Tunnel Rats is a Viet Nam war movie from notorious director Uwe Boll, who I consider to be a modern day Ed Wood. It features Michael Pare in a supporting role, but otherwise doesn't have any main character or even really a plot, and the director admits it was made without a script. All that aside, this movie is actually kind of good.

There is not really a story to this movie. It's just about a bunch of guys in Viet Nam who find an entrance to a tunnel and start exploring it. A lot of them get killed and they do a bunch of killing. About half of it takes place down in the tunnels and the rest up on the surface. It opens with a rather brutal killing of an American soldier in a tunnel, then for the next half hour it shows the soldiers sitting around talking about home before they get into combat.

Although the acting and dialogue leaves something to be desired, where this movie really succeeds is during the tunnel sequences. I thought it did an excellent job of showing the horror of travelling through those dark tunnels with little more than a flashlight and a pistol. I am mildly claustrophobic, so movies like this get to me a little, and the tight camera work only helped make the cramped quarters seem that much tighter. Those guys that really went down into the enemy tunnels must've been nuts, or at least had big ones.

Violence and gore abound in this movie, but that is expected in a war film. There's copious amounts of blood, especially in one scene where a guy gets stabbed through the neck with a giant piece of bamboo. There's a good bit of shooting and blood flying from bullet wounds, but the gruesome stuff takes place in the tunnels. In one scene, a soldier had to dismember an enemy corpse just to squeeze past them in the tunnel.

I have never been on the ‘Uwe Boll sucks' bandwagon, because I do find his movies entertaining. He's the king of B-grade sci-fi and horror that sometimes seems deliberately awful. This is why I compare him to Ed Wood. Most of his previous movies have been adaptations of video games, but this movie was actually made as an original, then the game came later. I've seen enough of Boll's other movies to say that this is surely his best work. The final scene of this movie is actually very good, and left me a little surprised.

The poster for this movie has a lot going on, but not in a good way. First, it compares itself to Apocalypse Now and Platoon, which is quite pretentious. It also includes a couple of snippets from critic reviews, including a single word quote, which is not all that reliable. Most telling of all are the three Black Hawk helicopters shown flying overhead. Those helicopters weren't even built until the late 70's, and sure as heck weren't used in Viet Nam. The photo of the guy on the cover, who appears to be falling backwards after being shot, was obviously inspired by the famous Platoon poster. Even so, this movie will attract people who like war movies, and those people will probably not dislike this one.

Tunnel Rats is certainly not a masterpiece, but I did find it entertaining. The real tunnel systems used in Viet Nam were both terrifying and structurally impressive, so it was neat to see them explored in a movie.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD