Reviews

Commandos is one of those movies I remember watching on the late-late-late show back in the late 70s and early 80s. It aired frequently.

I was quite surprised to find it included in a WWII movie multipack I bought at WM. An entirely different description of Commandos was listed, so imagine my surprise when I saw it was the old Lee Van Cleef movie! This movie isn't going to win any awards. There's no historic accuracy to it at all, other than the Germans and Italians were fighting in North Africa (or the Western Desert, for our British friends). But it's still fun to watch.

This is a good Saturday afternoon popcorn movie. It had been years since I saw it. I remember it airing on network TV in the 80s, and that may have been the last time I'd seen it. Since it's not available on DVD in the states, I bought a VHS copy off Amazon and have watched it several times.

ETA had the potential to be a great movie. The cast was there. The storyline could've been fleshed out a little more but it's not half-bad.

The action sequences are good, especially the chase scene through the winding streets. I remember that and the monastary attack the most.

I had to read Beowulf several times in high school and college for English lit classes. I'm gong to find my old books and see how far off the movie was from the poem.

Just to get through the movie (I taped it) I started doing something else. Rewinded a scene or two.

The acting was so-so. I kept thinking, okay, Ben Cross has found steady work over the years, but steady, quality work?

Like someone previously posted, the sets were the highlight. Don't know if the sets actually existed or were in a studio. Need to check that out.

Basilisk wasn't as bad as some of the other Saturday night Sci-fi Channel offerings. The majority of the budget was obviously spent on CGs. While there were scenes where the CG effects weren't great, there were others that it was.

My big complaint about these movies are little details. These movies are filmed in Eastern Europe, where the buck can be stretched further than in the states. That's fine, but at least if you're depicting the U.S. military, use American-issued weapons, not weapons fixed to look like them. Would it be too hard to scrounge up some decent-looking M-16s?