Combat Shock
Tags: tragedy, cult, murder, violence, flashback

Plot synopsis:
The film begins with stock footage scenes of warfare in Vietnam. An American soldier named Frankie is seen running alone through the jungle as his voice narrates. He explains that he "goes back there every night" right before he wakes up in bed with his wife in their squalid NYC apartment. The distorted cries of his baby are heard, and his pregnant wife wakes up to tend to the boy. They argue over Frankie's unemployment and their son's health. The baby is a mutant, portrayed by a puppet. Frankie assumes it was a result of chemical weapons used during the war.
The bulk of the film consists of long sequences of urban blight underscored by Ricky Giovinazzo's synthesizer soundtrack. A junkie scores from the local kingpin, Paco. Frankie waits in line outside the unemployment office. The junkie desperately searches for a needle to shoot up with. Frankie kills time entertaining a child prostitute. The junkie resorts to dumping the drugs directly onto a wound he opens in his arm and passes out. A random woman comes upon him and steals his gun and ammunition, putting them in her purse.
There is no work for Frankie at the unemployment office. Unexplained arbitrary things happen, such as one social worker asking another if he's seen his Veg-O-Matic. Frankie's social worker spaces out during their meeting and says, "Life is hot, and because life is hot, I must take off my jacket." He then resumes the meeting, imploring Frankie to go back to school because he has no marketable skills. Frankie is desperate for work, having been unemployed for four months.
He calls his father to ask for money. His father thinks the call is a prank, because he believes his son died in Saigon. Frankie explains that he was reported killed 15 years ago but he made it out alive and spent three years in an army hospital recuperating. He tells his father that his wife is pregnant again and they are being evicted, but his father claims that he is also broke and about to die from a heart condition.
Seemingly broken, Frankie comes across the woman who stole the junkie's gun and steals her purse, an out of character criminal act for him. She screams for help. Paco and his thugs chase Frankie. When they overcome him, they mercilessly beat him. The gun falls out of the bag during the pummeling. When Paco goes through the bag, he finds the bullets and realizes there must have been a gun in it. He turns around to see Frankie standing with the gun.
Frankie shoots all three men in a daze. He has been beaten to a pulp, and his voice over explains that his father was right: he had died in Saigon. He explains that his company had come upon a village where everyone had killed themselves to avoid being raped and murdered by the US soldiers. He realizes that he must similarly 'save' his family, and he returns home.
His wife is horrified by his appearance and briefly tends to his wounds. He is catatonic and hallucinates in front of the TV. Eventually, he reloads the gun and prepares to kill himself, but another hallucination reminds him of his purpose for returning home. Frankie walks into the bedroom, tells his wife that he loves her, and then shoots her in the stomach. As she lies on the ground, he shoots her three more times, yelling at her to die. He shoots the baby once and then picks it up from the crib. He cradles it and walks into the kitchen with it.
Frankie lays the baby in the oven, and turns it all the way to the cleaning setting. He then pours himself a glass of spoiled milk and drinks it, before committing suicide via gun. The final shot shows a train passing by into the night.

Review: now, back home, where he lives with his wife and his deformed son, thanks to the fact that he has been in touch with Agent Orange, he just cannot get his life back on the rails and this movie portrays one day where everything seems to get as worse as it can be.
we follow him from the morning, where he has again a terrible nightmare about Vietnam (he has hallucinations and flashbacks throughout the day) until the evening, where the film ends in a shocking way.the acting is maybe not always top notch, but every character in this movie feels totally believable.
or maybe they were looking for at least 1 movie so that they could say "hey, we are also producing serious flicks!!" you can say what you want, but i think it was great to give this movie a chance, it deserves it.not a commercial movie, no, a very dark, convincing story about a man who lives a life we all want to avoid.
Combat Shock (1986) was a low budget film about a battle scarred veteran who just cannot erase the memories of his horrific experinces in Viet-Nam. He's also having a hard time adjusting to civilian life.
With a family to support and no hope, the surrounding environment and his family's fianancial problems begin to take a toll upon his sanity and well being.Buddy Giovinazzo has created a grim and gritty look about life in the inner city and for those veterans who were one of the few to escape from the bloody jungles of Viet-Nam seemingly unscathed.
They haven't eaten for days and he wanders the streets, trying to look for work with no luck at all.He suffers flashbacks and hallucinations throughout the film, where he is being tortured in 'Nam and then his supposed recovery in a hospital after.
