Review:
From director Metzstein (Late Night Shopping) comes the unlikely hit comedy of the year. The Vietnam War has been over for four years and Reagan has just announced George Bush as his running-mate and their “Peace through Strength” ticket. The US military kick into action and the USSR are on the losing foot. Meanwhile on Qangattarsa military base in Greenland, Rudy Spruance is definitely lost, dumped in the frozen wasteland and nobody comes to help but a swarm of mosquitoes that land him in the base hospital. Waking later, he realises he is involved in a rather big clerical mistake, but nobody seems willing to help. His misfit fellow soldiers are a funny bunch and seem to have been there for a very long time, and the commanding officer Colonel Woolwrap is also missing a few screws. When Rudy meets Sergeant Irene Teale, her sanity alone is enough for him to fall for her; unfortunately she’s the Colonel’s girlfriend. In pursuing her, Rudy stumbles across The Wing, a secret hospice on the base for casualties of one of Woolwrap’s disastrous missions in Vietnam. They’re all drugged unconscious but one wakes up, Guy X. When he asks Rudy to send a letter back home to America for him it begins a chain of events that threatens to destroy the base itself and when Rudy and Irene decide it’s time to get the hell off the base, it’s really not going to be easy…
This bizarre and unlikely plot for a comedy is actually very funny, a lot of the humour coming from Rudy’s fellow soldiers’ crazy behaviour and his reaction to them. In a land where they have to suffer 24 hours of darkness or light through the year it is easy to feel the discomfort, isolation and claustrophobia Rudy suffers when there really is no way off the base. Jason Biggs may also seem an unlikely choice but he is fantastic, as are the supporting cast, especially Jeremy Northam as the unhinged Colonel. An all-round great film, completely bizarre but very quirkily funny, refreshingly non-Hollywood, this is a must-see.
Hannah Upton
