Backtrack, or: I Do Nazi the Point of This Movie

So maybe you’ve thought off-hand that you must have done something terrible in a past life to deserve a series of lamentable circumstances in the present.  Like…the global political climate, for example.  Perhaps as you’ve considered this possibility, you’ve used a series of clichéd expressions and non-sequiturs to frame what is already something of a cliché.  That’s this film in a nutshell…with Nazis.  And, coincidentally, we must have all offended the forces of the universe to deserve this movie.

The Film:

Backtrack:  Nazi Regression

Where to Watch:

Amazon Prime (US)

The Premise:

What’s more fun than a walking holiday with your partner and two of your closest friends?  Exploring a possible Nazi past life through hypnotism while your girlfriend hooks up with your friend’s boyfriend and a deranged kidnapper stalks you.

The Uncondensed Version:

Claudia has an incredibly vague and convenient talent for looking into the past and future.  While on a walking holiday with her friends seems to be the perfect opportunity to test out her abilities.  Specifically, to explore the secret Nazi life of friend Ralph.  Learning about his past life is…important?  For some reason?  As it turns out, Ralph had a Nazi family in his past life, and something bad seems to have happened to them.

A fun hobby to try explaining during interviews.

Meanwhile, Andrea and Lucas (who looks 12), the respective partners of Ralph and Claudia are fine with this turn of events as they’re off having sex constantly and/or complaining about all the walking…ON A WALKING HOLIDAY.  Too tired to deal with this shit, Andrea and Lucas go off to find the local pub.  Once there, they are greeted by an incredibly creepy bartender.  I kind of expected him to get along well with Lucas because they are both so fucking sleazy.

Is he reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally old enough to be in a bar, though?  Is he REALLY?

Later, as Andrea and Lucas have yet another weirdly shot sex scene, a mysterious figure who we’ve heard talking to himself throughout the entire movie approaches their tent.  He hits Lucas and ties up both parties.  Whoa.  Is that where this film is heading, i.e. torture porn territory?  Apparently so.  There are some absolutely disgusting scenes that feel endless where this guy burns his victims with a lot of camera close-ups.  I hope you realize I don’t say that lightly given the massive number of B horror movies featured in this blog collab.

After being asked once, Andrea immediately reveals where the other two have gone.  Look, I’m not saying I’d do any better if a creepy kidnapper started asking me questions, but come on.

Btw, did I mention all of this is happening in broad daylight?  And he moves his victims in the back of a tractor wagon?  Super inconspicuous.

Conveniently, when Claudia and Ralph return to the campsite, Claudia senses that Andrea and Lucas were abducted after the odd camera angles of their sex scene.  The answer to all of their questions is supposedly to do another Nazi past life regression.  This is interrupted by the most unintentionally hilarious attempted abduction scene in film, in which the creepy shadowy dude tries to basically tow their tent with his tractor.  Unsurprisingly, they can get out of that one pretty easily.

IDK if I should really be laughing so hard about kidnapping.

However, when he does catch up with Claudia and Ralph, he is intent on exacting revenge for some unknown offense.  You’ll have to watch to see what happens, why, and if you even fucking care by the time any of this happens.  But honestly, if you ask nicely, I’ll probably just tell you how it ends.

Top 5 Lines of Dialogue:

5. “It’s better to know than not know.”

4. Andrea: A man hit you, tied us up, and brought us here.

Lucas (outraged): WHY?!

3. Julian Glover (dramatically, to a grave): You shall be avenged!

2. “If you untie us now and let us go, we’ll be on our way and the whole thing won’t be mentioned.”

1. “I’ve lived before…even if I was a Nazi.”

The Rating:

1/5 Angry PPHs

So bad, guys.  So, so bad.

I tried to think of small things about this film that could be changed to improve it, and I drew a blank.  On the bright side, the scenery is pretty?   Fucking hell, though, those burn scenes are vile.  And though as viewers we are obviously supposed to hate the cheaters and like the other two characters, they are all sooooooooooooooooooo bland.  Sub-par, even for a Nazi B movie.

Would Christa go along with this one or roll on out of the tent ASAP?  Find out by reading her review here!

Look Who’s Back (Hint: Not Slim Shady)

This week’s film is our last feature of April’s Blog Free or Die Hard series.  I’ve been so intrigued ever since the book, Er ist wieder da, became a bestseller.  A satirical novel, it imagines Hitler’s return to Germany in the present and follows its citizens’ reactions to his ideology.

