Review: Frankenstein's Army

During World War II a small contingent of Russian soldiers follow a distress call to an isolated village in eastern Germany. The village has been decimated, all the inhabitants brutally murdered. The true horrors, however, lie beneath the ground in a secret laboratory built by the Nazis and ruled over by a mad genius bent on the creation of a new breed of super-soldier, unlike anything the world has ever seen.

ZZZZZZZZZZZeig heil!

FRANKENSTEIN'S ARMY
2013
Rated R

"My father said man would be more efficient if they have hammers and screwdrivers instead of fingers...When I tried to do it with cats he told me it was a sin against God."

I know many purists will cite 1980's Cannibal Holocaust as the birthplace of found-footage horror, but I don't think I'm alone in my belief that it didn't become a proper subgenre in its own right until nineteen years later, when The Blair Witch Project proved yet again that inventive, passionate, talented people working outside the Hollywood machine and using their wits to overcome budgetary limitations could revolutionize horror cinema. Like Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Halloween before it, The Blair Witch Project spawned a slew of imitators - some good, most total shit - and established a subgenre that would inspire filmmakers and infuriate film critics for decades to come.

I’m not a found-footage detractor by default. In the right hands the style can be wonderfully effective. Even after repeated viewings, [REC] still scares the crap out of me; I expected The Last Exorcism to be a piece of shit, yet walked away from it chilled to the core and eager to share it with cinematically like-minded friends. What can, and usually does, end-up souring the whole experience for me, though, is the plausibility (or lack thereof) behind the found-footage conceit. Compiling a film out of security camera footage, filmed interviews, and live news feeds seems to work well because I can make logical sense of the footage existing in the first place. Film students solipsistically recording themselves wandering through the woods is perfectly believable because wannabe auteurs really can be that self-obsessed (I aught to know, I used to be one). But the sad truth is that the well of plausibility isn’t bottomless, and the form can only be stretched so far before my suspension-of-disbelief’s elasticity reaches the breaking point.

Just "hanging" around.  Get it?

Case in point, Frankenstein's Army. This movie is a rare bird, in that it is both a found-footage movie and a period piece. Taking place during World War II, the justification for the footage is that a Soviet propagandist is assigned following a small contingent of Red Army soldiers on the march into eastern Germany, ostensibly to capture the glory of their victory and inspire folks back on the homefront. While reasonable enough in concept, the execution just doesn't live up to my standards for a found-footage movie, sporting countless anachronisms and poor editing decisions which left me repeatedly lamenting to myself, "They could have fixed that so easily with just a little more effort!"

The film looks too damn good. I know that seems like a stupid complaint in the era of 3D-HDTV and 4K, but the whole setup here is that it's a Soviet propaganda film. Have you ever seen old footage from WWII? Even the US didn’t use color film stock, and our resources were far more plentiful than the Soviet Union’s. Secondly, at what point did WWII-era Soviet Russia have anything lying around in abundance, let alone film stock of any type? Yet somehow these propagandists have enough of the stuff readily available to run around shooting (presumably) hours and hours of footage that – given every totalitarian regime’s proclivity for focusing exclusively on the noble and heroic deeds of its army, and not on its ineptitudes or atrocities – could only have been destined for the cutting-room floor. At one point the aforementioned propagandist cameraman even lays the camera down, pointed at his feet, and lets it run until morning! For shame, comrade!

"Hey, you got a magazine or something?"

Okay, I don't want you to think this is going to be one long hate-fest. There were, in fact, things I quite enjoyed about Frankenstein's Army. Once the titular army actually puts in an appearance, things get swinging pretty quickly, and that was where my suspension of disbelief kicked back in and allowed me some enjoyment. I am a sucker for a good rubber-mask monster movie, and this film is chock-full of twisted goodness in that department. There's a fair bit of monster footage that makes very little technical sense, in which the cameraman lamely stands there as monsters leap onto him or savagely attack someone three feet away, but by that time I was adequately distracted by the monsters and violence and utter fucked-up chaos of the whole thing to give it a mental pass. Fun goes a long way towards alleviating my need for technical plausibility.

With reasonably solid performances (all things considered) and enough monster fun to allow me to forgive sloppy technical mistakes and poorly written dialogue (I swear I remember one of the Russian soldiers saying, "For real, man?" but that might just be my mind substituting better, more realistic dialogue for the shit the writers came up with) I actually walked away from Frankenstein's Army with a smile on my face. Is it a great movie? No, not by any stretch of the imagination. Does it have shining moments of pure fun despite its weaknesses? Oh yeah, and fun covereth a multitude of technical sins.

"Oh, Brunhilda! You're so lovely!"
"Yes, I know it. I can't help it."

Found-footage movies can be among the best horror cinema has to offer. They can also be among the worst. Ultimately, Frankenstein's Army falls somewhere in the middle for me, but there just aren't enough rubber-mask monster movies being made for my taste, so I have to give it a little bump, if only for scratching that particular itch.

This isn't great filmmaking, but there's definitely fun to be had here. Just don't look too closely or you'll see the strings.

SEX: 1/5 BLOOD: 4/5 ROCK & ROLL: 3/5

-GABE

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