Movie Review: Nazis at the Centre of the Earth

Nazis at the Centre of the Earth.  Yep, we’re doing this thing.

Basic Synopsis

As WWII is coming to an end, Josef Mengele is seen fleeing Germany on a plane with a “secret machine,” never to be seen from ever again. Skip to 2012, when a group of researchers in Antarctica start looking for two of their missing comrades. Our protagonist Lucas leads the group because one of the missing researchers is his girlfriend Paige, but honestly who cares.  The group follows a trail into a cave and eventually wind up at the center of the Earth.  

Following along?  Cause we’re not even at the stupid part yet.

The group wanders into a trap where they are ambushed by waiting Nazi soldiers, whose leader is (ta-da!) Josef Mengele.  It is then explained to us (at nauseum) that one of the researchers, Dr. Reistad, is a traitor and had made an arrangement to provide the bodies of his colleagues to the Nazis, who in turn use their body parts to prolong their lives, which also kind of explains how the Nazis are still around.  Which also kind of makes them zombie-ish.  Sigh.

So the researchers proceed to get butchered up and their parts get transplanted onto the decaying bodies of Nazi soldiers.  This seems to be crux of the movie until we find out that the “secret machine” is actually a preserved, mechanized body of Adolf Hiltler, which is brought back to life using stem-cells from one of the pregnant researchers.

So the Nazis board their flying saucer ship (WTF?) and start flying around with plans on taking over the world.  Fortunately for us, this never happens as the ship is sabotaged by Dr. Reistad’s pissed off girlfriend, who blows up the ship with an electronic, WWII style potato-masher grenade.

Mecha-Hitler attempts to kill our protagonist Lucas and Paige, but they manage to defeat him, and his robot-body sinks to the bottom of the Antarctic ocean, along with the Nazi ship.  Lucas proposes to Paige, they laugh and kiss, then it’s curtains.

Content and Feel / Ambiance

Ok let’s try to evaluate this film for what it is: this is a low-rent movie that was filmed using less money and less time it takes to shop for groceries at Wal-Mart.  You can’t go into this thing expecting Hollywood production.

That being said, I’m not really sure how to categorize this film because it can’t seem to decide what its own genre is going to be.  From the very first  few moments you get the feeling that the actors are hamming it up, like you would see in a teenage comedy, as though they are preparing the audience for a barrage of corny one-liners.  Think Scary Movie type acting.

All that would be fine, except the movie actually gets pretty gruesome in a lot of the more violent scenes.  The main villain is Mengele, and the guy playing him is dead serious the whole time, so he doesn’t fit in with the campy playfulness of the rest of the actors.  It’s a pretty stark contrast, because he’s not acting at the same level, nor is his character written in a way that flows with the rest of the movie.

The result is that  the audience is left wondering if we should actually care for the victims and protagonists, or if this is just a goofy film where we can just turn off our brains and enjoy some cheap horror gimmicks.  I think the director must have been going for the second option, but by making the scenes of violence so eerie, and having such extreme villains, the movie fails to bring that element of “fun” which is necessary in a less serious horror flick.

Notable Awesomeness

I think everyone is aware of cheesy horror movies that are so bad they wind up being awesome.  But I’ve never actually watched a movie where you can actually see the progression throughout.  The first 45 minutes of this movie are just terrible.  Ridiculous storyline, flat characters, and too many useless scenes of violence which don’t advance the plot.  BUT - the moment Robo-Hitler comes around, it’s like the movie zeros-out its suck-o-meter and comes round full circle into being kind of entertaining again.

I’d even go so far as to say that had the villain of the movie been Robo-Hitler the whole way through, this would likely have been an awesome, low-budget campy horror.  The fact that we have to wait until the movie is nearly two-thirds over is a waste of film.

Also Dr. Reistad is Jake Busey (remember Shasta McNasty and Starship Troopers?)  That’s neat.  Kind of.

Notable Lameness

Without sounding like a total wimp, I really take issue at watching people getting harmed if it doesn’t have anything to do with the story.  Couple that with the fact that the main antagonist in this movie is Josef Mengele, it really takes a lot out of the movie.

If you’re going to put together a goofy, low-rate horror movie, I really think using Nazis, and one of the most appalling figures in history as your villain is a bad move.  Maybe it’s just me, but it’s hard to suspend my disbelief and enjoy watching Nazis chop people up unless it serves to raise the stakes of a movie.  Had the movie remained more intense throughout, I would have been more or less ok with that, because I would have cared enough for the victims that I would want the good guys to win.  But when you have one foot in the horror door, the other in the comedy door, it completely sends the wrong message to the audience.  You really don’t care who wins or what happens because it’s all so silly.

Verdict

I don’t dislike this movie because it was low-budget, and had correspondingly low production quality, special effects, and less-than-stellar acting.  I don’t even dislike this movie because of it’s implausible storyline and characters.

I dislike this movie because it fails to commit to a genre.  Either be a gritty, dark, disturbing indi-horror, or be a foolish, semi-comedic B rated slasher.  By trying to be both, this movie comes off as the sour grapes of horror movies.  You can almost sense the director saying “whatever, I wasn’t even trying.”  

Low-budget movies are fine; there’s nothing wrong with slapping something together for pure entertainment purposes with lower-quality production.  But that doesn’t give you carte-blanche to be sloppy in the story-telling.  And it certainly isn’t a built-in excuse for putting together a shitty movie.

