Combat Shock: Troma's Bleak Vietnam Nightmare

Troma’s catalogue is a joke that the company is in on. Slime, mops, tutus, exploding heads, a logo that promises you will not be asked to feel anything. Rent enough of it and the brand becomes a guarantee: whatever is on this tape, it will be silly.

Then there is Combat Shock, and the guarantee fails.

Buddy Giovinazzo wrote, directed and edited it on 16mm in Staten Island, for a budget that has always been reported in the region of forty thousand dollars. He called it American Nightmare. His brother Ricky plays the lead and composed the score. Troma acquired it, retitled it, cut it, and put it out in the mid-1980s alongside the melting bodies and the vigilante mutants — and every viewer who came to it expecting the house style got the worst ninety minutes of their video-shop life.

It is the bleakest American film I can name. I mean that as a description rather than a recommendation, and I am going to recommend it anyway.

One day, downhill

Frankie Dunlan is a Vietnam veteran. He is unemployed, unemployable, and living in a Staten Island apartment with a wife who has stopped pretending and an infant whose deformity the film attributes to Agent Orange. There is no food. There is no money. There is a loan shark who wants paying and has staff.

The film covers roughly a day. Frankie goes out to look for work, to look for money, to look for anything, and the day proceeds through a sequence of failures, each one closing a door that was already mostly shut. He queues at the unemployment office. He asks for help. He meets an old friend and watches what the friend has become. He walks. A great deal of Combat Shock is a man walking through a broken borough in winter, intercut with Vietnam flashbacks that Giovinazzo shot in the local woods, because the local woods were free.

There is no rescue in this structure and Giovinazzo never implies one is coming. The film’s clock runs on arithmetic — a sum getting smaller, an afternoon getting shorter — which is a colder mechanism than suspense and a great deal harder to sit through.

The mechanics: why the poverty is not a limitation

The technical argument here is the most instructive thing about the film, so let me take it slowly.

Giovinazzo had no money, so he had no lights, so he shot Staten Island in available winter light on 16mm — and Staten Island in available winter light on 16mm looks like the end of the world. Grey concrete, grey sky, grey water, grain like static. The film’s visual identity was determined entirely by what could not be afforded, and it produced a palette that a production designer with a million dollars could not have improved.

He had no locations budget, so he shot in real derelict spaces — actual ruined interiors, actual weed-choked lots, actual streets nobody was cleaning. A set-dressed slum has an art department’s optimism in it somewhere. Giovinazzo’s slum has none, because it is a slum.

He had no composer’s fee, so his brother made a synth score in a bedroom, and the resulting music is thin, repetitive and slightly out of tune with itself. It sits under the film like tinnitus. A proper orchestral score would have told the audience what to feel and thereby offered a hand to hold; this score offers a headache.

And he had no name cast, so nobody in the film looks like an actor. Ricky Giovinazzo’s Frankie is a small, exhausted, badly shaved man with the affect of someone who has stopped sleeping — a performance that no professional would give, because professionals give you something to watch. There is nothing to watch. That is the achievement.

Every one of those constraints is a version of the same principle: the film’s texture makes a claim about provenance, and the claim is that this was found rather than made. It is the same discovery Cecelia Condit made on video in Possibly in Michigan a year earlier, applied to a feature and pushed until it hurts.

One further craft note, because it is the detail that convinced me the film is deliberate rather than lucky. Giovinazzo edited this himself, and his cutting pattern is consistently a beat too long. Frankie leaves a room and the camera stays. A conversation ends and the shot holds on the silence afterwards. In a competent thriller those frames get trimmed, because they are dead. Giovinazzo keeps every one of them, and the cumulative effect over ninety minutes is a film that will not let you skip the waiting — the queuing, the walking, the standing about that constitutes most of an unemployed man’s day. The tedium is transcribed rather than summarised. You cannot cut your way to that; you have to decide to do it.

The Taxi Driver problem

Everybody who writes about this film reaches for Taxi Driver, and the comparison is fair enough as far as it goes — a veteran, a rotting New York, a slow accumulation of pressure, a violent release. Giovinazzo has never hidden the debt.

