Apocalypse Mercenaries

With a title featuring the word ‘apocalypse’ and directorial reigns credited to one John J. Dawson, it would be easy to assume that this was some sort of mid-1980s post-apocalypse actioner from Antonio Margheriti. Featuring oodles of impressive combat footage inserted at appropriate moments, all of it shamelessly ‘borrowed’ from Stipe Delic’s 1973 war drama The Fifth Offensive, Apocalypse Mercenaries is in fact a second world war ‘mission impossible’ effort inspired (like so many others) by The Dirty Dozen. Hiding behind the John J. Dawson pseudonym is the relatively uncelebrated Leandro Lucchetti, most famous for the outrageous women-in-prison sleaze-fest of Caged Women (1992).

“Five sons o’ bitches” are chosen to locate and eliminate a Nazi command centre operating out of a limestone cave on the border of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The motley quintet, made up of Capt. Tony Hale (Spaghetti Western regular Vassily Karis), ‘The Priest’ (Maurice Poli), ‘Hierro’ (Bruno Bilotta using the Karl Landgren moniker), Hertz (Peter Hintz) and ‘Flyer’ (Thomas Rauser) mow their way through endless German cannon fodder with ease, teaming up along the way with female partisan Mirca (Marlee Foster).

The threadbare plot is really just an excuse to stack one action sequence on top of another, with a so-so subplot involving a rag-tag group of Yugoslavian partisans trying to stop a valuable supply chain from being destroyed by the superior German forces.

One point of note is the character ‘Hierro’ played by Bruno Bilotta. Obviously inspired by Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo character, Bilotta's copycat muscle-bound mercenary also embraces a similar taste in combat clothes and superior fire-power — totally anachronistic to a film set in World War II!