Suicide Battalion (1958) User Reviews

A tough mission for a special squad of G.I. Joe's.

[michaelRokeefe · 3/10 · 8 September 2001]

Edward Cahn directs this very low budget war yarn. Mike Connors leads a special squad assigned to destroy top intelligence papers in the Philippines. The mission is almost suicidal, because the Japanese have set up a HQ in the small building housing the hidden documents.

Familiar stock footage is meshed with this spotty script. No masterpiece, but a quickie war flick worth watching. Diverse cast of characters that include: Bing Russell, Russ Bender and John Ashley. Ashley always seems to over act, but then there is Jewell Lain that shows very little skills as a reporter/love interest. Look for Sammee Tong, who played the butler on TV's "Bachelor Father". Lock and load.

Very Cheap

[SgtSlaughter · 3/10 · 23 August 2002]

This is one of the countless 1950s-60s AIP war flicks. I have seen several and they are all pretty bad. This particular one is directed by Edward L. Cahn. Other entries in the genre include TANK BATTALION, TANK COMMANDOS, JET ATTACK and HELL SQUAD.

Familiar face Mike Connors (from MANNIX) leads a band of specially trained demolition men to blow up a HQ building the Japanese have captured.

There's lots of badly stock war footage, a script that makes no sense (don't send the men right away, give them almost the entire movie to sit around doing pointless stuff when they ought to be killing enemy soldiers). Plus very cheap looking soundstages to simulate the Philippine jungle. Oh, yeah, throw in an obligatory woman character for the two leads to fight over and you're all set.

Still this movie towers above BRIDGE TO HELL and COMMANDO SQUAD.

I give it a 2/10.

Cheap ,shoddy and lacking in quality

[lorenellroy · 4/10 · 15 March 2008]

A quick look at the Edward L Cahn section of this site reveals that he was notably prolific and in the year this movie was made -1958-churned out 5 other titles and maintained a similar rate for much of his career.Quantity rather than quality was a feature of his movie making and this has little to recommend it .

It is a curiously immobile film with much of the footage consisting of actors reciting rather dull dialogue in front of a static camera .The picture is clearly drive -in movie fodder and I suspect it was the bottom half of a double bill alongside a beach party or horror flick of similar dullness and lack of skill.

Set in the Pacific during World war Two it deals with the eponymous battalion who are sent behind enemy lines to prevent key strategy papers falling into Japanese hands .The actors are mostly youthful and good looking ,designed to appeal to a teen audience but possessing little grasp of the dramatic arts .Tension arises when the hard bitten commander Major McCormack (Mike Connors)clashes with second in command Lieutenant Hall (Bing Russell)in part over a mutual interest in a woman war photographer Elizabeth Mason (Jewell Lian)and there is a tiresome sub plot about a marriage between a young GI ,Tommy Novello (John Ashley)and a native girl . The acting is atrocious -apart from Russ Bender as the experienced Sergeant .Battle scenes use obvious stock newsreel footage and the whole movie is shoddy badly staged and a waste of time for the audience suckered into watching it

Yet Another AIP War Movie

[richardchatten · 3/10 · 3 June 2020]

Despite actually having a familiar face in the lead (Mike Connors), an Oscar-winning cameraman and a veteran director there was plainly nothing left in the kitty to leave the studio and actually make the movie.

So it consists almost entirely of actors on a tiny soundstage looking rugged, hanging out in the local bordello, engaging in unfunny comic relief, tangling with a sexy female 'war correspondent' with a 50's hairstyle; and wholly dependent for actual action outdoors upon library footage.

A bad war film from AIP....no major surprise there.

[planktonrules · 3/10 · 24 June 2018]

American International Pictures (AIP) was a super-cheap production company that really came into its own in the 1960s. With a lot of beach films, stories about drugs, hippies and biker gangs, the studio made a ton of money because their super-cheaply made films were popular in drive-in theaters....though they never were what anyone would consider artistic masterpieces!

In the case of "Suicide Batallion", the studio made the sort of 1950s film that they really did NOT do well...a WWII epic. What are the major problems? It all boils down to money. The writing and acting weren't all that hot and the film often resorted to stock footage because there really wasn't much money for costumes, props and the like.