The difference is money, and the difference is the whole point. Scorsese’s Travis Bickle has an apartment, a job, a car, a gun budget, and a plan. He has agency, which is what makes him frightening. Frankie Dunlan has none of these things. He cannot afford a gun. He cannot afford the bus. The film’s most horrible running detail is that its protagonist’s violence is repeatedly deferred by his inability to finance it.

That relocation converts the story from a psychological thriller into an economic one. Bickle chooses. Frankie is processed. And where Taxi Driver ends in a bloodbath that the film ambiguously rewards, Combat Shock ends in a kitchen, and the difference between those two endings is the difference between an artist with a studio and a man with forty thousand dollars and something to say about Staten Island.

The real ancestor

The genuine ancestor sits ten years earlier and about six hundred miles north. Deathdream — Bob Clark’s 1974 film about a soldier who comes home from Vietnam dead and whose family will not admit it — is the film Combat Shock is descended from, and the family resemblance is exact. Both are horror films where the monster is a veteran and the horror is the household’s insistence on carrying on. Both understand that the returning soldier is a genre figure because a returning soldier is a genuine haunting. Clark had the wit to make his supernatural. Giovinazzo declines the metaphor and simply keeps the man alive, which turns out to be worse.

The other relatives are the New York grot films of the same decade — Street Trash, Basket Case — that used a bankrupt city as a free set. Those films are having fun. Combat Shock is what the same streets look like from inside.

And for the register Giovinazzo is aiming at, Come and See is the summit: a war film with no interest in your endurance. Giovinazzo has a fraction of a percent of Klimov’s resources and the same disposition.

The honest case against

The film is a chore. That is a real criticism and it should be stated without the special pleading that cult writing usually supplies. Combat Shock has no jokes, no relief, no second gear, and no interest in the ordinary contract by which a film gives you a reason to remain in your seat. Its middle third is a man walking. Its performances outside the lead range from adequate to visibly non-professional. Its Vietnam flashbacks are exactly as convincing as a Staten Island wood can be.

The Troma cut, which is the version most people have seen, runs shorter than Giovinazzo intended, and the compression damages what little breathing room the original had; the longer director’s cut has since circulated and is the one to seek.

There is also a fair charge of exploitation to answer. The infant is a prop, and it is a grotesque prop, and Giovinazzo’s use of it walks a line between a serious statement about Agent Orange and a shock effect from precisely the catalogue that released it. I think the film clears the bar. I understand entirely why others do not.

The verdict is that Combat Shock is the most valuable thing Troma ever distributed, and the company deserves the credit for putting it out, and the film is still on the wrong shelf. It is a genuine piece of American social horror that arrived with a mop-and-tutu logo on the box, and forty years later that mislabelling is the only reason anyone has heard of it. Rent it once. You will not do it twice.

Where to find it: the restored longer cut has had a proper disc release and turns up on the horror streaming tier. Do not put it on late at night with company.

Spoilers below

The last ten minutes are why people who have seen this film remember it for the rest of their lives.

Frankie comes home with nothing. He has failed at every transaction the day offered. And Giovinazzo, having spent eighty minutes establishing that his protagonist cannot afford a weapon, resolves that problem in the most domestic way imaginable — a kitchen, an object to hand, an infant, a decision that the film has been quietly arranging since the first reel.

Then Frankie sits down at the table and finishes the arithmetic on himself.

Giovinazzo films all of it flatly, in the same grey light as the queue at the unemployment office, with the same tinny synth underneath. There is no crescendo. The camera does not move in. The violence is filmed with the exact energy the film has given to a man waiting for a bus, and that equivalence is the argument: this ending has the same weight as everything else in Frankie’s day, because it is the same kind of event. A thing that happened because the money ran out.

What lifts it out of nihilism, narrowly, is the final image and the flashback structure closing over it. The film has been telling you where Frankie really is since the first cut to the jungle. He never came back. The apartment, the wife, the child, the borough — all of it is the war continuing by other means, on a smaller budget, with the same casualty list. Bob Clark made that idea supernatural in 1974 and the metaphor was bearable. Giovinazzo shot it in a real kitchen in Staten Island for forty thousand dollars, and it is not bearable at all, and it is the truest thing in the Troma catalogue.