I confess I stopped reading the book, in part because I didn’t want all of my work colleagues to suspect me of being a neo-Nazi.  I know—I’ve become that person who hasn’t read the book but watched the movie.

The Film:

Look Who’s Back

Where to Watch:

Netflix (US)

The Premise:

In this mockumentary-style film, Adolf Hitler returns to modern day Germany and enjoys (unintended) success as a comedian.

The Uncondensed Version:

As mentioned above, the film follows Hitler, who has seemingly pulled a Rip Van Winkle when he wakes unchanged in 2014.  Instead of being revered, Hitler is astonished that no one pays him the proper respect, preferring rather to selfie with him.  It doesn’t take long for Hitler to become disgusted with the current state of Germany and draw the conclusion that democracy has failed.  Somewhat unexpectedly, he identifies most strongly with the Green party, which makes an increasing amount of sense when you think about the fanaticism of vegans.

Not on team iPhone, apparently.

Meanwhile, at a commercial TV station, Katja Bellini has just gotten the big promotion her colleague Sensenbrink fully expected would be his.  In a moment of rage, Sensenbrink fires relatively innocent bystander Sawatzki for a poorly timed comment.  These men are too emotional for leadership positions.  Suddenly out of a job, Sawatzki (which is, ahem, very close to being an anagram for a certain Nazi symbol) is looking for a big scoop.  I WONDER what story he’ll find…

Sadly, Sawatzki’s big idea is just touring the country with Hitler and filming their exploits.  I feel this kind of thing has been done before and isn’t especially noteworthy?  However, what’s remarkable to Sawatzki is how spot-on the impression is and Hitler’s talent for ad-libbing (that was a weird phrase to write).

Definition, please.

Hitler and Sawatzki go around Germany with surprisingly mixed results.  I felt most conflicted when I identified with Hitler’s annoyance at reality TV programs.  Most of them are objectively bad, though.

It gets a bit too real when some Germans speak with Hitler about the immigrant problem, the government that doesn’t represent their interests, and some fucking insane football hooligans beat the shit out of someone who doesn’t support Germany.  Hitler starts blowing up on social media and getting a scary number of followers.

Basically never ok to utter this sentence.

All of this brings Hitler to Bellini’s attention, and she’s impressed with his supposed comedy routine.  She gives him the chance to appear on a live sketch show, where he starts improvising rather than following the cue cards.

At first the audience thinks Hitler’s routine is funny, but at a certain point the applause becomes genuine and the audience finds many of his ideas appealing.  The tried and true method of telling everyone the country is going to shit and only he has the answers works wonders and he goes viral.  (Many of the words he utters have honestly come out of Trump’s [Drumpf] mouth.)

For real, though, “Who Said It: Hitler or Trump?” MUST be a Buzzfeed quiz.

Meanwhile, Sensenbrink is trying to discredit Hitler in order to steal Bellini’s job, but nothing seems to do the trick.  What will it take to stop Hitler—or is history doomed to repeat itself?

The Rating:

This film is very interested in Hitler’s legacy on German politics and, by extension, world politics.  Its title is Look Who’s Back, but it implies that Hitler never really left the world stage.  The effects of fascist, xenophobic hate groups have lingered, though they sometimes disguise themselves behind smiles and charisma.  Look Who’s Back doesn’t shy away from drawing a correlation between Hitler and groups opposed to immigrants, Muslims, refugees, and outsiders.  It encourages viewers to examine this relationship rather than bury it.

Although it’s a satire, a lot of the humor is derived from physical comedy, and it gets a bit didactic at the end and sort of shakes its finger at the audience (there was a pretty great parody of that famous rant scene in Downfall, though).  I don’t dispute that certain political groups are in need of a bit of shaming, but it did feel a bit condescending at times.  That being said, it does make the film much darker and more thought-provoking than I’d anticipated.

But sometimes you just want to laugh at Hitler.

The Rating:

3.5/5 Pink Panther Heads

Would Christa go on a cross-country tour with this one or kill it with fire?  Find out in her review here!

The Man Who Never Was, or: Operation Mincemeat Is a Terrible Codename

The next few weeks on the blog are basically anything goes as we Blog Free or Die Hard. Freedom, carpe diem, etc. This week I picked a WWII thriller because I didn’t think I could handle two Polanski films in a row. I do really love Chinatown, though.  Our film for the week is the nonsensically titled The Man Who Never Was.

As usual, find Christa’s review here!

The Film:

The Man Who Never Was

Where to Watch:

Netflix (US)

The Premise:

Those sneaky Brits come up with a plan to mislead the Nazis about where the invasion of Sicily will occur.

The Uncondensed Version:

Based on the introduction, this film is going to be super melodramatic. These two military dudes are talking, and the younger dude (Montagu) gets stuck with the job of tricking the Germans into thinking the invasion of Sicily will be somewhere else (NOTE: I was trying to place the younger guy, Montagu, and I finally Googled him [bad librarian]. He’s that really sketchy journalist in Laura!)

Even though he is apparently a reasonably important naval commander, Montagu seems to have a staff of two to accomplish this. But maybe that’s normal for the military, IDK.

Understaffed? Underfunded? Check and check.

Staff = assistant Pam and this lieutenant who is also an assistant. I felt he wasn’t particularly important in this film, so I didn’t really make an effort to figure out exactly what his role was. Pam is def important, along with her roommate of loose morals, Gloria Grahame. Obv Lucy/Gloria Grahame is American b/c no Englishwoman would have such low standards of morality. It sucks to be Lucy as the dude she’s dating is a pilot, and she is way more into him than she’d like to admit.

But back to the military strategy side of things. Montagu decides he will fool the Nazis by planting the body of a downed pilot off the coast of Spain. This is Operation Mincemeat, aka one of the worst codenames for a military operation in history. There are two major obstacles to overcome for the plan to work: 1. Montagu needs a body, and 2. The strategic meeting pretty much exists for all of the important military dudes to criticize Montagu’s plan and person.

HOLD IT TOGETHER, MAN.

However, Montagu eventually manages to wrangle a body from a Scotsman. He and his crew have to spend quite a lot of time deciding what the pilot should be carrying: passport, love letters, picture of Gloria Grahame, etc.

After Montagu sets the body on its way, he is troubled, which you know because there are shots of him thinking about the ocean while everyone else is laughing and having a jolly old time.

Surprisingly, things go according to plan, and the Greeks or Italians or whatever find the body. (It took me a while to figure out what nationality these ‘50s people were going for, but it’s Spanish.)

In a dramatic twist, a Nazi spy arrives in London and starts stalking Gloria Grahame. Will GG be able to fool the Nazis, save England, and preserve life as we know it? (Sorry, Christa, I just stole your blog technique.)

I’ll give you a hint: GG comes in really drunk and starts reciting Tennyson and half-assedly playing the piano and crying.

Oh, girl. We’ve all been there.

The Rating:

3/5 Pink Panther Heads

I expected this to be a bit more on the thriller/film noir end of the spectrum, but there were quite a lot of lengthy logistical discussions. Ex: there was a scene where Montagu was rubbing a letter on a cabinet to make it look old, followed by a discussion about why exactly he was doing so. Not the most gripping dialogue in the history of cinema.

And, typically, Montagu ends up with a medal and GG doesn’t even get a fucking mention.

Have you read Christa’s review yet? Well, why not? You can find it here!

Frankenstein’s Army, or: I Was Promised Nazi Zombies

Great blog collab with A Voluptuous Mind, round 2! Read Christa’s review here.

The Film:

Frankenstein’s Army

Where to Watch:

Netflix

The Premise:

A unit of the Red Army attempts to complete a secret mission to find and destroy Dr. Frankenstein and his army of zombies (robot monsters).

The Trailer:

The Uncondensed Version:

This is a found footage movie, so we’ve got the obligatory explanation of a mission that’s about to go horribly wrong. It’s WWII, and a group of Russian soldiers are about to film their mission, to be completed in the name of Stalin!

We’ve got a pretty solid start thanks to epic marching through Mother Russia music and some terrible Russian accents.

Ra-Ra-Rasputin?

The first action this unit of the Red Army sees happens when they have to take out a sniper’s nest (except for poor little incompetent Sasha who has to stay behind and guard their gear). After the fighting’s done, they encounter this weird monster skeleton, which is kind of creepy but, eh, they don’t give it a whole lot of attention.

We also get a better idea for who the soldiers are. Though I really only kept track of the attractive one (the Polish guy, OBVIOUSLY) and the guy who was a dick (because I wanted to see him die). Aaaaaaaaaand they all get drunk because that’s what you do in the Red Army.

