No Good Very Bad Movies 15: The one with diesel punk zombies

 

Title: Frankenstein’s Army

What Year?: 2013

Classification: Mashup/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Guinnocent!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

In the course of this feature, something I have thought about on and off is working in a zombie movie, a genre I already mined out with The Revenant Review. There’s no question, the lion’s share of the worst movies I’ve ever seen have been zombie movies, and in almost all cases, I avoided them. I had a long list of titles I usually made a point not to mention, including one that would definitely have this spot if I was ready to commit to watching any part of it again. The thing about these movies is that most o them didn’t really take the zombie concept anywhere, and many of them are still entertaining after a fashion. Zombie movies are like pizza, even a ”bad” one can still hit the spot. While investigating further material, I came across one that is genuinely different, with some of the strangest revenants on record and an odd approach to the narrative notwithstanding the fact that it drew directly on one of the most overused and unwelcome trend of the current millennium. I present Frankenstein’s Army, which I happened to watch for this review at 4:30 AM on one of the nights when I know I’m not getting to sleep.

Our story begins with Soviet soldiers advancing into Germany, documented by a largely unseen man with a camera that happens to record in color. After some standard looting and atrocities, they catch wind of a signal from another unit under attack.  As they investigate, they begin discovering strange remains that appear to combine human, animal and machine, which unhelpful locals warn them have been attacking both sides. Soon, they begin encountering the hybrids alive and fully functional. The group is quickly picked off in combat with the lumbering, nearly invulnerable retro-tech cyborgs. To stay alive, they must be as ruthless as their inhuman enemies. But our cameraman is more than he seems, with a mission of his own, and the lair of creator of the horrors still lies ahead!

Frankenstein’s Army was a 2013 film directed by Richard Raaphorst from his own story and concepts. The film was based on an earlier unproduced project titled “Worst Case Scenario”, which would have featured several creature designs used in the finished film. The film was shot in Raaphorst’s homeland of the Czech Republic. The multinational cast included Karel Roden as Dr. Frankenstein, Joshua Sasse as Sergei and Alexander Mercury as the “point of view” character Dmitri, with Romanian Cristina Catalina as the eventually transformed nurse Eva. Extensive effects for the undead, referred to in the credits and publicity material as “zombots”, were created mainly with prosthetics and practical effects by a team that included Lord of the Rings veteran Carola Broekhoff. The film received a limited theatrical release, followed by release on disc and streaming. It received mixed to positive reviews from genre critics and fans, with a number of critics noting problems with its “found footage” setup including the fact that the production far exceeded World War 2-era film equipment. The film is available for free streaming on several platforms.

For my experiences, this is another film I watched on my epic rides to work. It stood out to me as a particularly late example of the found footage genre/ conceit, which I had experienced mainly through Cloverfield and Romero’s Diary of the Dead. My strongest impression of the whole iffy trend is that Romero’s entry offered the only approach that makes it workable and convincing: Everyone involved is supposed to be part of an experienced crew with equipment they know how to use. By comparison, the present film is first and foremost the one that just said to Hell with it all, and I remain ambivalent about the results. It would have been fascinating to have a horror movie that simulated the technology and “look” of actual wartime films. What we get instead makes me suspect that the real inspiration was first-person shooter video games. Given that frame of reference, the film at least follows its own “rules”; The camera angles follow natural lines of sight, the lingering detail shots are fitted into the pauses when nobody is trying to kill the cameraman, and there isn’t even much of the “shaky cam” artifice wrongly taken for realism.  It may not be particularly “good”, yet it’s still not so tiresome as to distract from the events.

And that brings us to the obvious hook, the biomechanoid undead. They aren’t that unique, but they are unquestionably at least as well-done as anything one could compare them to (see Splinter, if anything). The better points come from the simple fact that you can generally figure out what they’re made from, as well as the fact that the camerawork doesn’t willfully obscure them. The overall look is that of body horror twisted all the way into pure abstract art, with enough examples that this could easily become a nearly endless list. It’s admittedly problematic to take them as a threat. We see literally first-hand that they are surprisingly stealthy and almost impossible to kill, but their biggest real advantage is the confined, ambush-friendly environment. The counterpoint is that there is clearly a law of averages in effect, with some clearly less successful creations and others that don’t appear intended to fight at all. The latter are easily among the most unsettling, especially the eerie “character zombie” nurse, who seems to hum as she does her work. The most fascinating to me is the “mace” zombie, which reappears several times without ever doing more than crawl along. It’s not clear if it’s damaged in battle or outright defective. Still, it does make its way back to the lair, whether to be repaired, upgraded or merely recycled.

The con side here is that the visual horrors far exceed anything we get from the story or characters. Now, this is where critics can be a little unfair. The characters are not likable by any means, to a certain extent perpetuating wartime stereotypes and propaganda, but this is after all a war movie as well as a horror movie. On consideration, they are at least well-defined, usually well-acted, and a lot better developed than they really need to be. The real affront to the sensibilities is their matter-of-fact disposal, culminating in the fate of Sasse’s charismatic character as a guinea pig in an experiment that would give Megavolt serious reservations. (See Wild, Wild Planet while you’re at it.) Where balance drops off is the extremely thin story, to the point I would probably have disqualified it from the Revenant Review (and I cleared The Video Dead!). The journey is no more or less than a guided tour of a meat grinder, with little sign of the deeper allegory and tragedy that a mature anti-war narrative might bring to the table. It doesn’t help that the otherwise chilling villain’s backstory is a mess of contradictions, still less that he has to keep handling the camera himself to continue the found-footage conceit.

Now for the “one scene”, I was inclined to go with the appearance of the nurse, which gets honorable mention. (And what the Hell did they do with her eyes?) The one I decided on, however, was one I might have disregarded if I hadn’t seen it discussed on a page for the movie. As we enter the final act, Dimitri and the camera wander the doctor’s lair alone, into the largest and most ominous chamber. Our point of view approaches a rickety-looking cart in the middle of it all. Only then do we see that one of the bodies is a still-living man. He actually looks into the camera, though it’s never clear if he’s really aware anyone is there. Even more unsettlingly, he begins to laugh. That’s when the figure approaches, and he begins to talk, argue and plead in German, without the benefit of any subtitles (itself a conceit I was making fun of with the “authentic” Serbo-Croatian in my Exotroopers series). He continues to talk as he is pushed to his fate. Just why he bothers is one more thing not at all clear; perhaps he recognizes a former comrade, perhaps he is addressing God or the universe in general. His talking becomes a steady cry, never quite a formulaic scream. It’s very unnerving, yet oddly intimate, and really a fair example of why the movie at least sometimes works.

In closing, I have less to say about the rating than the trend the movie represents. In hindsight, “found footage” as a device had been in use since the 1970s at least, as evidenced by sequences from Dark Star, The Hidden and for that matter Aliens. The obvious difference is that these films all used “first person” segments to supplement more orthodox camerawork and storytelling, which was the most realistic assessment of the strengths and limitations of the concept. As with many unwelcome “trends”, the problems only started when the latest “new wave” filmmakers expanded it from one tool in a toolbox to a central element of their narrative style. Inevitably, for every example that worked on its own terms, there were more that failed and in some cases diminished otherwise worthwhile projects. The present film stands out as one of the ones that didn’t entirely succeed, but went in a different enough direction that it can’t be readily discounted as a failure either. It’s films like this that I had in mind when I started this feature, and for that, it belongs here. With that, I’m done for another day.