20140427: Horror Review--Frankenstein's Army

Frankenstein's Army

1. Fundamentals, reception.
1. Dutch/American live action feature length film, 2013, rated R, 84 minutes, horror.  Spoken word is English.
2. IMDB: 5.3/10.0 from 3,816 audience ratings.  Aspect: 1.78
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 71% on the meter, but 'no consensus yet'; 39% liked it from 3,878 audience ratings.
4. Netflix: 2.9/5.0 from 44,840 audience ratings.
5. Directed by: Richard Raaphorst.
6. Starring: Karel Roden as Viktor, Alexander Mercury as Dimitri, Joshua Sasse as Sergei, Robert Gwilym as Novikov, Luke Newbury as Sacha.


2. Setup and Plot
1. 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.


2. 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.


3. 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.


4. 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.


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


3. Conclusions
1. One line summary: Clever ideas wasted by bad execution and found footage style.
2. One star of five.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 0/10 Hand held cameras.  Bad everything.


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


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


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