Can we get a spin-off of the Polish dude just staring into the camera?

Later, they hear an urgent message on the wireless from Tiger Bear, presumably another battalion, at a mining village nearby. There’s a lot of running through the sad, brown woods to get to the village. When they arrive, they find a pile of bodies, all nuns, being burned outside of a church. Surely the Nazis are responsible for this (spoiler alert: no, they aren’t. And stop calling me Shirley).

The Russians go into the church and discover it looks like a factory inside. Because they’re STUPID they start the machines up and encounter a robot monster, which salutes (of course). Before they can destroy the robot monster, it kills their commander pretty much by ripping out his intestines. Basically now either the asshole or the pretty Polish one is going to be in command. I think it’s the asshole guy. (I’m sorry, guys, but I need a more structured plot.)

Since they have no radio signal and no idea what’s going on, a small group goes into the village, where they find a house full of animals in cages. Suddenly the occupant returns and demands to know what they are doing (short answer: preparing to eat the animals).

Russians: masters of sass.

He says everyone in the village ran from the things the doctor makes, but he knows where the rest of the Russians are. Of course they are in a creepy old basement, which doesn’t deter the jackass who’s in charge. As they navigate the narrow underground tunnels, they encounter a robot monster who awesomely has scythes for hands and a kind of steampunk-y helmet that clamps open and closed. There are some really pointless scenes in which one of the guys is mortally wounded and the Russians find a German nurse to heal him but he dies anyway…so I’m skipping those.

At this point, the cameraman reveals that there is no Tiger Bear, and there are no Russian soldiers awaiting their help. They are, in fact, on a top-secret mission to destroy the lab of one Dr. Frankenstein, mad scientist. After more robot monsters attack, including one with really cool metal lobster claws and a Pinhead look-alike, the Russians decide they’ve had enough and leave the cameraman to the robot monsters.

Now, having been sent down a chute by his own comrades, the cameraman starts muttering about Stalin (shame of all shames)! He reveals his Jewish parents will be freed in exchange for the doctor and generally feels sorry for himself. Eventually, he gets up and starts wandering through the lab. In the lab there are a bunch of odd hybrid experiments, including a woman’s head sewn to a teddy bear (how would that ever be useful to Nazis?) Then a bunch of really cool-looking robot monsters start chasing the cameraman. One attacks him with a sledgehammer. Camera glass breaking. Fade to black.

When the cameraman wakes up, Dr. Frankenstein feeds him this weird soup and explains his robot monster creations. He gets really offended when the film guy implies they’re puppets when, in fact, they’re individuals.

Post would be incomplete without still of mad scientist brain splicing experimentation.

Frankenstein starts cutting this Nazi’s brain open to splice it with a Russian brain, which will, in theory, allow the two sides to understand each other and end the war (riiiiiiiiiiiiiight). When this experiment fails, Frankenstein begins a new experiment with the cameraman. When the Red Army suddenly returns, Frankenstein flees, explaining that the robot monsters will go nuts without him as a leader. However, one of the Russian dudes shoots him. The cameraman pleads with his comrade to save him, but the Russians just take the camera and peace out.

The Critique:

Maybe this is just me, but I interpreted “monstrous new soldiers pieced together from body parts of the dead” (from the Netflix summary) as zombies. So I was highly disappointed by the lack of any zombies in this movie.

The summary also says the monsters were created by the Nazis, which really isn’t true—they were just created by this one crazy German guy. So the monsters weren’t even directly part of some Nazi conspiracy. Sometimes German robot monsters aren’t Nazis; they’re just German robot monsters. Admittedly, they looked pretty cool.

Also I didn’t think the found footage thing worked particularly well in this movie and made the film feel really disjointed.

The Rating:

 2/5 Pink Panther Heads

In a more generous mood, I might say 3/5 because it wasn’t that bad, but I’m cranky due to lack of Nazi zombies.

Iron Sky, Or: Moon Nazis Are Coming

The Film:

Iron Sky

Where to Watch:

Netflix

The Premise:

Nazis who have been living on the dark side of the moon since 1945 decide the time is ripe to re-conquer the Earth after President Sarah Palin-alike sends a mission to the moon as a publicity stunt. A war between the Space Nazis and Earthlings ensues.

