With all the earnest dramas and innovative documentaries at the Edinburgh Film Festival, it’s always a treat to escape reality for a while with a nice, ridiculous monster movie. Last year the excellent horror comedy Grabbers was one of the most memorable films but wasn’t granted a cinema release. This year we get Richard Raaphorst’s robot-zombie-Nazi flick, Frankenstein’s Army. Unfortunately, as promising as a robot-zombie-Nazi flick sounds and as much as there is to enjoy here, it has some serious issues that prevent it being as entertaining as it should and it’s unlikely to make it to cinemas.
The film’s first and most obvious problem is that it’s a found footage film. I can’t imagine there are many people who aren’t now sick and tired of the whole gimmick. It genuinely feels like everything interesting that can be done with that sub-genre has been done and then repeated to the point that it’s become boring. With Frankenstein’s Army the idea doesn’t even make logical sense, as the film takes place at the tail end of World War II.
It opens with Russian documentarian Dimitri (Alexander Mercury) addressing the camera and explaining that he has been assigned by Stalin to follow a Red Army platoon pushing its way into Eastern Germany. What he doesn’t explain is how he’s in possession of equipment capable of digital quality picture and sound about five decades before it was invented. The photography has been graded to make it look slightly like 16mm film and the early scenes have a projector whir on the soundtrack but this is abandoned pretty quickly.
This, combined with the fact that the central characters are supposed to be Russian but are speaking Russian-accented English, makes the whole thing feel distinctly fake. This would be easy to forget and get caught up in the story if this were shot like a normal horror movie, but the whole idea of found footage is that it’s supposed to feel authentic, like you’re watching genuine recordings of events as they happened, but this always feels staged.
However, if you can get over these flaws, there is a lot of mounting tension and creepy fun to be had as the Russians make their way through war torn Germany. At first the horrors they encounter are of the standard wartime variety but then they wonder into the laboratory of one Dr. Frankenstein (Karl Roden), the grandson of Mary Shelley’s nature-tinkering hero. Here they come face to face with the good doctor’s creations, made with pieces of fallen soldiers combined with various weapons and machinery.
It’s with these creatures that the film really comes into its own. Raaphorst himself came up with the designs over a period of ten years and the man and his special effects team clearly have twisted imagination in spades. Each monster is like a sick piece of modern art and everyone who sees the film is bound to have a favourite. Personally, I liked the Propeller-Head’ Nazi but I’m not sure what practical purpose he was meant to fulfil.
Unfortunately, Raaphorst seems to be a better artist than a director. Again, this is mainly due to the limitations of the found footage format. The soldiers spend a lot of time being chased through the labyrinthine lab being pursued by the monsters. But where this would normally be a chance to ratchet up tension here it’s simply a case of the camera waving around and zooming in and out while we try to figure out what’s happening. At best this makes the action scenes frustratingly confusing; at worst it makes them utterly incomprehensible. There’s also the fact that the characters are all merely monster fodder and none of them are particularly sympathetic so the audience is simply waiting to see them die in interesting ways.
It’s a real shame as the film looks beautiful, in a hideous sort of way and the monsters and the comically exaggerated violence are masterfully done and this should be a comic-book style guilty pleasure, and by-and-large it is, but the choice to film it all first person means we don’t get to relish it as much as we would if it were a traditional horror flick.
Overall Verdict: An interesting idea and a promising set-up let down by some slapdash execution. It has some amazingly well designed monsters and is intermittently great fun but thanks to its reliance on the tired found footage formula it’s often incomprehensible.
Reviewer: Adam Pidgeon