20140320: Horror Review--War of the Dead

War of the Dead

1. Fundamentals, reception.
1. American/Lithuanian/Italian live action feature length film, 2011, NR, 86 minutes, horror, zombies, supernatural.  Spoken word is English with lots of dubbing.  Straight to video.
2. IMDB: 4.1/10.0 from 1,753 audience ratings.  Estimated budget, 1 million euros.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 'No reviews yet...' and 11% liked it from 185 audience ratings.
4. Netflix: 3.1/5.0 from 95,684 audience ratings.
5. Written and directed by: Marco Maekilaakso.
6. Starring: Andrew Tierman as Captain Martin Stone, Jouko Ahola as Captain Niemi, Samual Vaurama as Kolya, Mikko Leppilampi as Lieutenant Laakso, Andreas Wilson as Assistant, Antti Reini as Sergeant Halonen.


2. Setup and Plot
1. In World War II, Finnish troops and American troops attempt to investigate a Nazi bunker that lies inside Germany.


2. After spending some time with Wikipedia, I see that there was little historical support for the idea of American and Finnish troops to be operating together against the Germans.  America was the ally of the Soviet Union.  Finland had been fighting the Russians off and on for about 150 years.  During most of World War II, the Finns were allied with the Nazis based in Norway and Germany against their longtime enemy, Russia.


3. So, the setup of the film is nonsense.


4. The 'action' scenes are boring or inept.


5. As a zombie film (the bunker in Germany supposedly contained experiments to re-animate the dead), this is a bust.  The main clue that a walking biped was a zombie was 'did we not already kill that one?' or words to that effect.  A few zombies had glazed over eyes.  The gloomy, heart wrenching threat one expects from the Zombie Apocalypse environment was absent.


3. Conclusions
1. Cheap jack zombie film with historical inaccuracy.
2. One line summary: Avoid this ersatz zombie film plus poor action film.
3. 1/10


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 3/10 Dark.  Poor camera angles.  Colour palettes so reduced as to be only slightly different than greyscale.


2. Sound: 4/10 Horrible accents.  Background music was not an asset.


3. Acting: 0/10 Terrible performances.


4. Screenplay: 0/10 There was a screenplay?  Where was the exposition of motivations?  There was a lot of stilted dialog that generated confusion.  The joint group just drifted from one disaster to the next.  The film seemed more of an elimination derby of nameless characters that were impossible to care anything about.