Some movies are so bad that you actually enjoy them, laughing at the silliness, preferably with some alcohol involved, and friends.
This isn't one of them.
It's more of an insult. The wooden dialogues, the cardboard settings (did I actually see some of the 'actors' glancing sideways to read their lines??).
The "special effects", well let's not go there.
If my 12 year old cousin (I don't have one, but bear with me) would present me with this film, I would be very impressed. And I would wish him well in his future as a potential director/screen writer.
But this actually got made and released, and that's quite an insult to the year 2020. And to movie viewers.
Plot summary
In one of the most dangerous missions of the war, an American B-17 pilot volunteers to fly a surrendered Messerschmidt 109 on a daring flight through the heart of Germany to try to prevent the people of London from being terrorized by the V-2 rockets. "Rocket Hunter" tells the story of an amazing pilot and his bombardier brother from the time they are teenagers dreaming of taking to the skies to the dark days of January 1945.
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Not even bad enough to laugh at
Horrible!!! Gow this got made is a mystery!!
Dont watch!! By far worst movie of the decade!!! Just when you thought it was safe to see a movie,,,bam, yuk!!!
Just gotta give it a 10!
OK! I know your instant reaction will be to Downvote me immediately, but I admit this film IS BAD! at least permit me, allow me to explain why I gave it a high rating. Mainly it is because I enjoyed it, or parts of it.
Don't get me wrong, this is definitely bad but there were a couple of things that I liked a lot, and I was kind of impressed. The other earlier scenes I flipped through, apparently there is something going on about a woman who is using the radio to torment American soldiers, I think maybe she was the girlfriend or something of the old guy at the end who is kind of the Winston Churchill clone, or daughter or something- he's got her picture on the wall. And for some reason she is broadcasting from the rocket factory. They kept on showing a picture of her on some wall without context all the way through the movie. Finally, we get to see that the picture is hanging in the office of some old rummy that looks like a cross between WC Fields and Winston Churchill, so apparently there is some relationship between that woman and "WC Churchill".
This is "allegedly" based, very loosely based, on the raid upon Kohnstein Hill in Germany where Mittelwerk/DORA was. If anybody ever watched "The Good German", that was partially what that film was about as well. But where in that film I think by Steven Soderbergh they actually took great pains to completely re-create the filming techniques of 1947, they didn't bother doing anything unique like that with this film. This film would have worked a lot better if it were done to mimic the black-and-white and filming techniques of the 40s.
Because the story itself is alright, there are a couple of interesting things in there, but it's just that the story is planted within the confines of such a poor production that it is pretty much wasted.
I don't remember ever hearing anything about a single pilot using a stolen Messerschmidt to blow up part of the main Kohnstein factory. There was an actual raid where they used some kind of napalm to blow it up, and there was a much larger raid later on toward the end of World War II.
I just didn't see any references to this particular story in anything that I have just read. If this is based on something that actually happened, I would like to read about it. But the Wikipedia article doesn't really say that much and some of the other articles I found were just too comprehensive and I didn't have the time to read through the TOMEs quickly enough.
What yanked me into this was the 1.3-star rating, I had to see what it was about. And I should have given the same rating, but I just have to be different, you know? But I mostly agree with most of the opinions expressed here.
Most of the acting was so pitiful and bad that I scrubbed through it. Until I got to the part where the kid locates and shoots a pitiful 20mm gun into a rocket factory. I think it was 20, The size kept changing.
The reason why I am rating this a whole 10 is because there is a scene where the kid is flying over the (Black?) Forest very close to the treetops and this had to have been taped, it looked like it was taped in a small airplane or Chopper with what was probably a Sony Handycam. Actually I think it probably was a real airplane that they used to film that flyover. The $83 was probably the airplane rental for the day. The vibrations of the plane must have caused video distortion, I got the same kind of distortion when I attempted to videotape the punk rock band "DOA" at the Casbah in San Diego with a similar Handycam. The bass was so loud that the low-frequency vibrations literally caused the video to distort, and that is exactly what I see here in the aerial flyover scenes, the same exact kind of distortion. Because older handycams couldn't handle low freqs like that, new handycams can. So they probably dusted off the old Sony Handycam taken from their moms closet to film that part.
There is also a scene where it shows the airplane from the side, shooting, and this to me appears not any worse than the animation used in late 30's or early 40's war films, like that film about Bombardiers made in 1943 starring Randolph Scott. In that film, they took literal footage of B-17s and they cleverly animated Japanese Zeros flying through their formation, shooting at them, it was actually pretty remarkable animation for 1943, although some of the shots of the Japanese pilots were taken from the John Wayne movie "flying tigers".
Which is why I kind of liked the animation that they used in this, the animation that must have cost an additional $83 to fund.
Actually more likely the guy who made this film probably paid $41.50 to rent the airplane to fly over the "Black Forest", and the other $41.50 spent creating the animation of the Messerschmidt shooting up the factory.
Around that time in the film they show a V2 rocket being moved out of the factory and I don't know if that was animation or not but it did look kind of interesting, it looked good actually.
That's why I say this movie would have fared a lot better had they done it completely in black-and-white, minimized some of the camera shots, And hired a slightly better script supervisor.