User Reviews

"The rainbow is good luck." Steve Parrish (Marchini) is fighting in Vietnam in 1974. He is injured and after a six-month recovery in a small village, he decides to stay behind and marry a local woman. He teaches the whole village martial arts including a small boy who resembles Scott Baio and has the fan favorite bowl haircut.

Everything is going swimmingly, and Steve is enjoying his only piece of clothing, a bright yellow sleeveless shirt, when peace is disrupted. His old 'Nam buddy Thompson, who now works for the Pentagon, and is now evil, tries to find Parrish and along the way works with the local army of baddies run by Col. Minh. Parrish gets really teed off when Thompson rapes and kills his wife. Now, Steve is a one-man-force to be reckoned with.

Marchini yells, many huts explode, and there is a very high kill count. In fact the baddies keep coming and coming, and they are more endless than "Olive Garden" breadsticks. Didn't we learn anything from the Orange Grove Chase from that same year's "Cobra"? Warrior is just as good a Rambo knock-off as Final Mission (1984). Marchini even ties a scrap of his yellow shirt around his head very tightly a la John Rambo, later parodied in one of the "Hot Shots!" movies.

Marchini's Ron-Fu is at its absolute peak in this movie. His skills are never bettered in his later films. Once again like Death Machines, there is a freeze frame at the end of the movie. This time there are actual credits over it. Marchini is improving.

For 80's fun-action-Vietnam-VHS-silliness, it is hard to do better than "Forgotten Warrior".

For more insanity, please visit: comeuppancereviews.com

Man, this movie has some alternate titles. In France, they call it U. S. Warrior. In Spain, Traición a un Soldado or Betrayal of a Warrior. Greece? O Hamenos Polemistis (The Lost Warrior). In the UK, they call this Forgotten Warrior. But in West Germany, this gets my favorite title: Commander Rainbow.

Steve Parrish (Ron Marchini) was escaping a POW camp when Thompson, one of his fellow soldiers, doesn't want to be slowed down by a wounded man. He shoots the soldier, then shoots Steve so that he couldn't tell anyone else. Luckily, some villagers saved our hero and he chose to stay behind, choosing to marry Malia (Marilyn Bautista, Driving Force, Bloodfist), one of the women in the village where he has settled. His wife gives birth to a son and the warrior soul in Steve is content to be, well, forgotten, just like the title says, as he just likes teaching everyone martial arts.

Our hero plans to live out his days in the jungle, but Thompson's orders send him back to 'Nam with the goal of rescuing POWs. Instead, he works with the Viet Cong to try and kill Steve, pausing to assault and murder the wife of our protagonist. Somehow, Steve gas a sword and darned if he isn't going to kill everyone in the Philippines - sorry, Vietnam - to get the payback that his warrior spirit demands.

This movie kills so many bad guys that it needs two directors, Nick Cacas (Deadly Commando) and Charlie Ordoñez (Jungle Wolf). Parrish would return in that movie, as well as Return Fire: Jungle Wolf III, which of course has nothing to do with any of these movies.