Combat Shock

Combat Shock is a 1986 action war drama film written and directed by Buddy Giovinazzo and distributed by Troma Entertainment. The plot of the film takes place in Staten Island, and follows an unemployed Vietnam veteran living in total poverty with his nagging wife, his deformed baby due to Ricky having been exposed to Agent Orange that the US was spraying as a defoliant over Vietnam, and junkie friends. Unable to get a job and surrounded by the depravity of urban life and crime, he begins to lose his grip on sanity. The film received mixed reviews when it was released. Film Threat's Christopher Curry praised the film for its gritty realism, and Troma president Lloyd Kaufman calls it one of the company's true "masterpieces"; however, shockcinemamagazine.com called it "one of the ugliest, nastiest, most depressing movies of the decade" (though the review itself was a positive one), and Videohound described the film as "relentlessly bleak... you won't find a more depressing film outside an art-house cinema". The film's tagline is "Fighting, killing, maiming... Agent Orange and the torture cages were the easy part!"