Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Frankenstein's Army - DVD review
*
The blog's been on a bit of a hiatus while I wrapped up some meatspace stuff, but we're now rolling again. To kick things off, I've got a little change of pace - my good friend and fellow @Gamecritics staffer Mike Bracken was kind enough to review a Horror film DVD that turned up in my mailbox:
Frankenstein's Army, from director Richard Raaphorst.
*
MB: Like Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster has become one of
horror’s most iconic monsters. Mary Shelley’s creature has starred in a massive
number of films over the years (although for the past few decades, he’s taken a
back seat to zombies and more modern slashers) but it’s hard to imagine Shelley
ever conceiving how Richard Raaphorst would take her greatest literary creation
and re-envision it in Frankenstein’s Army.
Frankenstein’s Army is
a bit of a hybrid; a found-footage alternate history period piece that joins
films like Outpost in the burgeoning
World War II horror subgenre. Making horror films during the greatest war the
world has ever known makes a lot of sense – war is Hell, after all, and the
Nazis were into enough crazy shit in reality that almost anything a
screenwriter comes up with seems plausible on its face. So, when Raaphorst
opens with a small contingent of Russian soldiers encountering
mechanically-altered re-animated corpses while traveling across the German
countryside in search of a battalion in distress, I find myself thinking “yeah,
well, that’s not as crazy as the whole Nazi Bell thing…”
Anyway, soon our ragtag assortment of war film cliches (the
gruff commanding officer, the scared greenhorns, the psycho who wants to commit
every war atrocity in the history of humankind against the enemies – and maybe
his allies if they’re not down with it) find themselves locked in a life or
death struggle against an army of reanimated soldiers who’ve been modified with
all sorts of crazy mechanized attachments in order to make them even more
efficient killing machines. This is the entire reason why Frankenstein’s Army exists.
Raaphorst’s film uses the found-footage angle (the group of
soldiers has a filmmaker amongst their number) to help conceal its tiny budget.
The indie nature of the feature is both a positive and a negative – positive in
that it called for a lot of ingenuity on the crew’s part, and necessitated
making the monsters with real practical FX work instead of relying on the
crutch of CG. Of course, the downside is that the small budget also means the
film skimps a bit on the kind of spectacle viewers anticipate when hearing a
title like Frankenstein’s Army. It’s
not really an army – it’s more like a small unit.
The found-footage angle actually works to the film’s benefit
most of the time. The quick cuts and grainy visuals (which are in color –
unlikely historically, but a necessary concession for modern viewers) help
create a documentary feel. The way many sequences are composed allows the
audience to spot the dangerous things lurking in the background before the
potential victims do, increasing the tension of the experience significantly.
The downside is that the handheld camera work is very
frenetic during the action scenes, making it easy for the audience to get lost
in the space of a sequence. This allows for some great jump scares as our
intrepid cameraman will whirl his device right into the slavering mechanical
jaws of some undead monstrosity pretty regularly, but the price is that the
logistics of the action often become hard to decipher.
If this new Frankenstein’s creations are the true stars of
the film, then the blood and guts in the special effects are probably a close
second. Most viewers won’t care about any of these characters, but there is a
certain amount glee to be found in watching these monsters shred through the
crew. Heads are crushed, brains removed, skulls pried open, and intestines
removed from still-living bodies with frightening regularity. Again, budget
constraints required good old fashioned practical FX work here – which is
always welcome with this gorehound.
Ultimately, Frankenstein’s
Army appears destined for cult status – not a bonafide cult classic, but a
film that will certainly find fans and admirers. Raaphorst and his team milk
maximum effect out of a miniscule budget, but it’s hard to shake the feeling
that Frankenstein’s Army is really
just a high concept pitch that got turned into a feature because the idea was
so awesome that they couldn’t pass it up even if they weren’t sure how to make
it work. And the idea is awesome – Frankenstein’s creatures are fantastic in
their execution, a sort of WWII riff on Giger’s bio-mechanics that will
definitely please monster freaks. The problem is that nothing else in the film
is nearly as cool as the beasts – which is unfortunate.
In some ways, Frankenstein’s Army feels perfectly
suited for a videogame adaptation – a realm where the relatively threadbare
story and cardboard characters wouldn’t be such a detriment. There’s fun to be
had here, for sure – but it’s hard to look at Frankenstein’s Army on the screen and not marvel at what might have
been.
*
Mega thanks to the @Horrorgeek for the review, and look for Coffeecola to return to its usual game-oriented programming next time!
*
Posts
0 comments: to “ Frankenstein's Army - DVD review ”
Post a Comment