I actually had never heard of this movie until I stumbled upon it a few months ago while looking at upcoming video releases. The title and cover art caught my eye and it turns out this movie is well respected movie from Australian Director Tom Jeffrey. This would actually be the last movie he would ever direct according to IMDB.
That said, The Odd Angry Shot is about a group of five Aussie soldiers who are flown into the Vietnam campaign. The opening minutes feature one of the co-stars as he is given a farewell party by family and girlfriend. Once at the airfield, the other stars are introduced, including Harry, played by Graham Kennedy. This is his second tour in Vietnam, but for the others (Bryan Brown, Ian Gilmour, John Jarratt, and John Hargreaves), they’re going in not knowing what to expect. Thanks in large part to Harry’s sense of humor, the tension between the group breaks early.
I was pleased with the pacing of the film at the outset, but I thought it slowed down quite a lot soon after that, say around the twenty minute mark. It wasn’t until after watching the film entirely and reflecting that I realized that the numerous non-combat or “slow” scenes were intentionally a focus of Jeffrey’s. Indeed, while most war movies focus on the action, drama, and tragedy of war, The Odd Angry Shot spends a considerable amount of time showing just how slowly paced and outright boring war can be at times for some soldiers. You can hardly go fifteen minutes in without at least one soldier cracking open a new can of beer, and there is much time spent joking and chiding each other. The big scorpion/tarantula fight between Harry’s crew and the neighboring squad’s crew is another example of how these men at war kept busy and tried to keep stress at bay.
Still, whether in combat or not, there was always a sense of despair loathing about underneath all of the laughs and smiles. The source of this despair is the same as it is today, no matter what nationality it is that goes to war: combat, friends and comrades dying, girlfriends who stop writing, disease, death, fatigue — it’s no secret: war is hell, and that holds just as true for this group of Aussie’s. Just don’t expect the film to dwell on the tragedy as much as it does on the more typical and light-hearted days in these soldiers’ careers.
Ultimately, I thought Jeffrey and crew achieved a good balance between the pacing and content of the film and its runtime. At just over an hour and a half, it’s not an epic war film like The Longest Day, Patton, or Saving Private Ryan; it pops in, tells an entertaining if not terribly memorable story, and the brief credits roll.
On Blu-ray, expect a 1080p 1:78:1 presentation that was taken from the original recording. The image quality for the most part is very good — it’s at least very consistent throughout. There are some speckles, pops, and even a couple of tears that flash up randomly, but they aren’t very common. Looking closely, you could pick up a steady grain, but at a reasonable distance, it fades away. I found myself examining the detail of the sets (backgrounds) a lot. Bottomline, the image quality is very good given the source. The lone audio track is a DTS-HD MA 2.0 Mono track in English only. As this is a very dialogue driven film with only a handful of minutes of action, it works. It’s perhaps not the quality most would hope for, but it got the job done and I didn’t feel like it undercut the value of the movie or this release very much. I would have appreciated the convenience of subtitles, though. Lastly, I love the cover art image and the menu was well designed. I should point out that the cover art is actually reversible too, but honestly, in either case the cover is misleading, making it look like this is a far more action-oriented war film than it really is.
Extra features are slim, but include the lengthy 3m14s vintage trailer in HD. There is also a nearly seven minute long HD feature called “Stunts Down Under with Buddy Joe Hooker.” Set against footage of the film (not behind the scenes or production footage, but just clips from the final cut), Buddy reminisces about the movie and stunt-work back in the late 70s and 80s. It’s a short feature and worth a watch, but probably not one you’ll look up very often.
I would conclude with that same point regarding the movie itself, too — at least for me, it’s not one I really see myself watching again anytime in the next few years. That’s not to say it’s bad, it was worth the time and I was entertained, but The Odd Angry Shot just didn’t strike a chord with me that would encourage me to see it again.
With that, let’s get to the summary…