It's probably the bleakest, most depressing film I've ever seen and all I can say is, if you're having a bad day or work or a bad day in general, just see what happens to this guy!I got the excellent Troma DVD release which features the full uncut Director's version - the only one really worth seeing.
"Combat Shock" stars Ricky Giovinazzo as Frankie Dunlan,a depressed Vietnam veteran living a meaningless life in Staten Island.With no money,no job and little hope,Frankie takes to the streets,shocked by the depravity of the neighborhood-of childhood friends turned junkies and prostitutes.The viewer watches Frankie meander through his bleak existence before a bloody and nihilistic finale that is not for the squeamish."Combat Shock" is a deeply disturbing film that left me stunned.The cast of unknowns is fine and the direction is well-handled.The film is filled with incredibly dirty and depressing atmosphere of urban decay and the gore effects are disgustingly real."Combat Shock" deals with the mental anguish one veteran goes through once back home.It's not as disturbing as "Cannibal Holocaust" or "Man Behind the Sun",but it's close.Check it out.10 out of 10..
Gritty, disturbing nightmare movie about a pathetic Vietnam veteran living in poverty in New York City, who's slowly disintegrating mind finally snaps after one too many days of unemployment, loan sharks, a nagging wife, flashbacks and, worst of all, his constantly crying baby, monstrously deformed as a result of his exposure to Agent Orange.
If you want to see a very effective, considerably penniless drama filled with horror and despair you can't go past the Troma released "Combat Shock".
Looking at the cover artwork, it doesn't do it any justice because it's far more than just an exploitative actioner but a thoughtfully raw and unsettling psychological character piece on the struggle to cope with the hardship of unflinching reality that faced Frankie a Vietnam Vet returning back to a decayed society that just doesn't care.
Other than the nightmares and flashbacks that plague his mind, he finds himself still battling a war and trying to survive along with his wife and baby son (which is a disturbing sight); only the jungle this time is in his own backyard.
This movie shows the crime of poverty , the horrors of war and how some veterans fall under real hard times when they return home.
The score (by Ricky Giovinazzo as well) is one of the best I have ever heard, and fits the film like an uncomfortably tight glove, conveying a horror-movie feel while combining it with more melancholy and dramatic sounds (as well as some dirty, seedy, bored, punked-out-sounding death disco sensibilities) to help give this movie a feel of a study of reality as a horror movie.
I've watched this movie several times and still come away laughing at the end every time, not because it's funny (which it's not), but because it's a feeling of relief and release I get when the catharsis finally occurs in the brutal, climactic scenes.
Certainly lacking in wise-cracking rubber monsters and outlandishly- dressed brain-dead punks, Combat Shock - a serious, if extremely low- budget drama/psychological horror by writer/director/producer Buddy Giovinazzo - proves that Troma Entertainment occasionally took their movies seriously.
Far from a masterpiece, and riddled with terrible production values, Combat Shock nevertheless is a glowing statement as to just what scraping-the-piggy-bank film-making can sometimes offer.After an event during the Vietnam War that left a village dismembered and massacred, Frankie Dunlan (Rick Giovinazzo - brother to Buddy), struggles to adapt to civilian life.
Owing money to a group of drug-dealing punks, led by Paco (Mitch Maglio), Frankie wanders the battered streets of his native New York, coming into contact with various low-lives and looking for any way to make a buck.
The baby, horribly disfigured due to Frankie's exposure to Agent Orange, looks cheap, but the way it moves and sounds, combined with the dump that surrounds it, is just as disturbing as Eraserhead (1977).
Filmed amidst the squalor of inner city slums, and admittedly mounted with an ultra-low budget, this initial film of Director Buddy Giovinazzo is a stark portrait of urban poverty and hopelessness that is both repellent and somehow, captivating, despite the amateurish thesping & technical execution.Definitely not a film for everyone, this picture paints a bleak portrait of a veteran GI and former POW, Frankie Dunlan (played by Rick Giovinazzo, brother of the Director),  whose memories of his experiences in Viet-Nam have left him functionally deficient upon his return to civilian life.
Incapable of holding a job, but saddled with the responsibilities of supporting a wife and deformed child ( a side effect of his Agent-Orange exposure), Frankie awakens each day to a dead-end future, with no perceivable way out.
He eventually comes to grips with his hopeless situation in a stark and shocking climax.This film will never win any acting awards, but the overall milieu is realistically captured and the final effect is powerful, albeit depressing in the extreme.Worth viewing (particularly via the Troma DVD, released in '98), despite the production drawbacks.