The story is about an amazingly undisciplined group of jerks who are assigned the task to blow up a building behind enemy lines in the Pacific theater. Heading the group is a wimpy Major (Mike Connors) who doesn't see all that put off that his Lieutenant is disobedient and even, at times, does this in front of the rest of the men. Toss in some sexy ladies (after all, wasn't the Pacific in 1942-3 filled with hot, buxom American women???) and you have a picture that is watchable but nothing more.

after the first ten minutes this goes into the toilet

[dbborroughs · 3/10 · 9 April 2011]

Terrible 1950's war film about a group of men needing to go on a dangerous mission which is to blow up their old out post which is about to fall in to Japanese hands, or may have fallen into Japanese hands or something.

It's all well and good for the first ten minutes which sets everything up. Sadly after that it goes in the toilet as the men get a 72 hour reprieve, so they mingle with the locals, and other nonsense occurs for at least 25 minutes of screen time. What the romance and soap opera is doing in a war film like this is beyond me. After that the film picks up (relatively speaking) with tons of stock war footage which doesn't match the studio stuff so people are reacting to things that obviously aren't endangering them.

It's horrible and a fine example of filmmaking at it's worst.

It's a film that should be avoided.

Cheapo Filipino-shot AIP war nonsense

[Leofwine_draca · 4/10 · 14 January 2017]

SUICIDE BATTALION is a typically nondescript American WW2 movie, shot on the cheap by AIP on sound stages representing the Philippines. The low budget production involves a script that tries to avoid having action sequences at all costs in order to save on the budget, so for a great deal of the running time the main characters are holed up in a bar for entirely spurious reasons.

I suppose the one unusual aspect of the storyline is that the heroes in this film are intent on destroying an American base. That's usually the objective for enemy troops, but don't worry, there's nothing sinister here; the base must merely be destroyed to stop it falling into the hands of a Japanese invasion force. In any case, this shoddy production is slow throughout, with unappetising action and boring character work. John Ashley plays a dashing young private and ended up heading off to the Philippines for real for two decades, making a series of slapdash exploitation and horror flicks which are all more entertaining than this film.

Suicide is right. Self inflicted slow death for 80 minutes.

[mark.waltz · 2/10 · 29 September 2022]

This is one of the most cartoonish war movies ever made, so absurdly animated that you expect Bugs, Daffy and Porky to all of a sudden come out playing drums, piccolos and a trumpet as the troop stationed in the Philippines face the enemy whom they keep trying to spy on in between battles and romantic intrigue. Mike Conners and John Ashley must put behind their own animosities to fight the enemy while dealing with curvy journalist Jewell Lain and Ashley's love for the niece of Hilo Hattie.

Cheaply made with one of the most ridiculously absurd scripts, I'm surprised there wasn't an alien monster or some unidentified creature from the jungle coming out, mixing American International's two most utilized film types that dominated late 1950's drive-in screens. The acting by Conners and Ashley isn't bad, but that's difficult to tell considering the dialog. The mixture of the war scenes and romantic intrigue (overloaded with dumb bits of outlandish comic relief) is laughably bad. The final moments of a line of TNT is the nadir of bad war movies, and Lain couldn't act her way out of a water canteen. This however wins as the best unintentional war comedy of 1958.

Hampered by a Lack of Realism and Its Low-Budget Nature

[Uriah43 · 3/10 · 31 May 2023]

This film takes place in the Philippines during World War 2 with an American officer named "Major Matt McCormack" (Mike Connors) being told that the Japanese Army has captured a key building where top-secret documents have been stored. With that in mind, Major McCormack is ordered to lead a small patrol comprised of volunteers to go behind enemy lines and destroy the building before the Japanese have a chance to find where these documents are hidden. The problem is that the odds of any of these men returning back to their battalion alive and well is extremely small. To that effect, each of them is offered a weekend pass and some money to spend at a local bar before heading out--and they all plan to make the most of it. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this was a rather weak movie due in large part to the extremely unrealistic plot. For starters, for a small squad of this size, it was more than a bit unusual to have two officers assigned to it--especially one with the rank of major. To add insult to injury, the other officer named "Lieutenant Chet Hall" (Bing Russell) would never behave in such a disrespectful manner toward his superior. It just wouldn't happen. That being said, it is my belief that whoever wrote the script never served in the military. But that's Hollywood for you. Throw in its obvious low-budget constraints, and I have difficulty rather this movie any higher than I have. Below average.