Okay,
it’s a little creepy, but animating dead bodies has obvious military advantages.
The National Socialists would be just the sort to develop such technology. In
fact, the grandson of a certain controversial scientist has apparently cobbled
together quite a monstrous division of soldiers in Richard Raaphorst’s Frankenstein’s Army, a midnight
selection of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.
Dimitri
is a graduate of Soviet film school filming a small recon squad in the field.
Less than thrilled to be shepherding the would-be documentarian and his nebbish
assistant, the commanding officer busts their chops every chance he gets. Everyone is on edge since radio contact with
headquarters was cut-off. Suddenly, a mysterious
distress call lures them to a remote monastery, whose occupants were gruesomely
murdered by a mysterious force. You can
probably guess where things are headed from here, even if the Commies can’t.
The
potential midnight movie appeal of Nazis vs. re-animated freaks needs no
explanation, but Frankenstein’s Army is
poorly served by its found footage structure.
That it is in color frankly makes no sense. Hardcore cineastes will also be disappointed
Dimitri, the Soviet Tarantino, never nods towards the work of Eisenstein Vertov
that should supposedly have inspired him, not that this will be foremost in the
minds of late night patrons. However,
they will notice when he “cheats” with the conceit.
On
the other hand, Raaphorst is on pretty solid ground in the manner he depicts
the Red Army. Hardly liberators, they
are more like marauders, committing war crimes against the local peasantry that
the commander not so discretely censors.
Likewise, it becomes clear their Soviet masters do not care about the
soldiers’ safety. In fact, they have a secret agenda in the whole horrific
affair.
The
Frankenstein monsters are also quite inventive in a ghoulish way, looking like
a rogue’s gallery of Silent Hill creatures
decked out in Nazi regalia. While Karel
Roden has plenty of genre cred, his mad doctor’s character is sadly underdeveloped.
There is an intriguing hint of a backstory involving the Frankenstein family’s
complicated relationship with the German state, but Raaphorst never fully
capitalizes on the Frankenstein legacy (after all, if he is the grandson, than
Basil Rathbone’s Baron Wolf von Frankenstein must be his father, right?).
