Just as the Korean conflict was escalating, Fuller set about making this grim film about an American patrol lost in the forest. A gruff veteran, Sergeant Zack (Gene Evans) is the sole survivor of a North Korean ambush. Bound and crawling through a field of corpses, he is freed by Short Round, a South Korean orphan. The two then begin their dangerous trek back to secured territory. Along the way, a motley assortment of GI stragglers is accumulated. Fuller's disdain for war creeps into every characterization, but it is Sergeant Zack, gritty, emotionless, almost bestial in his lack of sentiment, who calibrates the film's cynicism. When a crack finally appears in Zack's armor, the dogs of war come sniffing. Manny Farber observed: "Fuller is one of the first to try for poetic purity through a merging of unlimited sadism, done candidly and close-up, with stretches of pastoral nostalgia in which there are flickers of myth."-Steve Seid