The Gardens of the Devil (1971)

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

HEROES WITHOUT GLORY is a late-stage Italian WW2 film, made at a time when all the good movies had already come out and film-makers were left feeding out the remaining dregs to jaded audiences. This one is a low budget affair, made with a no-name cast and directed by Alfredo Rizzo, who also made THE BLOODSUCKER LEADS THE DANCE, although he found greater fame as an actor earlier in his career.This desert-set movie sees a British patrol working their way through a hostile landscape, fighting off attacks by German units at regular intervals. They come across a group of prisoners who have in their possession a treasure map that tells of an ancient tomb; before long the whole group is in search of an ancient treasure.The plot makes it sound more interesting than it really is, because this is sloppy stuff indeed. The humour is broad and the characters broader, painted in simple strokes so that you don't have much interest in them. The on-location desert scenery is nice but the action is rather routine and there are few instances of incident or set-pieces that really stand out. Star Jeff Cameron made a career out of appearing in quirky Italian B-movie fare but this is one of his least interesting efforts.

Incredibly messy Italian war film about a British officer taking his men across the desert on some mission or another. The film looks to have been put together in an uncaring manner with the actors looking more like they were pulled off a street in Rome rather than having gone through British training (scenes like the pasta eating one will do nothing to dissuade you from thinking otherwise). The sets and props seem to have been put together by taking what ever was at hand at the time and using that. Its so bad that one can't really be sure if it was suppose to be serious or a comedy. In either case you're laughing at the serious bit and sitting stone faced at the "humor". The action, when it happens, is good, but there isn't enough of it and it seems more like brief respites between stretches of boredom. My opening line about one mission or another is the truth, I really didn't know what was going on because I stopped caring enough to remember what was the point of it all. This is a bunch of over fed actors driving about in jeeps, occasionally shooting guns and behaving (and performing) badly. While I can't fault producers from throwing films together to get some money on what ever trend was big in cinemas at any moment I can't help but feel that it's the sum total of poor films like this that diminished the opinion of people toward various action/horror/ comedy films that that country put out. As Euro-war and Italian war films in particular go, this is one of the worst and least interesting

A veddy veddy proper British officer (Isarco Ravaoili, later to appear in the even worse Achtung! The Desert Tigers) tries to whip a group of recalcitrant American troops into shape in order to lead them on a dangerous commando raid deep in enemy territory. He's assisted in his efforts by Lt. Billings ('Jeff Cameron', aka Giovanni Scarciofolo), a comparatively sane US Army officer. Coming very late in the Italian war movie cycle, I Giardini del Diavolo (Heroes Without Glory) is bottom of the barrel cinema scrapings, with little effort made to maintain period detail or military accuracy. Thankfully, there's a fair amount of action provided as a distraction from the threadbare plot and early '70s hairstyles.