COMBAT SHOCK is a gritty film about the disillusion and ultimate break down of Frankie, a Vietnam vet, living in New York with his wife and "child".
Frankie is basically a complete loser with no money, job, or life in general, and the film pretty much just follows him around from one depressing experience to another, until the shocking finale.
COMBAT SHOCK is far too bleak for the standard audience, and as a previous reviewer noted, most people either really like, or really loathe this film.
Clearly, a movie so depressing and upsetting will not appeal to everybody, and it will likely divide viewers furthermore because of its low budget, sometimes iffy acting, graphic violence, and bitter philosophy.
It grapples the viewer by the neck with unstoppable rage, sucking them into a world of hopelessness and depravity, forcing them to witness the cruelest, darkest, and saddest aspects of humanity, always obscuring that glimmer of hope and lightheartedness your heart knows is there somewhere but just simply cannot find.After watching this it's safe to say that you may want to try to lighten up your mood because, although this movie is a masterpiece of tensity and shocks, this is a goddamn BUMMER!.
The film features the director's brother Ricky Giovinazzo as Frankie, a Vietnam veteran returning home to find a very bleak and depressing New Jersey, where he wanders around aimlessly almost throughout the entire film.
He is a shell shocked Vietnam vet who may have massacred his own men, he is in debt to the local loan shark, he cannot find a job, his wife (Veronica Stock) is nagging him constantly, he is about to be evicted from his crummy Staten Island apartment and his rich dad is senile, has lost his fortune, lives in a nursing home and thinks his son is dead.
The middle section of the film suffers badly from slow pacing and lack of material, but things pick up with an apocalyptically unpleasant and nihilistic ending.Definitely a very strong TAXI DRIVER influence, but there is enough twisting and corruption of an already sleazy idea to keep you interested as a whole, despite boring moments.
Combat Shock (1984)*** (out of 4)Frankie Dunlan (Ricky Giovinazzo) returns home from Vietnam after some bizarre experiments were done on him and he's hit a string of bad luck.
Frankie has lost his job, all three are starving and the future doesn't look too bright but he heads out one day in search of something better.Buddy Giovinazzo's COMBAT SHOCK is without question one of the most raw, depressing and bleak character studies ever created.
The movie isn't the best made film that you'll ever see and it's certainly very raw in regards to various technical things but at the same time there's just something so wrong and so off about the subject matter that you can't help but be drawn into its nightmare.The film certainly has a lot to say about mental illness as well as the troubles that faced vets when they returned home.
The flashbacks to Vietnam are all that convincing and there are other technical problems with the film but at the same time this is a lot deeper and a lot more troubling than what most filmmakers would try on a $40,000 budget.Giovinazzo does a very good job in the lead role as he's certainly believable as this broken man who really is at the very end of things.
Combat Shock is hands down, the most depressing movie I have ever seen, yet laughing just kind of came natural, but I would imagine you would need a rather dark sense of humor to see any humor in this at all, but believe me, it is totally there, it's just that it's overshadowed by the morbid, nightmarish, grittiness of it all.
Not only dealing with memories of war and other atrocities, but having to live in filthy Staten Island, having to support a freakish infant who will apparently never get strong enough to grow or even age and a wife with a nagging voice and repulsive physical appearance, not to mention bills, along with debts to a guy who wants to kill you, no food, no work and zero money, never mind the fact that your'e "this close" to going insane.
To me, Combat shock is funny in a Blood Sucking Freaks kind of way, just a little more subtle, or maybe it's the soundtrack that makes you feel like you're watching something humorous, almost like the cheap-sounding repetitive theme song is taunting the shell-shocked Vietnam vet as he walks up and down Staten Island looking for something...
anything positive.Just to break it down, Combat Shock makes Taxi Driver look like Mr. Deeds.
I give Combat Shock 9 stars, for possibly being one of the top 5 most powerful films of all time..
If you're not used to seeing gritty, no budget 16mm depraved amateur student film sickness disguised as a movie then you shouldn't watch it.
If you're a fan of low budget horror films with a very sick ending then you should definitely watch it.
I can't think of a more downright grimy movie than "Combat Shock." The plot is simple and effective.
It's one of those films where having a low budget adds to the overall effectiveness of the picture.Recommended for fans of films like "Deadbeat At Dawn," "Eraserhead" and "Nekromantik." 8 out of 10, kids..
