Let’s Take a Moment to Revel in the Awful Awesomeness of Strike Commando’s Movie Poster

You’ve probably noticed this, but my movie reviews as of late have been trending decidedly towards the sort of cinematic fare that I would’ve stared at with wonder whilst perusing the VHS rental shelves as a kid back in the ’80s and early ’90s. We’re talking low-budget post-apocalyptic titles, sci-fi knock-offs, and of course, Z-grade ninja flicks galore, all of which I’ve finally been able to enjoy as a mature and functional adult thanks to streaming services like Tubi.

One of the things that I’ve come to sincerely love about these movies are their posters, which are clearly meant to compensate for the movies’ clear lack of good cinematic taste. You know the producers of Overkill — a 1987 buddy cop flick about an LA detective who teams up with a Japanese cop (and goes undercover as a male stripper) to defend California from the yakuza — knew exactly what sort of movie they were making. And so they went all out for the poster artwork, which depicts our two heroes battling yakuza toughs whilst cruising down the street on the hood of a cherry red convertible. Similarly, the trashtastic posters that IFD Films produced for Godfrey Ho’s ninja movies are appropriately absurd and incomprehensible, and I want every single one of them framed and mounted on my walls.

That brings us to 1987’s Strike Commando, a “Namsploitation” flick from Italian director Bruno Mattei that stars Reb Brown, best known for his performance as Dave Ryder (aka, Blast Hardcheese) in the MST3K classic Space Mutiny. Much like Space Mutiny, Strike Commando finds Brown running around, punching and shooting bad guys, and yelling. A lot. Only this time, his character is Sergeant Michael Ransom, a Rambo-esque commando who’s battling both the Viet Cong and Russian soldiers who tortured and killed his friends as well as the Army brass who betrayed his unit. It’s terrible and unintentionally hilarious in almost every possible way, and I’m pretty sure that twelve-year-old Jason would’ve loved every single minute of it.

He also would’ve loved the movie’s poster, and thus, so do I. Strike Commando’s poster feels like several Platonic ideals of cinematic cheese colliding together to form a kaleidoscope of awful awesomeness. How else to explain Ransom’s mis-proportioned M-16, which sports not one, not two, but seven(!) barrels, all of which are spouting hot lead? Or the bad-ass cobra tattoo on his bulging, vein-riddled bicep? Meanwhile, the other side of the poster features a rogues’ gallery of all of the bad guys who Ransom will inevitably punch, stab, shoot, and/or blow up in his quest for vengeance, along with a flight of helicopters that would make Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore green with envy.

But the pièce de résistance absolutely has to be Ransom’s blood-soaked and sweat-covered face, which is twisted in fury as he yells in defiance. Which is quite apropos, since Ransom spends approximately one-third of Strike Commando simply yelling, sometimes at bad guys (“Jaaaaakooooodaaaaa!!!”) and sometimes simply into thin air. (Interestingly, the Norwegian VHS release of Strike Commando features the same basic artwork, only with a much younger Ransom who’s considerably calmer, and even looks to be a wee bit stricken by all of the violence he’s unleashing.)

Strike Commando’s poster is so ridiculous and over-the-top — indeed, Ransom’s grotesquely rendered M-16 looks so surreal the longer you look at it that it feels like it must be a metaphor for something — that it’s tempting to dismiss it altogether. Likewise, it’s tempting to dismiss the poster’s artist — whose name, alas, has faded away into the mists of “B” movie history — as a hack. And yet, the work they created is a dozen times more interesting, more dynamic, and more accurate a representation of the movie that it’s promoting than the vast majority of Hollywood posters you see today.

Movie posters have become a dying art-form that’s prone to recycled visual tropes and rehashed clichés. But then along comes Strike Commando to stick a seven-barreled machine gun in your face while screaming at the top of its lungs and remind you that movie posters can, in fact, be ridiculous and terrible and original and awful and awesome all at the same time.