User Reviews

Oh, my God, it was another Found footage movie. Now, I hate FF movies in general because I find it unlikely that anyone would keep operating their video cams or cell-phones during some horrific event. This is even MORE unlikely, as the improbable 1940's Color Film Camera that also has synchronized sound and can perform at the quality of 21st century equipment.

So our protagonists are a bunch of Russian recon soldiers who are ALSO filming a propaganda film WHILE the cameraman is on a secret mission to find this mad scientist on behalf of Stalin. (Spoiler) .

By "Russian Soldiers", I mean Western Actors doing bad Russian accents, with dialog written by people who were only paying marginal attention during WWII history class. You have military action being filmed by people who've clearly never been in the military, like dropping a grenade in a room you are in.

So let's get to the Monsters. Yes, the grandson of the original Dr. Frankenstein is making human/machine hybrids that are ridiculous looking, with big old swastikas on them so we remember they are Nazi Zombie Robots. All suspense is dissolved when you see these things, they look just silly.

The ending has the Secret Agent left to the mercy of the Nazibots by his own soldiers (who apparently have forgotten Stalin will kill their loved ones) and then having a nice discussion with the mad scientist about how he plans to end war by turning everyone into Zombie Robots.

Made worse is that you really don't cheer for anyone here. They had about two minutes of trying to make some of the Soviet soldiers likable, like the guy from Krakow who wants to rescue his wife. But then they go about simply looting and murdering civilians before they encounter the monsters. Not even sure who the protagonist is supposed to be here.

So characters you don't care about being killed by silly monsters.

I went to see this movie with minimum expectation: to be entertained by nice monsters, ass- kicking fights and a minimum of story. I did get nice monsters, but that is all. The plot is pretty much inexistent, which would be OK if the action was entertaining but it's just... not.

First, the "found footage" thing... I know, this is not real life, but Russian soldier in WWII didn't have color camera with integrated microphone. it just makes the action harder to see because you only have one point of view at a time. It can be interesting, but not here

The people are just... there. there is nothing really to make you care about them, so you don't. The movie is really slow so there was time for more, but instead you just watch them walking in a forest, walking in a village, walking with monsters walking around. Cause yeah. you'd think they would fight those monsters, but they don't. sometime the monsters attack then disappear, sometime they don't even bother and are just there.

And then, you meet the "doctor" responsible for those creature and hear his motivation and you think "well why wasn't that the beginning of the movie" and then everything blow up and you feel like you just lost too many minutes of your life for a shitty movie.

Set in late World War II, on the front between Germany and Russia. There is a lot of 'found footage' style shaky camera, shot by a young soldier on the Russian side.

They come upon a village where the population is mostly missing, but there are plenty of corpses. In a nearby factory, they find a stitched together something that is connected by cables to the main electrical lines. When the squad's flunky starts the generator, the thing animates and kills the squad's commanding officer.

They find some rabbits, which looked good for food, but they also found more constructed monsters. These have more impressive armament, and the squad loses a couple of more men. They find some German civilians who try to be helpful, but the whole situation is close to irredeemable. More armed monsters show up and do more killing.

Dmitri's underlings (Dmitri is a captain, and has always outranked everyone in the squad) find out about his treason that kept them in the factory to die. He led them indirectly to the place, and jammed their radio once they were there. Dmitri claims it's orders, and had a document to back him up. Anyway, they are expected to figure out what the Nazi scientists have been up to. Dmitri's squad mates are upset with him, and they shove him down a chute so he can find out better. He does find out quite a bit more, but it is not clear how he will get out. Then he meets Victor, whose last name comes from the title.

Does anyone get out of this alive? Are all the constructed Nazi warriors put down?

-----Scores------

Cinematography: 0/10 Hand held cameras. Bad everything.

Sound: 5/10 So-so. What would one expect from hand helds?

Acting: 1/10 There was acting? Well, Karel Roden did a bit.

Screenplay: 5/10 The steam-punk Frankenstein monsters were often cleverly constructed. The ideas were fairly well realised visually, but the story did not make all that much sense.

