THE G.I. EXECUTIONER (1971)
aka Wit’s End
Article 4438 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-2-2014
Directed by Joel M. Reed
Featuring Tom Keena, Victoria Racimo, Angelique Pettyjohn
Country: USA
What it is: 86 minutes of exposed footage

Someone is trying to kill a journalist in Singapore, and it has to do with a kidnapped scientist being held for ransom.

Angelique Pettyjohn appears naked quite a lot in this movie. There you have, in a nutshell, the only reason why anyone would want to see this movie. It certainly isn’t the action; you’ll need the patience of a martyr before it shows up, and the forgiveness of a saint for the lack of competence with which it is dished out. It’s certainly not the plot, which is mostly found in the narration during the credits and then lost in the muddle of the movie itself. It’s not the acting; I didn’t see any. It is most clearly not the fantastic content, which can be summarized like this – the scientist was apparently working on something involving antimatter. Not only does the antimatter experiment play no active part in the story, you never see any of the experimentation. Nor do you ever see the scientist. In fact, if a two-second piece of footage where it was mentioned in passing in conversation were excised from the movie, you wouldn’t even know there was any fantastic content at all. I can’t even bring myself to call it a Gizmo Maguffin; it’s more like the faint outline of the rumor of one. That this one sat on the shelf for 13 years before being released is no surprise. The only two reasons I think that it was finally released by Troma is because it was directed by the man who gave us BLOODSUCKING FREAKS, and because of Pettyjohn’s lack of wardrobe. And if there is a G.I. executioner in the plot somewhere, he’s kept safely out of the existing footage of the movie. Quite frankly, this movie may be the single biggest waste of my time for my whole project.

P.S. It has come to my attention that this movie did actually get a release before Troma picked it up in 1984. It doesn’t make the movie any better, though.