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the audience applauded

Sorry, this movie sucks

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

Sad, but true, but the message at the very beginning of this film suggests that. A World War II film made during the Vietnam war, this gives evidence that supports that theory. I found thus to be a mixture of clichés and a few wise observations, in the telling of a story of desperation of the last of the German tank force to get out of France before it is too late. By this time, it's obvious that the war on their side is lost, and survival is the goal. "The Germans are coming! The Germans are coming!" one frightened towns person shouts, a laughable reference to a recent hit movie which involved Russians. Soldiers argue over who said, "If you're not with us, your against us!", debating whether or not it was Hitler or Caesar. An apology causes somebody to inquire whether or not the person who said it was actually German. A French girl somehow ends up in the Panzer (German tiger tank) with topless soldiers as the camera shoots a close-up of her barely covered chest. Guy Madison is the only American actor, surrounded by mostly Italian actors, putting this among the list of "Spaghetti westerns, although this is obviously not a western. Long moments of silence plague this, while combat sequences are loud and obnoxious, but a scene where one soldier is suddenly hit by a bullet from the tank starts off as profound as he seemingly finds blood on him with no pain, then ridiculously rolls down a hill like a log. Gratuitous love scenes in the middle of battlegrounds add to the complete ridiculousness as does transposed memories of war for the man while he is making love. A chicken appears out of nowhere for one of the men to literally wrestle with. It reaches the height of ridiculousness when the blonde heroine puts an obvious doll up to her breast to nurse. I wouldn't call this the worst war movie that I have ever seen, but it certainly is one of the strangest!

War film logic dictates that both Americans, Germans and the occupied French will all understand each other while speaking fluent Americanese. With this kind of co-operation, why was there ever a war in the first place? Possibly to inspire no-budget tank operas like Battle Of The Last Panzer. It's the tale of a doomed Panzer squad led by the clearly-insane Lieutenant Hunter (played by Italian actor Stan Cooper, real name Stelvio Rosi). His men know the war is over and are on the brink of mutiny, but Hunter, who spends most of the film with his shirt off and practicing his strange full-facial style of overacting, is determined to see his mission through to the last man standing. They bulldoze their way into a tiny French village and capture the sycophantic mayor and his less-than-impressed wife Jeanette, who despises weakness and sees something sexy in Hunter's bullish macho destructive determination.Played by German actress Erna Schürer who spent most of the Seventies in more sleazy Italian fare such as Strip Nude For Your Killer and Deported Women of the SS Special Section, Jeanette willingly volunteers to become their tour guide, supposedly to save her husband, but after a while trapped in a tank full of sweating, leering Germans her motives are quite clear, showing off her flesh and playing the affections of one soldier against the other. At one point, Hunter peers up her skirt and says "Pull up into the underbrush and park!" Jawohl, mein herr.Unlike spaghetti westerns, the Italian war cycle was far shorter, much less prolific, and produced no stand-alone genre classics, least of all this one. But Battle Of The Last Panzer from 1969 has the look and feel and musical score of a spaghetti western from the same era - transpose Confederates versus Yankees on top of the WW2 players, substitute a war wagon for the Panzer tank, and gatlings for submachine guns, and you have a Sergio Leone movie. A rough as guts Leone at a third of the running time, one-fiftieth of the cost and with a script rewritten buy a team of monkeys on typewriters, but a Leone film nonetheless. And with a cool red-tinted spaghetti western style shootout at the end, it's worth sitting through this interesting yet deeply flawed Italian-Spanish poverty-row production. So gather the troops and fire up the Tiger for another excursion into enemy territory courtesy of the losing side: the Italian war epic Battle Of The Last Panzer.