The Uncondensed Version:

The film begins with the failed mission of an American shuttle landing on the moon. When the astronauts landed on the dark side of the moon, they inadvertently trespass on a secret Nazi base. The first astronaut is shot, the second is captured, and the space shuttle is destroyed with a rocket launcher (Would a rocket launcher work in space? This is an important question to me).

The Nazis take the astronaut to their headquarters, which is A GIANT SWASTIKA-SHAPED BUILDING. How has no one noticed this??? Is this a commentary on the American space program? I just wasn’t expecting political commentary from a bad movie.

A swastika-shaped building stands above a moon crater.

Now we get a little Nazi backstory. Renate is just the little Nazi who could. She teaches the children the Nazi ways of peace, unity, and love because she believes so goshdarn hard. If she’s guilty of anything, it’s believing too much in making the world a better place/Nazi propaganda. The future führer, Klaus, is played by Günsche from Downfall, aka the Nazi Who You Are Uncomfortably Attracted To (a role usually reserved for Ludwig Müntze, who at least has the decency to be a fictional character). Things on his wish list include babies with Renate and the death of the current führer.

(I’m sorry, but he just looks so good standing next to a taxidermy wolf.)

Back to James, the second astronaut.  James is African-American, so the Nazis, led by a man who looks suspiciously like Einstein, perform experiments on him to make him white. Einstein-alike is also working on a secret Nazi super-weapon, the Götterdämmerung (seriously). It turns out the device can be powered by IPHONES, so the Nazis’ strategy is to get James to bring them iPhones, and, essentially, “take me to your leader.” This really begs the question of how their cars and technology have not evolved since the 1940s (they have fucking space zeppelins, I swear to god), yet they have survived on the moon for 60+ years and have managed to create a super-weapon powered by iOS. I KNOW…it’s just a bad movie, but still. I would appreciate some consistency. Also, none of the Nazis need helmets or space suits on the dark side of the moon. That just bothers me.

So anyway. James, Klaus, and Renate go to Earth to find iPhones and meet the President. Then Renate falls in love with James and has to learn a hard lesson about neo-Nazis and Charlie Chaplin.

Meanwhile, the movie gets even more political as President Sarah Palin-alike reveals she has orchestrated the moon landing as a publicity stunt. But it hasn’t boosted her ratings as she had hoped. What will give her that ratings boost? Starting a war, apparently. I wonder where she will ever find a group of warmongers who are almost universally despised by the American people with whom to do battle.

Surprisingly (or maybe unsurprisingly), Klaus and Renate meet the President, quickly becoming key figures in her re-election campaign.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin-alike’s campaign manager(I think?) becomes obsessed with Klaus, but he doesn’t really care about her since she’s not a Nazi. Though she does a pretty great/actually funny parody of the Hitler rant scene from Downfall (coincidentally, she is played by the Jabberwocky from Once Upon a Time in Wonderland [which became too unbearable even for me]).

Finally, there’s a war between the Earth and the Moon Nazis, which is going pretty well for the Earth until the Götterdämmerung is revealed to be a huge Nazi UFO/space warship. The movie ends pretty much how you would expect it to, though I won’t reveal every detail because THIS MOVIE IS ABOUT THE JOURNEY. And the moon getting nuked.

The Critique:

Overall an excellent bad movie. Not as good as Nazis at the Center of the Earth, but better than expected. I should never have suspected a film about space Nazis would be less than spectacular.

Some of the humor and quirkiness were actually effective rather than falling uncomfortably short as they do so frequently in bad movies. The strong sociopoilitical critique worked quite well, bringing environmentalism, nuclear weaponry, and the Republican Party under scrutiny, albeit largely for comic purposes.

The major disappointment of this film is, of course, the complete absence of Hitler. Surely colonizing the moon would require decades of planning. How did the Nazis utterly fail to bring Hitler with them to the moon??? I feel it’s just inconsiderate in this day and age to make a bad Nazi movie without the presence of Hitler or at least an explanation of his absence. I knew in my heart that the Götterdämmerung wouldn’t be Robot Hitler, but I was still extremely disappointed that Hitler didn’t appear in this movie, in robot form or otherwise. Coincidentally, I believe this is the only context in which I am legally permitted to express dismay at the absence of Hitler.

The Rating:

4/5 Pink Panther heads

What should I watch next? I’m thinking FDR: American Badass, but I’m willing to take suggestions for my Bad Movie Bucket List here.