EDITOR’S NOTE: Troma’s War was on USA Up All Night on March 14, April 17 and July 17, 1992.

Troma’s War was the movie that made me fall out of love with Troma. Yes, 16-year-old Sam loved The Toxic Avenger and the sequel and devoured everything that came out of this New Jersey-based company, but young and cynical me was so let down by this movie that I started to hate everything after. Now, thirty years or so away, it’s not all that bad.

A commercial airliner crashes on an uncharted island that ends up being a terrorist training facility. That means that Vietnam vet Parker (Michael Ryder) and Taylor (Sean Bowen) have to get it together and save their fellow passengers. Some of them are captured, tortured and killed by neo-Nazis led by conjoined twins, who include amongst their number Senor Sida (Paolo Frassanito), whose name means Mr. AIDS and who wants to start a one-man STD epidemic in the U.S. Actually, all of his soldiers have AIDS, so maybe he’s just leading that assault.

Jessica Dublin, who plays Dottie in this, spent most of her career in Italy where she was in Fragment of Fear; So Sweet, So Dead; Sex of the Witch and Death Steps In the Dark. She was also in a sort of remake of The Wasp Woman — Rejuvenatrix — as the older woman who wants to be young again and is Mrs. Junko in the second and third Toxic Avenger movies.

Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman — as Samuel Well — are responsible for this. As I watch it as an older person, I can appreciate just how over the top it is, as nearly every scene has nudity, gore, breasts being shot or genital mutilation. At $3 million, it was Troma’s biggest movie and when it had issues with the MPAA, that group’s president Richard Heffner said that it was “no fucking good.”

You can watch this on Tubi.