"La Battaglia dell'ultimo panzer" is a standard issue World War II actioneer made on a dime-store budget with countless of anachronisms, but it isn't as awful as some of the critics here contend. First,this drive-in style movie probably was never intended to be shown in the United States, and its producers were willing to do whatever it took to get their movie made so they cut numerous corners. Second, like every World War II movie made since the 1950s, a lot of the physical elements are clearly wrong. The infamous Nazi Tiger tank is in fact an American M-47 Patton tank, but what else could the producers have done? All Tiger tanks were destroyed in World War II, and this was before the age of digital effects wizardry? Indeed, it appears that the filmmakers turned to the Spanish army to get all those tanks. Unfortunately,unlike their air force with its scores of vintage Nazi training planes, the Spanish military didn't have any Tiger tanks to loan them like they did with their aircraft in "The Battle of Britain." Look at all those American World War II movies since 1945, they have M-48 Patton tanks clanking through them. The chief difference between the M-47 and the M-48 is in the shape of the turret. Yes, I'd have to agree that the U.S. uniforms are rather lame, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do to get a movie made. Nevertheless, I'd say that the story about one enemy tank caught behind Allied lines after D-Day was a pretty interesting departure for any war movie. Guy Madison of TV's "Buffalo Bill" plays an American commander who thought that he had destroyed all of the Tiger tanks. Predictably, with all its errors, "La Battaglia dell'ultimo panzer" presents itself as an easy target to eviserate for most serious-minded movie consumers who think that they have the critical credentials for the job. Naturally, the dubbing is execrable, but again the producers—like those on the ten-thousand abominable kung fu movies churned out in China—had to work fast. Remember,however, the late 1960s were still the time when most American movie audiences couldn't stand to read subtitles. I remember watching the historically accurate but lackluster "Tora, Tora, Tora" and the white subtitles used to translate the Japanese leaders, except that these white subtitles got lost in the picture when they appeared against the white Japanese uniforms. Yes, at times the music sounds straight out of a spaghetti western, but it does have the usual drumbeats that mark a military movie. Remember, these producers probably couldn't afford to pay for the likes of Jerry "Patton" Goldsmith, Elmer "The Great Escape" Bernstein, or Ron "633 Squadron" & "Where Eagles Dare" Goodwin to score the movie. The idea that the U.S. Army would disguise a German tank to get sneak into enemy lines wasn't so bad either. Similarly, portraying the French resistance in such an unsavory light is at least DIFFERENT! Like a lot of late 1960s Spanish/Italian war movies, "La Battaglia dell'ultimo panzer" qualifies as an anti-war movie. Indeed, most war movies are anti-war, but you have to have the blood splattered butchery of warfare to get that point of across. While the Nazi leader (Stan Cooper) is your run-of-the-mill, foaming-at-the-mouth Nazi fanatic, the other Germans emerge as less gung-ho. I like the German war correspondent who wanted to murder the tank commander. You don't see stuff like that in every W.W. II movie. At one point, the movie makes the legitimate statement that nations aren't good or bad but that people can be good and bad. Now, on the serious side, upon learning that the Americans are arriving in their French village to liberate them, a blonde innkeeper babe with the wrong era hair style observes pungently that the Americans liberate everybody except Americans. This was a legitimate complaint that real Nazi propagandists made about the U.S. during World War II about our hypocritical treatment of African-Americans. You don't hear that kind of stuff in "The Longest Day" or "A Bridge Too Far." Granted, "La Battaglia dell'ultimo panzer" is not designed for short-sighted, authenticity-oriented, armchair historians who bring unrealistic expectations to every film that they see. As an historian with a Ph.D. in World War II movies, I have seen virtually every World War II movie ever made and I'd prefer this lamentable but off-beat epic to one of those pretentious piles of junk with budgets out the butt that make the same mistakes with uniforms, armored equipment, and small arms that this one makes. As a colleague of mine at the university where I work is prone to say: "Remember, it's just a movie."

I almost turned this movie off during the first 10 minutes. I decided to continue watching it to see if there really was a plot buried amidst all of the other shortcomings of the film. There are several things that you should know that are bound to annoy the typical war movie viewer. 1. Stupid music. Some of the worst I have ever heard. It reminds me of the old spaghetti westerns. 2. It's a dubbed movie. I'm not a fan of movies that are dubbed, i'd rather watch them in the language they were shot in and read captions. In this case, it's worse because the Americans and the Germans are both dubbed and have no accents what-so-ever. In some really dark scenes, you don't know if you are watching the Germans or the Americans. 3. Authenticity. There are so many inconsistencies with weaponry, uniforms etc that it's hard to tell who is who and who they are shooting at. Even the Germans shoot at the other Germans who are hiding behind a tank early in the movie yet, Later, in pitch black one of the men can identify the Lieutenant from 1/4 of a mile away as he walks down a hillside. 4. Dialogue. War movies are about war. Guns, explosions and people fighting. There are some really odd cut scenes. There is one with a prostitute where a soldier trying to teach her about humanities indecency - she's not interested, she just wants the $64 dollars. Most of the dialog reminds me of watching Japanese Anime.If you watched it this far, you might as well know that it doesn't get any better. All of the actors have perfected rolling down hills as they die. Apparently gravity always pulls you towards a camera man, never away. All in all, a complete waste of time. Unless you are just looking for a movie with cheesy dialog, there's ALWAYS something better than this to watch.