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For the third time this year comes a movie that on paper sounds like good ol' fashioned campy Nazi fun, and then turns out to be something quite a bit different than its premise, turning it in directions it really doesn't need to go. This one comes way of Joel Schumacher, the world's most uneven and undependable filmmaker, and this is probably the film that reflects that the most: uneven, undependable. There's a good idea and a good story here, but instead Schumacher actually goes the Uwe Boll route (and you'd think he'd know better...) and just add things that don't make sense. Like dialog about Iraq. And voice-over narration. That repeats itself.
It takes a good twenty minutes before anything that happens really becomes clear. First we get a completely unnecessary prologue of the Nazi coming to a German immigrant farmhouse in the US that seems more like a chance for Schumacher to play around with Sin City-like neo-noir lighting and extreme contrast black-and-white effect. This prologue would help immensely for the understanding of what happens in the rest of the movie if it weren't for the fact that it's all explained later, again, by dialog, in a much more succinct and interesting fashion. Then we get this completely unnecessary transition where our hero, a physician, is somehow involved with some violent bloody something or another that involves a man dying of blood-lose and some woman wigging out. What this has to do with the story is establish that he's a physician. Which he then explains later in dialog, in a much more succinct and interesting fashion. THEN we get this bitter argument between our hero the physician and his father over his brother, who has been missing for two years, and how much his father appreciates the brother more for going to Iraq and being a hero. Which is explained later in dialog, in a much more succinct and interesting fashion.
Finally in the middle of a completely unnecessary dream sequence that explains the brother's disappearance (something that's explained later in dialog, in a much more succinct and interesting fashion), brother guy returns and drags physician boy off to the middle of the woods to some farmhouse populated by weird people, and they go around busting stuff up and threatening the people's lives and yelling at each other and what the heck is going on? At roughly this point the movie finally becomes interesting in a "What is happening here, and who is the badguy, and what was done?" sort of way until it finally gets established that the farm people are the never-aging caretakers of the Nazi necromancer from scene one, who have been keeping him from breaking out into the world and becoming more powerful than we can possibly imagine, only tonight, on a lunar eclipse, he is going to make one last bid to take over the world. FINALLY. I knew this movie was going somewhere!
And from there it's some pretty decent action horror, albeit tone deaf. If there's anything going for this movie, it is that the action is relentless and very few characters really get a moment to breathe. Otherwise it's hard to really differentiate when we're supposed to be scared, excited, thrilled, or really feel much of anything because nothing really slows down long enough to build a sense of tension or drama in the scenes. One scene becomes another in rapid succession and it's pretty easy to let the movie charge ahead at its own expense while deciding not to really care yourself. Meanwhile the dialog is absolutely ridiculous and gratuitous, all of this "Our father loved you more!" "You don't know what happened to me in Iraq!" "You don't understand what it's like being held in thrall by a Nazi necromancer!" "Who's the real victim here!" type of stuff that would be poignant character development in a slow-building drama where characters finally let themselves go over a cup of tea or something, but is absurd to be shouting at each other while being chased down by a 100 year old guy with a face he keeps peeling off and an eye growing out of his forehead.
It's not often this happens, but, this movie should be remade immediately. There are some really nice ideas that could make for a very entertaining and interesting movie if you cut the Iraq stuff, the Nazi stuff, the family drama stuff, and actually let some mystery and suspense build by getting characters to discover things instead of have everything explained to you in flat, wooden dialog. Worse is when, at the end, a bit of voice-over repeats what a character stated less than a minute before hand, showing indeed one of those pesky and annoying horror movie motifs where apparently the director or producer or maybe the studio or something decided that the audience wasn't intelligent enough to get the point (plus, it leads the way to a possible sequel, which is predictable). Honestly, it's a conceptual misfire. Somebody should grab this idea and, with a bit more creativity and an actual plot structure, make a good movie out of it.
--PolarisDiB
score 3/10
Polaris_DiB 23 September 2009
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2131427/ |
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2-4-2021 00:06:26