Customer Reviews

Operation Take No Prisoners

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I knew the director of this film, TOM SHAW, and worked on his previous feature film "THE COURIER" (aka "THE COURIER OF DEATH", aka "STREET CONTROL" in parts of Europe), which so far (2010) has not been released to DVD.

Gruff ole Tom was the "Ed Wood" of Portland, where his little movie studio on S.E. 75th and Division Street was located in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, before he died in the late 90s.

"OPERATION TAKE NO PRISONERS (aka "TAKE NO PRISONERS") was his second and last completed feature film.

Tom had a reasonably good sense of setting up a short scene or sequence, but had a difficult time communicating details, due to excessive daily drinking, and he had a hard time connecting sequences together into a coherent story, which his small crews (especially Associate Producer and film genius Ron Schmidt) usually did for him, as best as they could, cuz Tom always resisted doing any post production work that couldn't be done right on the set, resulting in some pretty uneven films that needed a lot of post-production fixing to be comprehensible to any reasonable level, usually done by Ron Schmidt and the crew when Tom wasn't looking as he was napped in the afternoons before his daily drinking parties with the crew each night.

Tom was also overly-generous with loaning out his film equipment to other local filmmakers, including an early Gus Van Sant, who shot his short films and his first feature film MALA NOCHE ("Bad Night") on Tom's 16mm equipment.

Oscar-winner Steve Lustgarten shot his first feature film AMERICAN TABOO on Tom's equipment also, as did several other local filmmakers.

As Tom was almost always loaning out some of his equipment to somebody, that situation often didn't make enough lighting equipment available to shoot his own films in the middle of production, and so many scenes are under-lit, "pushed" by the film lab (Teknifilm) during processing to create any kind of image, which makes them grainy, and thus Tom's films have a pretty consistent low- budget look to them.

Tom tried his do his best on his films, and tried to make them as well he could. In the early 90s, discussions were made to submit them to Mystery Science Theater 3000, but Tom didn't want his masterpieces made fun of, and so MST3K fans never got the experience of the Tom Shaw phenomenon as you will if you buy a copy of OPERATION TAKE NO PRISONERS, before it becomes a rare collector's item.

For now, OPERATION TAKE NO PRISONERS remains a fascinating piece of all-but-forgotten truly independent film history.

Dan Fiebiger
Portland, Oregon

This was an amazing tour-de-force of bad acting. It was fairly action packed and the acting was so bad it was funny. The stunts and effects were decent. The plot was absurd (also funny). If you are a MST3K fan, this movie is for you!