Zone Troopers (1985) is a Tongue-in-Cheek Battle Hymn
Imagine the conference where writers Danny Bilson and PaulDeMeo pitched the script for Zone Troopers: “It’s like Star Wars meets Saving Private Ryan meets E.T.” And it is…kind of. It certainly didn’t have the budget of any of those films, it didn’t star Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks, or Drew Barrymore, and it wasn’t directed by Steven Spielberg or George Lucas. Those are just technicalities.
Zone Troopers, a recently-released entry in the MGM “Limited Edition Collection” of DVD titles manufactured on demand (MOD), is more a light-hearted romp through World War II Italy (behind enemy lines, of course) in which most of the characters are killed and Hitler gets kayoed by a GI. It all starts with a group of US troops engaged in battle with Nazis. There are lots of casualties on both sides, but the deaths don’t affect the audience because they didn’t get to know the characters anyway.
By the second engagement, we are sorry to lose some of the Americans, but still don’t care about the nameless, practically faceless Nazis (should we?). The American troops are whittled down to four men: “The Sarge,” rumored to be invincible (Tim Thomerson), New Jersey native Joey Verona (Timothy Van Patten), tough guy Mittens (Art LeFleur), and Dolan (Biff Manard), an embedded journalist. When Mittens and Dolan wander off to kill a deer, they stumble across an SS encampment in which they find photos and films of peculiar aircraft--Nazi secret weapons, maybe?
In the meantime, “The Sarge” and Joey are off looking for the two missing men when they stumble across a huge craft that apparently crashed. Upon boarding it, they discover a strange-but-quite-dead occupant. For whatever reason, the Nazis are interested in aliens and while Sarge and Joey are still on the ship, a group of Nazis board it. The two Americans find an escape hatch, de-rocket-ship, and blow the thing up, Nazis and all. Then Hitler shows up.
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