The Epitaph

Here lies Nazis at the Center of the Earth; das ist warum niemand mag Deutschland.

☠/10

Movie Review: Contracted

Ok let's kick this thing off with Contracted.

Basic Synopsis

What if the zombie apocalypse was an STD? That's Contracted in a bottle.

Our heroine, named Sam (Samantha), is suffering the effects of unrequited love from her girlfriend Nikki. Sam gets wasted at a party and has a one night stand with some guy named BJ (yep that’s his name.)

Unbeknownst to Samantha, BJ works at a morgue, and we are led to believe that he has sex with a corpse.  For whatever reason, that makes her sex with BJ an awful, rapey debacle that leads to her contracting the zombie disease.  All this happens in the first 20 minutes of the movie.

The remainder is a three-day descent of Sam turning into a zombie. The catch is that she thinks she contracted an STD so she tries to keep it to herself, which ultimately leads to her demise. This, despite the fact that everyone in her life is noticing that she is in serious trouble and is trying to help her out.

So each day Sam awakens to find her body in an increasingly grosser state of decay, to the point where on the third day she is clearly dying.  It’s all sort of reminiscent of The Fly in terms of the body metamorphosis, right down to the scene where her teeth and fingernails are falling off.

On the final day Sam rage-quits on her mom, her education, her job, then kills her lame girlfriend, her party friend (for no particular reason, other than she’s mad) and then she has sex with a boy she has been avoiding all movie.  In the last scene she crashes her car, presumably dies, and comes back to life as a zombie, and then it’s curtains.

Content and Feel / Ambiance

This movie really wound up feeling a lot like a gory chick flick.  At the end of the day we are constantly bombarded with Sam’s emotional issues with her work, her stupid girlfriend, her mom, her friends, her self-esteem, and basically everything other than the fact that she's slowly dying and becoming a zombie.  All of those things would be acceptable if I was expecting to watch a chick flick, but I wasn't.

So this movie’s title should not be Contracted so much as it should be “Conflicted”- it's very much an emotionally charged, anti-hero story which has  a plot built for teenage girls, but has the gore factor of a slasher film.  It's like the movie director and producers deliberately tried to exclude both potential target markets.  Or perhaps, they attempted to score both horror buffs and emo-girls in one fell swoop.  I would say that attempt failed.

Oh and about the gore factor.  I have a fairly high tolerance for violence and gore.  I mean, I'm a 31 year old guy who was raised on video games.  That being said, this movie had some really eerie things that I could just not stomach.  Seriously how many “is she dying or does she have a really bad period” scenes does a movie need? I think the scene at the end of the movie where the dude has sex with Sam in her decayed state and she literally starts bleeding to death while in the act…oh man, only time can heal that mental wound.  Honestly, maggots falling on the floor??  Those scenes added nothing to the movie and just showed how shallow the characters had been written.

Notable Awesomeness

I applaud the movie for trying a new spin on the zombie thing.  I mean everyone is trying to cash in on the zombie hysteria created by Walking Dead - and with all the movies and books which have already been published on the matter, it's interesting to see a new take on the nature of how the zombie phenomenon spreads.  I won't lie, I actually really like the concept of gradual zombification.  We’re all used to the normal “get bit - turn into zombie within 24 hour” routine.  So the three day thing was actually pretty neat to see.

But that's as far as I am going to go.  

Also, Fat Neil from Community was the drug dealer.  So that’s cool.

Notable Lameness

This movie has a lot of the earmarks of a poor concept film.  Most notably, unbelievable characters, unrealistic and rushed plot, and needlessly cheesy gore.  All at the expense of the whole “STD zombie” idea.

Plus there’s the fact that this movie focuses too much on the main character’s personal problems rather than the matter at hand.  I get what the director is going for here, we all do: SAMANTHA IS THE ANTI-HERO.  Ok we all get it!  So now what?  Why the hell would you use that in a zombie movie?  Zombies are a societal evil- that’s what makes them so cool.  They are the horror equivalent to the Borg in science fiction.  They ruin humanity and turn everyone into a mindless creature.  What makes good zombie stories are the characters trying to live within the growing anxiety of a civic collapse; a death of values, ethics, morals and the very meaning of life.

We don’t get anything like that in this movie.  Samantha just continues to go about her business as per normal.  She even keeps going to work!  WTF??  It’s all just a bunch of teenage drama.  Where is the raising of the stakes?  Why should we care about this stupid, self-absorbed protagonist who ultimately turns on her family and friends, likely turning them into zombies (maybe that dude she slept with and her two girlfriends...but she kills them, do they come back?) See?!  We don’t even know! 

And all that cool stuff happens in the like, the last 10 minutes of the movie.  Quel dommage.

Verdict

Contracted is a neat idea, but that’s about it.  It had its moments, but far too few, and too far between.  I was seriously underwhelmed with the delivery of this thing.  Not scary enough to be a good horror movie, not interesting enough to be psychological thriller material, and just too much like a teenage girl’s movie gone wrong.  Neat ideas only get your foot in the door, you still need a story and believable characters to make the movie work.

The Epitaph:

Here lies Contracted. I will never buy pads for my wife again.

☠☠/10