Combat Shock (1986) is a hard-hitting, disturbing film with some very strong scenes, it's about a young man called Frankie who fought in the war, and now hes living back in New York in a slum of an apartment, with his girlfriend and deformed baby!!!
Combat Shock is actually a Troma film, and it's definitely one of their best, but be warned there is various violence and gory images throughout the movie, and the climax is very disturbing and horrific, be warned!!!
COMBAT SHOCK is both a disturbing, boring, awful movie AND a gritty, ultra-realistic, shocking movie about the difficulty many Vietnam vets had getting jobs and fitting back into society.
The film tries to present a bleak look at "Viet-Nam Vets" who can't fit back into society following their combat experiences.
Themes stolen from Midnight Cowboy (bleak New York City), The Taxi Driver (crazed vet shoots it out with three thugs at the end), Rolling Thunder (crazed and disturbed P.O.W. haunted by wartime nightmares), and Soldier Blue (hacked up bodies, severed heads, in a war setting) are chopped together to make this dull, and boring mess.
There is no real good reason to watch this movie.People say how it's gritty and true to life?
You almost feel a glimmer of sympathy for the main character, but the environment is so poorly made (via clichéd characters, bad acting, bad writing, etc) that your mind ends up drifting off to wonder when the movie will be over.It really isn't that gritty or shocking.
Requiem for a Dream does a much better job of being in your face, not to mention it has actual cinematography/writing/directing/ acting/lack of suck.If your claim to fame is realistically depicting a black pimp yelling at people or a typical drug user trying to get a fix, then you do not have a good movie.Blood for the sake of blood, shock for the sake of shock..
But it has appeal with it's ugly atmosphere, surprisingly good dialog, and realistic telling of a Vietnam vet's tortured life.I don't like admitting that the film bored me, but it did.
But with a style very similar to the gritty and depressing 'Last House on Dead End Street', another film I didn't really like, there is a unique feeling this type of movie gives off.
I am a huge low-budget film fan and see a lot of movies all the time and i still have not seen a movie that was more unique and and orignal as Combat Shock.
I usually like Troma films but I have to say that if I never see this movie again it will be too soon..
Seriously, after the first 10 minutes of the film's start (which was the most interesting part of the movie) we are treated with watching a man walk around town for like an hour.
The main lead was, like his "baby",...special.Not Troma's worst film, but definitely not their best on either..
He's also looking for a job to help his family as he begins to now work for a drug dealer with a gang if he can get them the money he owes them until one day he finally snaps and gets revenge even on his wife and kid.A disturbing, bleak and interesting action drama that feels as a mix of both genres which is also a character study in it and it's one of the more serious "Troma" distributed flicks, it's also a interesting movie as well.
"Combat Shock" wants to be more realistic than other movies about Vietnam veterans like Oliver Stone´s "Born on the 4th of July" or "Jacknife" starring Robert de Niro, to show the destiny of those men in plain openness, but it´s only cheap, filthy and boring: the most time main character Frank Dulan is on his way to walk through the shabby streets of the slums of New York City, surrounded by a pesky new wave soundtrack.
This film also contains a lot of stuff that is really ridiculous: the deformed baby looks like an alien, some of the actors behave as if they were in an amateur video and the scene at the employment office brings "Combat Shock" near the border of a parody.
Extremely bad acting, art school special effects and a thin plot make up Combat Shock a movie to avoid.
"I can never tell where one torture ends and the other begins."Extremely depressing parable of human misery, poverty, and drug addiction on the rotted, deteriorating streets of Staten Island where we follow a day in the life of a deeply troubled Vietnam vet who may or may not have slaughtered an entire village during that conflict and how such horrifying memories torment him.
The effectiveness of "Combat Shock" just goes to show that the movies which the notorious Troma company picks up for distribution are typically better than their own productions.
The film's low budget is totally appropriate for the grim subject matter and the stark interior lighting never allows the poverty to be romanticized.The performances are all excellent and one sequence, where Frankie calls his broke father for a favor, is shattering on so many levels."Combat Shock" is a very powerful achievement..
And what follows is ugly and unpleasant and it was a shocking and powerful ending to an already disturbing movie.
It captures the poor Vietnam vet's daily life back in the world, the poverty, hopelessness and horrors of a nagging wife and a horrific mutant son (and that boy has a whine that made me sick) A so simple yet shocking sound effect...
the movie centers around a nam' vet who, after coming home, sees his friends have gone to poverty, and searches for a job to help his wife and mutated baby.
if you are a fan of low budget film making, or you want to get a new look on war movies, check this film out.