Directed by Richard Raaphorst

Written by Chris W. Mitchell, and Richard Raaphorst

Starring Karel Roden, Joshua Sasse, Robert GwilymAlexander Mercury, Luke Newberry, Hon Ping Tang,Andrei Zayats, Mark Stevenson, and Jan de Lukowicz

Running time 84 minutes

 

Everything about Frankenstein's Army is a bit of a strange Hodge Podge of things that don't normally fit together. Lets start with the fact that the film itself is billed as a Dutch-American-Czech film, that in itself says strange things and definitely worked to pique my curiosity, as strange is often under rated as far as I'm concerned. One other thing that caught my attention with this one was the art attached to it. Sometimes we tend to take it for granted how much the poster art on any particular film colors or perception of what it may be and whether it would be worth our investment in time or money. So with so many various points pushing me towards the play button I gave in, I mean really we all know it was just a matter of time before I lost the battle anyway!

 

The setting is WWII, and we have an elite recon unit of Russian soldiers who are making their way across the countryside, occasionally coming across some very unusual corpses. These corpse don't appear to be entirely human nor do they appear to be anything actually know to the men. War makes the nerves sketchy enough with out strange half man half something else sparking corpses showing up. Anyway I digress, our band of soldiers receive a distress call from another platoon, so our hero's rush off in aid of their comrades.

 

While searching for their "boys" they come across a farm house, where they make the acquaintance of a German going about feeding some of the animals. (Now I should not have to tell you buuuuuuttt just in case you slept through history, the Germans were the primary enemy of WWII). They try to get info out of him in regards to the whereabouts of their fellow countryman, to no avail. After a bit of torture the German offers to take them to where they boys are, which is where things get really strange...

 

Frankenstein's Army is a hard one to review for me because on one hand its really kind of awesome, but on the other its really not! I find myself both loving and hating it at the same time, and my viewing buddy had much the same reaction to the film. So I guess to be fair I need to speak about both sides.

 

Some of this movie is really very successful. The story itself is fairly simple, war torn land, soldiers trying to find and rescue their comrades, and evil mad Scientist bent on finding his own solution to the raging war, fairly straight forward. Granted there are a few twist and turns I haven't expressed, but as always I do my best not to give everything away,because wheres the fun in that? The film also has some honestly creepy moments in way of visuals. The monsters that make up the Dr's.Army are awesome. Easily some of the most diverse and interesting creature I have seen in some time, and really well executed. It also has some nicely done gore effects, that work well with-in the story line and don't go overboard, which would have been easy to do in this kind of context. The film also has almost a classic feel to it, it looks aged making you feel like your watching something that would have come out in the 60s or 70s era. All of those things are really fantastic about this one.

 

Now onto the other side, what didn't work for me in this film. The biggest singular problem in this one is that its another in the long line of Found Footage genre, which works for some things but not this one. It starts out with a bit of promise with the quality and colors of the film appearing to be what you would expect from the time period. However as it moves forward the found footage concept losses something in the translation and just doesn't at all fit. This film could have been hugely successful had they just filmed it as a straight forward film, instead of trying force it forward as found footage. It has some other slight issues here and there but they are pretty inconsequential in comparison.

 

This is a film that would have been almost guaranteed cult film status if it had been filmed differently. It could still garner a strong following, for no other reason than the Mad Doctors creations which make the film worth watching for sure. Its just difficult to fully engage in this one, I found it impossible to really stay focused on the film, so take a word of advice, before you pop this one on. Make sure all shiny things are removed from view or you may notice a twinkle out of the corner of your eye and be pulled away completely for a few!!!

 

hEATHERoMEN