While the opening sequence is definitely a movie highlight, there's still plenty of awesomeness on show for the rest of the film. Director Teddy Page was surely in a state of grace when he executed this brilliant sequence. The opening sequence alone is mesmerizing and must be seen. Phantom Soldiers is a feast of massive explosions, constant shooting, guard tower falls and countless deaths. You think you've seen exploding huts before? You ain't seen nothing' yet. This is the ultimate Exploding Hut movie. Army for that matter, stop them? And where did they come from? What do they want? The secrets of the mysterious Phantom Soldiers will be revealed. They kill, destroy and explode everything in their path, and no one is safe. They wear gas masks with weird protrusions and have heavy arms. What the Custer brothers don't know, is that they're up against the Phantom Soldiers - terrifying, seemingly invincible, remorseless killing machines. Custer's brother, Texas Ranger Dan Custer (Thayer) wants answers, so he travels to the border of North Vietnam. Michael Custer (Sperry) and some of his fellow soldiers go MIA. It really is something to behold.ĭuring the Vietnam war, Green Beret Lt. Expect no niceties of plotting, no characterisation, nothing like that, just scenes which remind you a bit of PREDATOR (the soldiers mowing down the jungle after they spot an enemy) and endless low rent action.
What follows is endless jungle action, with a whole slew of extras being machine gunned and blown up. Some American soldiers decide to track down the villains but end up being captured or killed themselves, so another soldier and his men go in to rescue them. The rest of the film goes downhill from there, but to be honest there would be no way of topping this intense, endlessly violent set-piece which reminded me of similar moments in Stallone's last RAMBO movie. They also blow up all of the straw huts in endless explosive scenes. PHANTOM SOLDIERS starts out with the best scene of the whole film, in which a platoon of gas mask-wearing soldiers attack a Vietnamese village and proceed to massacre every villager right down to the last child. The film is one of dozens of Z-grade B-movies made by Teddy Page, a man who can always be relied upon to deliver cheesy action in spades. It's listed as an Italian/Filipino production although there's little Italian influence here and none of the stars of Italian cinema that you'd expect to see instead the movie is entirely populated by performers familiar from Filipino cinema, like Mike Monty. I don't think this movie has come out on DVD or Blu-ray yet and is only available on old VHS releases. PHANTOM SOLDIERS is an extremely rare entry in the Vietnam combat genre of film-making which was dying out at the tail-end of the 1980s.
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