Gunbus [VHS]

In 1986, Gunbus aka Sky Bandits was the most expensive independent European film production to date (a then-sky high $18m), yet aside from a brief US release to no business didn't even escape to video in most territories and has all but vanished today, becoming one of those huge box-office disasters that nobody even notices. It's not hard to see why - it's a real mess. Its tale of two Wild West bank robbers who get shanghaied into the army in World War One and, through a trail of unlikely misadventures, end up in a suicide squadron of British flyers taking on a giant German airship could have made for an entertaining bit of nonsense, but a clumsy script, poor action scenes and even poorer special effects do it no favors. Director Zoran Perisic may have won an Oscar for making you believe Superman can fly, but you're unlikely to believe that the aircraft on display here can thanks to some poor front-projection work and badly timed effects, not least in a scene in a massive airplane hangar. By the time the unlikely finale unfolds, with a squadron of makeshift planes made out of old cars (yes, really) taking on the flying fortress, it looks like they simply ran out of money without a major studio to underwrite the film. Parts of it don't even make any sense: why exactly one of our heroes disguises himself as a crewman to hang from a guide rope while the airship is in flight is never explained. It just seems someone thought it might make a good stunt. Even worse, after building up its rarely seen and unimpressively designed airship's reputation, they don't even get to blow it up (apparently due to the producer's ongoing obsession with making a sequel), depriving the film of a big finish.

It's certainly a bizarre mishmash, with Perisic more at home in the comparatively well-executed Western scenes than at the front or when dealing with actors or action scenes, although he does do a rather nice line in explosions and there is one fun sight gag with a real full size plane literally dropping out of the sky. The about-as-far-as-you-can-get-from-star casting (the biggest name is probably Nicholas Lyndhurst in a bit part as a mechanic called Chalky) tends to expose rather than paper over the cracks: Scott McGinnis (who to this day must be cursing his decision to turn down a supporting role in Top Gun for the lead in this) and Jeff Osterhage are blandly efficient leads in a TV movie sort of way, but overplaying and cliché are the order of the day for the supporting cast, from Ronald Lacey's German engineer called Fritz who thinks he's part of a German squadron pretending to be British (it's that kind of film), Miles Anderson's Biggles-off-his-meds C.O. to Keith Buckley's dastardly Hun ("Zis iz zee baddlechip oz ze future!!"). It's just about cheesy enough to pass muster if you're in a particularly undemanding mood - how many films have a cowboy in lederhosen cycling through a German airbase casually throwing sticks of dynamite left, right and centre? - and Croatian composer Alfi Kabiljo throws in a rather decent score, but you can't help feeling that American International could have made it all much better for much less back in the 1960s.

Entertainment's long deleted video release is not terribly good quality and none of the European DVD releases are good either: the Czech DVD is grainy fullframe and the subtitles can't be removed on most players while the German DVD, though it does have removeable subtitles, isn't much of an improvement in quality - although widescreen it's 1.77:1 rather than the original 2.35:1 and is cropped and at times a bit washed out.