Towards the end of World War II, a group of Soviet Union soldiers pushing into eastern Germany get a distress signal from one of their own. They pursue it and stumble across a secret Nazi lab, one that has unearthed and begun experimenting with the journal of one Dr. Victor Frankenstein. The scientists have used the legendary Frankenstein's work to assemble an army of super-soldiers stitched together from the dead body parts of their fallen comrades and with enhanced mechanical parts to make them the perfect killing machines - a desperate Hitler's last ghastly ploy to escape defeat.

If you're a purist, then there are a lot of things that you'll hate in this movie. This is fundamentally a found footage horror/sci-fi hybrid that is set in the 1940's. No black and white footage, everybody speaking in English, a camera that wasn't invented until a couple of decades later and the regular widescreen footage that are all supposed to be from the 40's might annoy the hell out of you. The found footage genre in itself is very contrived, especially during the second half of most movies. But, once you get past all that, there's a beautifully realized movie underneath. The creature designs - OH, MY GOD - the creatures were so fantastically terrifying. Terrifying is not the word though. They're just so captivating. It has just the perfect mix of necessary cgi and practical effects which brings these gruesomely gorgeous beasts alive.

The war tropes are all there though and a couple of the actors seem amateurish. Aside from that, the Frankenstein lore was very deftly integrated into the proceedings. The doctor was gleefully insane who made me uneasy with his gross Russian and Nazi brain experiment. The atmosphere is appropriately dreary throughout. In the end, the movie is worth it for the creatures alone. This is what clever and innovative filmmakers with a low budget can bring to the table. This movie slaps those obscenely big budgeted blockbusters across their faces. It is a flawed, but underrated gem among B-movies.

7/10

This is nasty.

In more ways than one.

The premise sees a small squad of Russian commandos on an insurgency "mission" into Eastern Germany in WW2. Two cameramen are taggng along to record their glorious exploits for Uncle Joe and the folks back home. But someone in the squad has an agenda and the "mission" isn't quite what the grunts have been led to believe. More about that later.

This film taught me some things about history and the history of film technology I wasn't previously aware of. Having seen actual grainy, jumpy and blurry colour archive footage from WW2 I didn't know lens and chip technology was actually so advanced at the time that digital colour filtering and other effects were readily available back then. Or that picture clarity was incredibly refined and sharp and that Dolby Digital sound was easily achievable. This being a found-footage flick, the footage shown us certainly looks and sounds much better and much more advanced in quality and up to date than most of the other modern equivalents I've seen, like PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, CLOVERFIELD, ZOMBIE DIARIES, REC, THE LAST EXORCISM, etc. Guess cam technology retrogressively devolves as time and science advances.

Well, no, it doesn't and it hasn't. If you want to make a found footage flick set in a certain historical period in the past it's a good idea to at least have the sound and visuals reflect that period a bit. Like, say, APOLLO 18. Otherwise, don't make it a found footage flick. Film it straight. Because to my mind, jerking the cam around a lot isn't enough to convince on any level. And FRANKENSTEIN'S ARMY has enough arresting visual flair, striking art direction and special effects going on to make it more than worthy of a straight shoot. The "found footage" gimmick is redundant here and mostly ruins the film.

So the real mission of the squad - who, by the way, have no real individual personalities and are largely aggressive, mentally challenged loud-mouths - is to find one Dr Frankenstein and bring him back to Mother Russia to assist with the Commie war effort.

Frankie is a bit of a fly in the ointment, though. Having gone completely off his skull he is obsessively churning out an army made of dead organic flesh fused with robotics and scrap WW2 war machinery. This is the crowning glory of the movie - the bastard creations of the good doctor. Imagine the Nazi zombies of DEAD SNOW married with radical steam-punk mechanics that consist of propellers, caterpillar tracks, binoculars, machine guns, blades, cogs, hydraulics, wheels and the like whilst being completely, blindly homicidally insane. The resulting creatures are imaginative and jaw-dropping to behold - especially when combined with some excellent Dolby rendered sound effects (clanking, hissing, groaning, clattering, roaring and exploding).

I said it was nasty in more ways than one. The shaky cam is nasty enough. And so is the continuous unrelenting violence, blood, gore, torture, graphic surgery, guts, viscera and physical atrocity that dominantly pervade the second half. It is a drawn out hymn to butchery and sadism that feels like it goes on forever. And then some. So excessive and sustained that it quickly becomes anaesthetising and loses all impact and meaning. Arguably it's aiming for a comic book aesthetic, but with a complete lack of character development for anyone it just becomes a mindless exercise in slaughter without consequence or point.

