Sky Bandits

1986

Action / Adventure / Drama / War / Western

Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Spilled 20% · 500 ratings
IMDb Rating 4.7/10 10 368 368

dirigible

Director

Zoran Perisic Photo
Zoran Perisic

Top cast

Ted Maynard Photo
Ted Maynard as Big Jake
John Sessions Photo
John Sessions as Flight
Keith Buckley Photo
Keith Buckley as Von Schlussel
Jeff Osterhage Photo
Jeff Osterhage as Luke

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by nigel_essex 6 / 10

Enjoyable nonsense but fails to fulfill its promise.

If ever there was a film needing a re-edit it's this one. It lurches awkwardly from one scene to the next with an air of making it up as it goes along. Which is a shame as within all its staleness there is a good film in there somewhere. Okay the acting from the two leads is bad and the dialogue they have to say is worse. There's an attempt to make them lovable rogues but they come across as objectionable idiots. Nonetheless the film is chock full of invention, excellent design and pyrotechnics. It just doesn't flow as it should. Not a bad film as such but could do better. Hence a re-edit would save its potential. BTW Gunbus is available on Amazon Prime but the transfer is awful; VHS picture and distorted sound. Terrific poster though.
Reviewed by Leofwine_draca 5 / 10

Hugely flawed, but still appealing

GUNBUS is a fun little British WW1 film featuring a couple of imported American leads who through various rather unbelievable plot twists end up joining a British suicide squadron in their plans to bring down a massive German airship. It starts out as a rather cheesy western in which the central twosome dynamite about a billion banks before they're suddenly in France and ready for action.This rarely-seen film is rather inconsistent and seems to be suffering from choppy editing and huge budgetary constraints; the ending in particular is extraordinarily abrupt and just cuts to another random scene in an unappealing way. Saying that, I did get a kick out of GUNBUS, enjoying it in much the same way I enjoyed the similarly flawed BIGGLES made during the same era.Scott McGinnis and Jeff Osterhage verge on the irritating rather than charismatic but there's a solid British cast to back them up, including the reliable Miles Anderson and Rodney himself, Nicholas Lyndhurst. Ronald Lacey is underutilised as a friendly German character. The movie was directed by Zoran Perisic, the Yugoslavian special effects guy who worked on 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and SUPERMAN, and I suspect that directing wasn't really his calling. Still, there's plentiful action here, and the many aerial combat sequences, although cheesy, are good natured and most of all fun.
Reviewed by davegrenfell 6 / 10

There are much, much poorer films out there than this

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