Monday, April 18, 2011

"The Fall of Sam Axe": One of the Worst TV Movies Ever Made?

I watched thirty minutes of "The Fall of Sam Axe" on the USA Network and that's a half hour that I'll never get back.

First off, they couldn't even get the fucking uniforms right. Axe walks in at the beginning of this turd-show "wearing" the summer white uniform of a Navy commander. I put that in quotes, because he has the shoulder boards of a full commander, but he is wearing the cover ("hat") of a junior officer. Axe is supposed to be a Navy Seal, but he is wearing the warfare pin of a Surface Warfare Officer. Axe is wearing black shoes with a summer white uniform; officers and chiefs wear white shoes with summer whites.

There are two officers sitting on a board of inquiry interrogating Axe; they are wearing service khaki. They also mixed up Seal insignia with SWO insignia. They are also not wearing any rank insignia on their collars, though they are wearing chest-fulls of ribbons that probably don't mean anything and are probably in the wrong order.

Jeez, USA, you guys were too cheap to spring for a movie military adviser to even give you two hours of show & tell on how to wear uniforms?

The rest of the half-hour that I watched came across as the kind of cheesy, dumb-ass, thoroughly implausible, made-for-basic-cable movie that I would have expected to see Bruce Campbell starring in during the 1990s.

5 comments:

  1. Answer: Yes.

    They were also too cheap to buy the correct uniforms even if they *had* known that the uniforms were not correct. What you saw was whatever was hanging around the prop rooms at the studio they were shooting at, and they tossed it onto the actors because "nobody will notice anyhow."

    They also cheaped out on writers, as you *also* noticed, by recycling an old 80's movie-of-the-week script with the edges buffed a bit and a new coat of paint. After all, it's a TV movie on the least-watched network in America, nobody will notice it anyhow, right?

    - Badtux the Cynical Penguin

    ReplyDelete
  2. You lasted ten more minutes than I did and I only did it that long because of some puff piece I read the other day in one of the daily news rags.

    Like you said a complete waste of time...

    All The Best,
    Frank W. James

    ReplyDelete
  3. I made it through the whole show. Kinda like watching an episode of The A-TEAM than wouldn't end.

    ReplyDelete
  4. That stuff drives me nuts too!
    I spent some time as a "historical consultant" on some films. Many times I was told "It doesn't have to be true, just believable".

    Thanks for your blog!
    ronn

    ReplyDelete
  5. BadTux, I didn't last long enough to see that it was a rip-off of an `80s movie. It seemed to have been, in part, ripped off from "Tears of the Sun".

    And what is with his blue cammies in a freaking jungle?

    ReplyDelete

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