes the liberty of having Casey let out of her isolation box, only for her to be escorted to his chambers, so that he can physically assault her. At this point the supposed stool pigeon, Botts (Robert Wightman) of the group sitting on the steps takes the liberty to peek through Becker's wooden cabin. He witnesses Casey getting assaulted, at which point he then goes back to the caged compound to inform Logan about it. Logan becomes hysterical, and demands to confront Becker about it. Becker becomes afraid, as he does not want his superiors to know about this, and attempts at a cover up by trying to get Logan killed by Tuan and make it look like an accident. He does this by letting Logan run loose into the forest, only for him to outwit Tuan easily by using his orange moo moo as a ruse, accidentally killing him. And as soon as Becker discovers Tuan's lifeless body, it is during then he again tries to manipulate the situation. As he manages to free Casey and the rest of his men in captivity, except that none of his men believes him, leaving Logan with Casey and Botts to fend for themselves. Becker then shoots and kills commander Stafford while he was tied to a chair in cold blood, for the intention was to ramp up his soldiers to go after them.

As a I mentioned, the movie was involving up until Logan freed the rest of his eight recruits. Like, none of them wouldn't even consider to grab a weapon to arm themselves, as viewers are left to presume that all eight of them were shot dead, as Becker did give orders to kill Logan, Casey and Botts on sight. Making the point toward the end that not all training exercises should not be acted out at all.

My review was written in May 1987 after watching the film on HBO/Cannon video cassette.

"Opposing Force" is a strong, fascinating film about overzealous military training techniques which unfortunately lacks a third act, concluding most unsatisfactorily. As a result, pic, previously titled "Clay Pigeons" and "Hell Camp", received only a test booking by Orion last August in San Antonio, Texas ahead of its current home video availability.

Tom Skerritt toplines as a major who enrolls in a special escape & evasive training program in order to prepare for a return to active duty as a pilot after years on a desk job. The training is run by Anthony Zerbe, who has beome sadistic in his post, meting out both physical and psychological torture to the mainly young soldiers, as adminsitered by his basically good-guy aide Richard Roundtree.

The catalyst to a showdown is the presence of Lisa Eichhorn as a femme lieutenant, the first of hr sex to be accepted into the program, even though women have yet to be authorized for combat. When she arrives, Zerbe goes off the deep end and in addition the the usual physical abuse (which the soldiers accept begrudgingly as part of their expected rigorous training) he rapes he, in order to "prepare her for waht the enemy would do". Finding out that Eichhorn has been raped by the commandant, Skerritt drops his cool demeanor and goes on the warpath, organizing an escape and setting up a violent showdown with the authorities.

For most of its length, the picture doesn't pull any punches, depicting a gruelling, war games-style environment to test and weed out the soldiers. Gil Cowan's script, forcefully directed by Eric Karson, raises many serious issues, including the limits to which raining can orf should simulate actual combat, the danger of adopting the enemy's inhuman tactics in order to compete and the difficulties in attempting to treat women as equals in a military situation. Final reel, however, degenerates into melodramatics and shootouts, with a terrible, abrupt freeze frame/voice-over ending that unsuccessfully shifts from an objective presentation to the Eichhorn character's subjective, wishy-washy point-of-view.

Cast cannot be faulted, punchng home the drama forcefully. Zerbe offers a finely shaded performance to what might have been a monster role, even delivering somewhat convincing arguments to justify his brutal behavior. Skerritt is solid as the hero forced to take action, while Roundtree brings out the duality of his pivotal role, the enforcer who nevertheless has a moral code. Eichhorn is outstanding in handling an unglamorized, both physically and emotionally demanding assignment.

Tech credits, including atmospheric lensing on Filipino and Miami locations are top-notch. Too bad an organic ending synthesizing the material did not round off this sleeper.