Thirty Six Hours of Hell (1969) Richard Harrison, Alain Gerard, George Wang, Pamela Tudor Movie Review

Thirty Six Hours of Hell (1969)   2/52/52/52/52/5


Thirty Six Hours of Hell (1969)

93 Minutes of Hell

With the Japanese having gained a dominance in the Pacific the American air force has focused all their efforts on one small island which once the Japanese resistance is destroyed they plan to use as a base to launch a further invasion. Captain Stern (Richard Harrison) is the lucky soldier to take a small platoon of Marines on to the island with 36 hours to scout it out for any resistance before one last final bombing run is planned.

I said to myself "stick with it son it can only get better" this was after a poor opening which relied heavily on a cold recording booth narration combined with some poorly hacked together stock footage. It is such an underwhelming, downright bland opening that you do genuine believe it can only get better. But whilst it does it doesn't get much better and is one of those movies which you end up sticking with just to know how it plays and so that you don't need to watch it again.

The thing is that the movie almost explains itself too well. What I mean is that with the time in the title you know that it is going to come down to the wire whilst you know are Marines will end up falling in numbers as they navigate the jungle only to discover they are being out witted. Okay so we have some originality, we have a journalist who gets lost and ends up wandering around like a complete jack ass but none of this is exciting and in fact at times is hysterically bad such as when one soldier ends up getting it in the gut after telling his friend to shoot. I could keep on going but the easiest thing is to say is that this is typical of the war movies made in Italy during the 60s and 70s.

What this all boils down to is that "Thirty Six Hours of Hell" might entertain those who have a love of the war movies which came out of Italy during the 60s and 70s. But it doesn't offer much for anyone who comes to watch this looking for an exciting war movie as it certainly isn't that.


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