FRANKENSTEIN'S ARMY

It's amusing just how over-represented Nazis are in the horror genre these days. Don't get me wrong – they weren't a nice bunch, it's fair to say, so it's inevitable that they would find their way into horror movies in some quantity or other. But, as much as I enjoy movies like Dead Snow and Outpost, it begs the question: where are all the Commies? Granted, we had a wave of Communist-paranoia induced sci-fi during the 50s, but we've yet to really see much of them being reimagined as zombies, vamps, robots, or anything of the kind. It's a curious thing. Surely the Stalinist hordes were indoctrinated, venomous, murderous bastards too; they even worked with the Nazis for a while there, lest we forget – and yet, if we're setting a horror around the time of WWII, it'll be Nazis every time. Well, I digress, to a degree. In Frankenstein's Army, we even have the Red Army as our protagonists, and see them pitting their wits against a Nazi who is using his scientific expertise to, shall we say, turn the war effort around...

We are introduced to our comrades during the last days of the war, out on a recce somewhere in Germany ahead of the Red Army's advance, whilst under Stalin's orders they are being filmed as they go – a documentary of their progress serving as a historical record and a nifty propaganda tool into the bargain. This allows the filmmakers – believably or perhaps not – to turn this into a found footage movie (sigh); possibly the earliest-set found footage movie we've had so far? I thought cameras in these days were fairly substantial in size and weight and needed a tripod, but hey ho...the mission is complicated early on when the boys' radio picks up on a stranded Russian unit, asking for assistance. They weren't aware that there were any other Russians in the area, but honour dictates that they should go and look for them, which they do, arriving in the environs of a deserted village to find absolutely nothing. Nothing, that is, except a fucktonne of dead bodies and some very unorthodox-looking casualties of war.

Soon the unit is pitting its collective wits against some heavily-modified and seemingly unstoppable soldiers, and to survive, they have to track down where they're coming from.

You know what? When I found out I was going to be watching yet another film which gave me motion sickness and assaulted my ears with the constant clichéd refrain, 'Turn that damn camera off!' (even if in a Russian accent for novelty), my heart sank. So it was a genuine pleasure to enjoy this film as much as I did. It has ideas, it creates a fun riff on a horror trope and it achieves a lot on a little. It starts off by setting enough of a scene that, although the central character is harder to get to know because he's behind the camera for most of the time, you have at least something invested in the people here, and a decent, comic-strip depiction of war, painted in bold colours and lacking in emotional weight but certainly not unbelievable per se. The film moves along at a good pace, happily pausing here and there to showcase its frankly awesome visual touches; the empty graves with their wrought iron crosses rigged up to a massive central dynamo was a moment of genius. There's loads of action, and you get the impression that the filmmakers had as much fun putting this together as you can have watching it.

Which brings me to the creatures themselves, of which there are, I'm pleased to say, plenty. I love seeing what people get out of the original Frankenstein mythos; in Frankenstein's Army, we have an odd blend of Japanese body horror (think Tokyo Gore Police with its bizarre modified limbs), a dash of Hellraiser and – dare I say it – a bit of steampunk. The new-and-improved soldiers sport a variety of imaginative features – extra legs, claws as hands, spliced brains, huge statures. There's even a nurse who wouldn't go amiss in a Giger painting, and although the team has been on an evident budget in making this film, they make their monsters work for them by giving them just enough screen time, with clever lighting and shooting. Also, not doing everything post-production with bloody CGI really pays off: as much as I wanted to get a good look at the modded soldiers, the fact that you felt they were really there lent them a fair amount of menace.

Overblown, entertaining and oddly charming, Frankenstein's Army has just enough of everything to make it work well. It's gory, it's clever, it's (dare I say it) original in enough ways to make it a blast. Would it have been better as a straightforward movie, not a found footage movie? Possibly, yes, but when the mania for this shooting style finally dies down we can still chalk up Frankenstein's Army as one of the good ones, one of those films which has strengths enough to surpass this already-hackneyed format.

Review by Keri O’Shea