Terror Squad

When looking at some films that a friend of mine had picked up,i saw the cover to what looked like a fun 80s action movie.Sadly when the end credits started,I felt very disappointed, The Plot: A group of terrorists try to blow up a nuclear power plant in Indiana.But when they fail to blow it up,they end up running to a near-by high school,where the only people their are a teacher and a group of teens are doing detention. The terrorists decide to take all of the students as hostages,and demand a bus and a privet jet,so that they can get home.Sadly for the terrorists some of the teens are going to do their best,to make sure they don't get away. View on the film: Screenplay: The screenplay is by Chuck Rose has a good idea at how to mix different types of films,by doing a Commando-style action movie,with Breakfast Club style teens being involved.Sadly, Rose's mix is let down by the very poor direction. Direction: Director Peter Maris sadly seems to be on a mission to kill any sense of fun that the film could have,with the main centre of the movie being a plodding forty minute(!) car chase,that I can easily say is one of the most boring and slowest chase scenes that I have ever seen in a film. Final view on the film: A clever,fun plot that's let down by a terrible director.

This is a tremendously bad thriller from the late 80s, and the dating shows. The bad guys are cartoon caricatures of Libyans. They cross the US-Canadian border into Indiana (think about it) and immediately fail to blow up a nuclear reactor in Kokomo. What follows is the longest sustained car chase I know of (35 minutes), with old cars, abandoned factories, and other unwanted props getting blown to hell with rocket launchers. Finally, they take over a high school during detention hours (described by one terrorist as a "steenky place!"). It's "Breakfast Club" meets "Die Hard" then, as jocks and nerds band together to defeat the baddies. Meanwhile, the police and SWAT teams led by Chuck Conners surround the school and proceed to do nothing, even when the terrorists' numbers are reduced to two and clear headshots present themselves repeatedly. Finally, it's a mad dash for freedom as the terrorists and their pretty-girl hostage board a Ford Bluebird school bus and head for the airport. But is it a big Bluebird after all? The final set of exciting stunts wouldn't work with a full-size bus, so it miraculously (and VERY clearly) transforms into a Hoekstra minibus halfway through the chase. I've said enough -- this is an overlooked classic.

Wonderful, amazing schlock with a surprising gritty feel and some amazing stunts and effects. Surprisingly, nearly every security officer and cop in this movie isn't portrayed as a dolt, and there's a 30 minute stretch from minutes 15 through 46 that has one of the best, most exciting car chases ever - it has everything except a boat chase. The story is unimportant but, aside from the nerd's choice towards the end, and the finale action sequence, everybody's character arcs feel like they make sense and fit within the framework presented. If you want cheese, schlock, silliness, action, shooting, and just plain ol' 1980s B-movie fun, you need to watch Terror Squad.

An odd concept for a movie: in Kokomo, Indiana, a group of Libyan terrorists raise hell in the town. What follows is a lengthy car chase (clocking in at almost 30 minutes) involving the entire sheriff's department (led by Chuck Connors of all people). A slew of police cars are demolished, splashed, blown up, etc. Unfortunately, the movie then transitions to a low-rent version of The Breakfast Club (which sets up the rest of the plot) where we follow a group of misfit students who are under the watchful eye of a hateful teacher and they must band together when the terrorists hold them hostage. To be honest, the oddball plot doesn't really work and even with the great Ken Foree in a supporting role as Connors' loyal deputy, the movie still can't get up off the ground.

Action has always been a plus point for me and some violence has never bothered me--after all it's just play acting. But when it got down to randomly killing innocent people in town and add a few school children to the body count after that, I drew the line and found no entertainment value in this. In the car chase the passenger terrorist does a poor job with his machine gun often aiming it at--nothing. The film was likely an anti-Libya propaganda effort as at the time the country was one of our biggest enemies, climaxing at year's end with the bombing of the Pan Am flight in the Lockerbie incident. Seeing Kokomo, Indiana was interesting as I moved to the general area 15 years later for a spell. It was a typical Rust Belt town that later on like many such towns would suffer heavily with plant closures and the effects of de-industrialization. I hadn't seen many films with Chuck Connors late in his life such as this one (he died four years after this release) At 66, he was getting up there in the years but at least did his part fairly well.

If you're making a low-budget film, and care about what you're doing, it shows. Peter Maris' low-budget shoot-em-up, on the other hand, shows just how bad the mixture of lack of money and total lack of interest in the quality of the finished product can be. If you enjoy watching movies for the sake of nit-picking, you can entertain yourself pretty well...there are enough goofy geographical errors alone to keep you busy. Never mind the just-plain-silly bits like the infamous shrinking school bus and the disappearing/reappearing windshield. If you can watch it through more than once, there might be some MST3K potential, but that's the only reason I can give you for watching this movie. Definitely a 1 on a 1-to-10-scale.

When looking at some films that a friend of mine had picked up,i saw the cover to what looked like a fun 80s action movie.Sadly when the end credits started,I felt very disappointed, The Plot: A group of terrorists try to blow up a nuclear power plant in Indiana.But when they fail to blow it up,they end up running to a near-by high school,where the only people their are a teacher and a group of teens are doing detention. The terrorists decide to take all of the students as hostages,and demand a bus and a privet jet,so that they can get home.Sadly for the terrorists some of the teens are going to do their best,to make sure they don't get away. View on the film: Screenplay: The screenplay is by Chuck Rose has a good idea at how to mix different types of films,by doing a Commando-style action movie,with Breakfast Club style teens being involved.Sadly, Rose's mix is let down by the very poor direction. Direction: Director Peter Maris sadly seems to be on a mission to kill any sense of fun that the film could have,with the main centre of the movie being a plodding forty minute(!) car chase,that I can easily say is one of the most boring and slowest chase scenes that I have ever seen in a film. Final view on the film: A clever,fun plot that's let down by a terrible director.

Four Arab terrorists, probably Libyans, sneak into the US through the Canadian border. They badly botch an attempt to blow up a nuclear power plant in Indiana. The four that survive are badly pursued by the police, who mostly crash their cars. The terrorists shoot up a town's main street and run down an old man with their car. The pursuing police chief then runs over the old man (a bad dummy). Meanwhile, a bunch of actors apparently in their twenties are portraying high school students. One of them plays guitar with the janitor, except that on the soundtrack is bad synthesizer music, the same kind of bad synthesizer music that is on the soundtrack. Later, a bunch of the students are in detention. The guitarist plays some more synthesizer music in detention, even though he doesn't have an amp. A jock makes farting sounds with his armpit, except that it sounds more like a synthesizer playing fart sounds. The now two surviving terrorists, apparently having evaded the police, burst into the detention room. Thus the stereotypical Arabs meet the stereotypical high school students. The police and SWAT surround the school, and miss dozens of opportunities to get into the school and/or shoot the terrorists. The students and their teacher frequently do things to make the terrorists nervous and angry (and one of them is quick to anger anyway), which only results in getting themselves injured or killed. As others have noted, when the terrorists leave the school in a bus, they are very clearly in a full-length bus. At some point while the police are following them to the airport, it clearly turns into a short half-length bus. I'm at a loss to explain how the filmmakers thought they could get away with that, especially since there are lengthy shots of the bus both when it is long and when it is short.

Trailer—Terror Squad