Combat Shock

Check out this bleak and hopeless flick about a Staten Island-livin' Viet-vet. It's full of cheaply recorded misery, despondency, and dreariness, but for every truly effective grimy broken-down homeless man scene there's at least two others bookended with the worst bargain-basement Carpenter-aping synth score you can imagine. Sure it was the early-mid-80s, but that stuff was inexcusable, inappropriate, and just plain bad. Really, how am I s'posed to be repulsed over seeing a gutter-bound junkie pour heroin into his bleeding abscess when ten seconds later I'm listening to some struttin' Moog vibrato?

Combat Shock is the type of flick that actually deserves its Kaufman-awarded "Troma Classic" status and we're darn certain that had Buddy G gone onto other big-time pictures you'd hear about this one soooo much more. Dude, the last scene is a guy shooting both his pregnant wife and crying mutant infant son (the Lynch has to be gettin' a cut)! Then he drinks down last year's chunky milk and pastes his gray matter on the filthy kitchen wall!

Classic cinema.