Forgotten TV star David Soul co-wrote and acts in TIDES OF WAR, a ridiculous low-budget wartime drama set in the Bahamas, for which the Colombian coast stands in unconvincingly.
Staged in early 1945, four months before VE Day, the story concerns a ludicrous SS plan to invade the Bahamas. Martin Henkle (Soul), a German naval intelligence officer and U-boat captain, pontoons ashore and executes the soldiers in a British outpost, then attempts to radio a German assault
team waiting offshore. Unable to establish contact, Henkle finds his way to a mission, where a benevolent doctor (Ernest Borgnine) and nurse (Yvette Heyden) minister to the locals. Henkle poses as an anti-Nazi Dutchman named Van Damme, but they discover his true colors and chain him up outside in
the village square. He escapes in a blinding rainstorm, just in time to witness his German comrades slaughtering the defenseless villagers; shaken, he rethinks his allegiances, and attempts to shield the doctor and nurse from a vicious SS Colonel (Bo Svenson), who tortures him. Henkle escapes once
again, steals some dynamite from the Nazi arsenal, and constructs a makeshift mine, hoping to disable a German tanker that is about to land a fleet of V-2 rockets and rocket fuel. When the tanker misses the mine, Henkle, now accompanied by the nurse, boards the ship and attempts to scuttle it
manually. Captured yet again, they elude death at the hands of a firing squad as the tide reverses in the nick of time, triggering the charge and sinking the tanker.
Even for bottom-dollar video fodder, this Italian production--apparently a vanity project for Soul--pushes the envelope. Plotting, editing, production values, and performances are uniformly inept. At best, jaded viewers may find it amusing to identify the classic Hollywood films from which
various plot devices and lines of dialogue are summarily lifted. (Violence, adult situations, profanity.)
