Reviews

For a story set in Georgia in late 1865 the absence of any blacks in the town and surrounding rural areas is utterly absurd. The labor force the farmers would mobilize to replant would have included the freed slaves. They would certainly have been a source of support for the Union military government.

The movie perpetuates the cry-baby version of history that the state of Georgia has foisted on the consciousness of the nation. Sherman's armies did not ravage Georgia anywhere near as bad as they complain. They did NOT routinely burn down houses and churches and schools. They did destroy supplies that could help the military effort of the South. It was noted at the time that where Sherman marched through Georgia, hardly a house in any town was torched.

By contrast, when the same armies marched through South Carolina, hardly a house in any town was left standing. That was no accident. Sherman blamed South Carolina for the war and gave orders to his men to burn everything. When his armies crossed the border into North Carolina, his forces reverted to the milder policy they had observed in Georgia.

South Carolina was the only state of the Confederacy whose citizens did not supply at least one regiment for the Union army. In all the others there were Unionists who made their way north to enlist and fight for the United States.

Lousy episode. The producers allowed their left wing bias to distort the plot.

This episode was based on the runaway train wreck twenty years ago in the El Cajon pass in California. That happened because the weight of the train was miscalculated and other technical problems with the brakes.

In this fictional version, the brakes were OK, the train would have stopped in time except for the callous disregard of safety by the rail operator (railroad president) who deliberately sends overloaded trains down the tracks. The plot looks at a mobster as a possible culprit for a while then clears him. That is so the FBI agents can chat among themselves, explicitly equating normal business ethics with those of the Mob. This happens long before the businessman is fingered for the crime.

To add to the air of the surreal, the passengers trapped in the crashed train are rescued by FBI special agents, the regular cast, instead of by Fire and Rescue personnel. This being Hollywood, they do not wear hard hats or firefighters' helmets or fire resistant clothing as they crawl inside the wreckage. That would keep the viewers from recognizing the actors. Dumb and offensive.

This episode on the origin of the Christmas carol "Silent Night" became an annual tradition in the mid to late 1950s. Every year, starting as a ten year old, I looked forward to watching the rerun of this simply told and well done episode including the introduction by the then white haired Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Well worth viewing again.

I wonder if it went off the air because it was in black and white and everything had to be in living color in the 1960s. There were any number of good anthology series in those early days of television, but this series was consistently the best. Another good one was Target hosted by Adolphe Menjou, and in genre TV, there was Science Fiction Theater. Of course you also had high toned shows like Playhouse 90 but they were too busy being high toned to be good, at least to a young boy.

The other reviews pretty much cover the ground. The premise is pretty hokey. What was a French planter doing on islands that were never controlled by France. How could he have lived his whole life on those islands when he must have been born before the British, not the French, made them a protectorate? How did a planter living on an island occupied by the Japanese learn the location of sea mines planted around the island of Bougainville, 30 miles away?

One more complaint. Why do so many movies have the heroine trip and hurt her ankle. So many have silly scenes like that: "'help I've fallen and I can't get up."

I will next limit my comments to a few corrections.

One review refers to the scene of the action as an "atoll". Wrong, atolls are low islands built up from coral. This was obviously filmed on one of the high volcanic islands that dot the Pacific Ocean, Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands.

Another comment call it a "wartime movie". Filmed in 1953, it was far too late for that. After all WW II ended in 1945.

One review mentioned similar movies, described as those with

"American soldiers battling Japanese on the Pacific islands during the WWII are the following: ..... Objective Burma by Raoul Walsh with Errol Flynn"

Sorry, but Burma is a whole country all its own on the Asian mainland. It is not an island in the Pacific or any other ocean. The only coastline it has faces the Indian Ocean. The movie really frosted the Brits when it came out in 1944 since they knew full well that Burma was the objective of the British XIVth Army which re-conquered it from the Japanese. The Brits angrily objected to Americans claiming that victory in the movies. Ironically the XIVth Army was made up largely of divisions from the Indian Army.

This was a pretty good action movie with believable characters, given the genre. The ex- soldier Lasko sick of death and hiding out in a monastery (Mathis Landwehr) reluctantly takes up the gauntlet to be the Vatican's point man in a struggle against terrorists centered on a train bearing pilgrims from Cologne Germany to Lourdes.

You also have a deadly virus, helicopters, explosions, martial arts fights in and on top of the moving train, rockets, guns, knives, the works. Pretty good pyrotechnics too. The single most unbelievable thing in the plot is when a henchman parks his truck right across the tracks while waiting to pick up the bad guys, anticipating the train will stop before it hits him, thinking the bad guys control the engine. I cannot believe anyone would not simply have parked a few meters away, just off the tracks. Too stupid to believe even of idiots.

I could more readily swallow Vatican secret agents than that incident, though who knows. There were military orders of monks during the crusades.

Mathis Landwehr looks to be in great shape in the early scenes when he is shirtless. He has a fine physique: lean but muscular and looks completely believable as a martial artist.

I hope they do a sequel, as the title suggests. In English it was Lasko:Death Train. That suggests Lasko: the Next Adventure. I would watch it.

This is a truly terrible movie. Because of the cast, I gave it a try but gave up after ten minutes. The principal cast including John Agar and Richard Webb were much too old for their roles, 47 and 53 respectively. The lengthy opening documentary about the course of the war was pointless and inaccurate. What did the war of the bombers flying from England have to do with EOD (explosives experts) fighting in Italy? EOD are often brave soldiers but who would ever call them Hell Raiders?

I would have ended there, but IMDb wants ten lines. OK, I reiterate:

This is a truly terrible movie. Because of the cast, I gave it a try but gave up after ten minutes. The principal cast including John Agar and Richard Webb were much too old for their roles, 47 and 53 respectively. The lengthy opening documentary about the course of the war was pointless and inaccurate. What did the war of the bombers flying from England have to do with EOD (explosives experts) fighting in Italy? EOD are often brave soldiers but who would ever call them Hell Raiders?

In 1999 there was a big to-do about a supposed atrocity during the Korean War, the strafing of civilians fleeing fighting during the initial push by the North Koreans down the Korean peninsula at No Gun Ri. It turned out that the main eyewitness for the story was a liar who was not even in in-country in 1950. The fuss would have been no surprise to viewers of this movie. Here it was artillery fire rather than air attack that caused civilian casualties, but the situation was basically the same. The film depicts the sad necessity of firing on a column of refugees, driven at gunpoint by communist soldiers hidden among them in civilian clothes, who were trying to get past U.N. lines. The blame in the movie is clearly on the commies, but there is no attempt to gloss over the ugly necessities of war. This movie was the first time I ever heard the phrase "Fire for Effect", a phrase I was to utter myself frequently years later as an artillery officer in Vietnam and Cambodia.

British forces are seen attacking with armored personnel carriers developed after the war. The M113 APCs were first fielded by the US in 1960 and were adopted by many other armies in the Free World. The boxy shapes of their aluminum hulls are unmistakable to any G.I. like me who served in Vietnam. By this time in the war, the British were well aware of the need to have their infantry attack with their armor to keep enemy infantry from doing what the Italian soldiers are shown doing in the last battle: swarming over the tanks and taking them out with anti-tank mines and Molotov cocktails. Still this is a fairly good movie, one worth watching.