Gorehounds may well love it for the last half, but I found it hard to maintain interest. Frankie's monsters are really spectacular to behold and I think most viewers would be impressed. The narrative is flaky and has more holes than a mountain of Swiss cheese. All the actors are loud and shouty. And the "found footage" hook trashes the remotest chance of suspension of disbelief and tries the patience to extremes.

Good, creative ideas, some compelling visual creativity, but the poor scripting, histrionic direction and mind-numbing execution significantly slap it down to being just another case of the shakes.

** A note ahead of the review proper: this film contains sequences and depictions of extremely over-the-top gore and violence. **

'Frankenstein's Army' is a new entry in the Military/Sci-Fi/Horror genre set from the historical perspective of a small Soviet Army reconnaissance unit and presented as a found footage affair based on the dark deeds of a fictional character from classical literature. Few films in present memory have combined so many genres and sub-genres into one block of cinematic story telling. But has doing the aforementioned benefited or detracted from the overall effort? I suppose that is the question to be answered by the viewer.

The filming method itself is of the shaky cam variety, which some viewers will find issue with off the bat. The movie opens with a brief self introduction from one of the characters who provides explanation for why he will be filming the battlefield exploits of his comrades. The premise is functional enough, but when a writer must blatantly reveal through a character the reasoning for said character's actions I feel that something is missing from the plot. Show us my good man, do not tell us.

Act one follows the combat exploits of a squad of Soviet soldiers during the final push into Germany, as they reconnoiter far ahead of the main Red Army. If you've ever seen a war movie, or a military horror, you know the drill. Here we have the standard sniper, machine gunners, greenhorn, radio man, grizzled sergeant, etc. From the actions of the said recon squad we glean that these handful of men of war have been fighting for far too long as even their leader seems perched on the ragged edge of sanity. One scene finds the men chasing chickens, rousting peasants and donning ladies' dress. Sort of an amalgamation of 'Kelly's Heroes' and 'The Outpost'.

Of course, as in all found footage films of late, the troops do not appreciate the constant filming of their exploits, and so in turn constantly berate and threaten the cameraman. Again, we've seen this before, and so it came off for me as a bit tiring.

The actions sequences are good enough for the budget. The weapons, uniforms, equipment and tactics are all historically accurate enough to make us believe, but the actors who played the soldiers fell over so many times throughout their running from foxhole to foxhole that it was obvious they were not used to the weight of the packs on their backs nor the weapons in their hands.

Act two finds our brave recon squad entering a small villa dominated by an ancient church on a mission to rescue another Soviet unit. It is here that the film veers into both the Sci-Fi and supernatural realms, and I must hand it to the film's creators that 'the reveal' is well done.

The creatures are incredibly well envisioned, well realized on camera and quite horrific. Throughout act two the suspense and action builds to the point where it seems no one will survive for a final act. I must point out that act one really never introduces us personally to any of the main characters, which is a shame because more than one of them seem interesting enough to want to get to know and to root for.

Act three rolls around to find some members of the squad K.I.A. and the overall situation much more dire, and then after a final action sequence, we are left with the perspective of but one of the characters. By the time we see again the rest of them, we will have had to guess what they were up to in the interim.

Act three is also where this film devolves into some serious depravity and needless splatter punk gore. All that we had needed to know about the monsters had been showed us in the previous acts, and we darn sure could have imagined the rest of the horror show ourselves without the film showing us every gruesome bit as it does.

I live for horror/Sci-fi/Military films, but I must admit that I found the level of gore needless and a bit stomach turning. Too much visualized desecration of the human form is never a good thing for a film or novel, and here we get it fed to us over and over from scene to scene until it becomes cartoonish and finally sickening.

Overall 'Frankenstein's Army' is a good entry into my favorite genre, and I could have scored it an eight or nine out of ten for awesome creature design alone. However, the buffet of needless gore soured my stomach - something that does not happen often. Thus I must subtract three or four points from my review score.

I can recommend this film only to very mature audiences, as a child or teen ought to never partake in this kind of cinematic gore and graphic depravity.

5/10 stars ...