Ski Troop Attack is a Roger Corman film – he produced, directed and also has a small role – and so comes with certain expectations. It’ll be made on the cheap but it’ll be competently done. Unlike the bigger Hollywood outfits, which worked on the principle that the odd hit would finance the other losses, Corman wanted every movie to turn a profit. How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime – his autobiography – says it all.
It was more than a hundred, of course, multiples more. Here, in 1960, he’s only six years into his career but he already has 35 movies under his belt. And he’s only 34. He’d carry on knocking them out at a prodigious rate, slowing down in his 90s but still going at it when he died aged 98 in 2024.
Ski Troop Attack isn’t one of his rare hits, like The Little Shop of Horrors or The Pit and the Pendulum, or one of his more esoteric cult items like The Trip (script by Jack Nicholson, starring Peter Fonda). It’s knock-em-out Corman doing it the way he liked to do it, essentially hoping he has enough in the can to make a film and then relying on an excellent editor to pull it all together.
It’s a “lost patrol” story about a reconnaissance unit in the snowy wastes as the US army pushes the Germans back in the Ardennes in the final year of the Second World War. Separated from the main thrust of the battle by a German surge that puts them way behind enemy lines, the soldiers have to avoid detection and decide on a plan of action. Head back and join the main battle like real men, says hothead loudmouth Sergeant Potter (Frank Wolff), constantly a-bristle because he’s out in the snowy wastes with a bunch of conscripts when he, alone, is a proper soldier. Continue forward and gain valuable intel, says commanding officer Lieutenant Factor (Michael Forest), the cool yin to Potter’s yang, the good American to Potter’s bad.
Eventually the guys will hit on the plan of blowing up a railway bridge delivering vital supplies, but not before skirmishing with Germans several times. In between, the men get to know each other in familiar scenes – “You got a girl?” one asks another, as photographs are brought out and tales of sweethearts back home are exchanged.
For all the Potter/Factor dynamic, which gets a bit tiresome, it’s the relationship between Privates Ciccola (Wally Campo) and Grammelsbacher (Richard Sinatra) that turns out to be the interesting one. Ciccola the average guy with reserves of pluck. Grammelsbacher the soldier of German descent who fights the Nazis because it’s the good fight, the warm, humane and funny one in this troop. Sinatra (cousin of Frank) pretty much walks away with the film, though Forest is its handsome star.
Corman opens with no introduction, straight into the action, and leaves us to figure out the relationships and backstories as we go. They’re not hard to fathom, since this is the formula-film scenario par excellence. Between the hot opening and the big finish, many interchangeable scenes of men on skis being pursued by other men on skis (the Germans are led by Corman himself), with occasional blow-ups between the lieutenant and his sergeant, a very brief interlude at the home of an ardent Nazi hausfrau (Sheila Noonan), the occasional bit of stock footage padding things out and then the finale on the bridge to be detonated.
It’s competently directed, nothing more, and what plaudits it earns should probably go to editor Anthony Carras, who ties it all together skilfully.
You do get the sense that it’s hellishly cold out there and Corman later said it was murder making this film in sub-zero temperatures. And he knew what he was talking about since he’d already shot Beast from Haunted Cave on the same location with the same crew and main cast members and his brother Gene producing. Everyone got one day off between that movie and this one. Say what you like about the movies Corman made but he always got good value for money. And in a move Corman would probably have appreciated, Ski Troop Attack comes in twofer deal with Beast from Haunted Cave if it’s a physical copy you’re after.
Ski Troop Attack (with Beast from Haunted Cave) – Watch/buy at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
