Movie thoughts - Frankenstein's Army (2013)
It is said that a thing of Evil lives forever. And undoubtedly the greatest evil the 20th century witnessed were the gruesome Nazis. Decades after the prisons and concentration camps have been turned into memorials, the books and movies still run red while talking about the horrors. In this line comes a movie from the same school of thinking that imagined ideas like Iron Sky, Werewolf women of the S.S, Captain America, Hellboy and many more. Aptly titled 'Frankenstein's Army', the movie shows a band of Russian soldiers who receive a false signal from another unit and get drawn to a Church that doubles up as a secret laboratory. One where a particular grand-son of the famous 'Dr. Frankenstein', straight out of Mary Shelly's classic, is experimenting on human body party and reanimating them with machinery appendages to create machines of pure terror. What then begins is a part comic and part tragic tale of the decimation of the soldiers at the hand, or rather I must say the drill point heads, axe-hands, saw-tooth and head-snares of the Frankenstein's Army.
Even though a B-grade flick, the movie does take itself seriously, with actors delivering a far better performance for the wages they would have been paid for. Though certainly no way comparable to any decent A-grade production, where the movie excels is the creatures creation department. When waves after wave of mechanized un-dead appear from every direction, all you can do is be amused by the sheer intelligence that imagined them. They are a visual treat to watch and deserve a second, director's cut version to give them more screen time. The movie remains a little confusing in the starting and becomes silly in the second half, but if only one remembers the premise on which it was created doesn't take itself seriously, we would be better off enjoying the good parts. Again, the handheld camera viewpoint that seems to have been overdone these days, works fine for this movie, specially in the tunnel chase sequences making them appear entirely game-like. All in all, it takes us down on a good nostalgic recollection of the old Wolfenstein 3D and its successor RTCW (Return to Castle Wolfenstein) video games.
Far better than many of the scifi channel's creations like Sharknado, Sharktopus etc., though the movie doesn't really deserve a second viewing, the director does deserve an applause for his first full length feature. I for one would surely be on lookout to catch more stuff from him in the future.
RTCW..!! you brought back many memories man.
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