I went into watching this movie totally ready to bag on it, and everything about it. When it was all over, I found I was so conflicted on if I actually liked it or not. This one isn’t easy.
Deep behind enemy lines in World War 2, a crew of Russian soldiers is sent in to investigate a small town, and the disappearance of another squad. As the small crew of men uncover a nazi village and some towns people hiding from “monsters” they soon find that they are in for more than they were told.
The monsters that hunt the townsfolk have been created by an “evil genius” and are slowly killing off anyone in the area. As the squad soon finds out, that includes them. One by one they are picked off until it is just a lone camera man trying to escape Dr. Frankenstein and his monsters, by any means he can.
So, much like all the other movies I watch here, I was expecting the worst going into Frankenstein’s Army. The title to me just screamed cheesy, campy, rubber monster nonsense. I was surprised that when the end credits rolled, I was still battling myself over if I liked the movie or not. I think, in the end, I really did enjoy it.
Frankenstein’s Army is another in a long, and seemingly never ending, line of “found footage” movies. It’s hard to imagine that a film crew, shooting on old reel to reel cans would be able to run around in the hills of some remote town shooting this movie. The amount of film that would be needed is ridiculous and the quality would not be as good as it is. That said, once you put this out of your head, the rest of the presentation is pretty great. Transfers, lens swapping, sound fidelity all of this is taken into account for the look of the movie. Once you are over the willful suspension of disbelief, the movie is actually shot, and composed really well. I also think the acting was really done surprisingly well. I asked the director, Richard Raaphorst, if there was any ad-libbing on set because to me, it all seemed very natural, and he said no, “there was very little. They stuck quite close to the script throughout filming.”
Lets get down to what really matters in a movie like this; the monsters. Monsters created by Doctor Frankenstein run from freaks with knives for hands, to one that literally has an airplane propeller engine as the top 1/3 of its body. While some of them were a bit hokey (mainly the one with a metal iron maiden-like contraption over its head) some of them were kinda creepy. The “mosquito man” comes to mind immediately. A monster with long pointed spikes for arms and legs and a giant drill jutting from its face. It must have been both fun and frustrating to create monsters cobbled together from parts only available to someone during the 1940s.
I’m sure that this movie isn’t for everyone, and its not like I have some refined movie pallet that no one else can appreciate, but I enjoyed it. It took me a while to actually see that. Maybe because I am a sucker for WW2 movies in general, I’m not sure. I don’t think this is the end-all-be-all of monster movies, but it accomplishes, at least in my mind, what it set out to do. YMMV, but I guess that’s the point of subjective movie reviews.
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