20.4.14

IHAO on ... Frankenstein's Army - READER REQUEST

Requested by Matt Hoeker

Bad movie.  BAD movie.  Sit.  SIT.  Stay.  Staaaaay.  No, no movie!  BAD MOVIE!

Heh, ok.  So this movie.  It is shot with HD cameras.  And the monsters look pretty neato.  Some of them.  I have now said all the good things about this movie.

It is not good.  At all.  It is a bad movie.  And not even a super enjoyable one.  The characters come from the Eli Roth school of "let's all be douchebags so the audience cannot wait for us to die."  Which is fine for side characters, but for all the characters?  I have no one to root for.  Not only that, it is a found footage film.  We have two cameras ... though only one ends up being used after the first five minutes.  And ... ok, let's talk about what the film actually is.

A group of Russian soldiers are heading into Germany at the tail end of WW2 to help a distress call by some comrades, only to find a bunch of half zombie, half mechanical monstrosities and that one of their own betrayed them because of orders from higher up the communist regime.  Like I said before, it is a found footage film, so your "protagonist" is the camera-man, who is a Jew, which is nominally important but ultimately not.

The effects are combination of ridiculous, cool, and terrible.  Oh, I know!  New paragraph!

Very little attention span, huh review-critic-person.

Ok, I got it figured out.  This movie is a haunted house.  A bunch of weird visuals as you move around a creepy location (locations look AWESOME in this, by the way) and creepy things "chase" you as you hear terrible scary sounds just out of view.  You never actually feel like you are in danger, but the atmosphere is terrifying alone.  And I do mean that, alone.  The script is basically no existent, the movie gives up on even having a plot around the 1/3 mark.  This movie is NOT a good movie.  But if you enjoy haunted houses, this might actually be right up your alley.  And it is only SLIGHTLY not interesting.  I betcha there are some of you out there who could LOVE this movie.  I'm not one of those people.  But I also don't care for haunted houses, so there might be a correlation there.

Grade: F

1 comment:

  1. This is another that I would probably consider a D. I think a film has to be a total failure for me to grade it as such. Some success (location, set, costumes, and monsters, in this case) makes me give Ds so I can save the Fs for abject failure. I think that I respond that way with a lot of things.

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