Beystiman
It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.
ThedevilChoose
When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.
Wyatt
There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.
Scarlet
The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
Michael Ledo
This is an odd found footage tape with a twist, that really didn't matter. In our found footage tape, Russian soldiers speak English with Russian accents. Germans tend to speak German for reasons unknown. A group of WWII Russian soldiers quietly approach a village while a camera is whirling the whole time. They discover a third generation or so, Dr. Frankenstein who is connecting humans to various instruments and mechanical devices except chainsaws which has been done (see DVD cover). They make very tough hand to hand soldiers, if not absurdly darkly comical, giving the viewer the feeling, "What am I watching?' and "Why am I still watching this?"Guide: F-bomb. No sex or nudity
dungeonbrownies
I would highly recommend never watching this film as a film, but rather simply leaving it on in the background as you're doing something else. The sets, costumes, and monsters are fantastic. Save for a few odd ones, the quality is consistently high and set dressing and effects are executed by someone with an eye for detail.On the other hand, the acting is atrocious- accents are inconsistent, the comedy isn't quite funny enough and the horror is ruined by the use of unbelievable leaps of emotion that scream artificial.The way the film was produced isn't that great either. The use of found footage hurts the film more than helps it in terms of story telling, the mixing of psychopathic characters and basic "scared kids" and heroic tropes leads to inconsistent mood, and most of the shots are distracting rather than focusing. A lot of scenes don't focus enough on the horror aspect but stick too long on the action and dwell too long on basic things like tripping in the mud or stomping through the forest in a way that doesn't advance the story at all.Reasons to still have the film playing at all? Monsters are great, design is creative, atmosphere and level of grit are appropriate, basic premise is entertaining.
quincytheodore
I must admit, the concept of World War II found footage film, although slightly absurd, makes for an interesting back story. The execution, however, is downright preposterous. Visual looks intentionally grainy, and while this may represent the antique vibe, it's not very pleasing to witness. Plot and characters are corny, quite predictably so since a mesh of mockumentary set in war time and the namesake Frankenstein doesn't ensure gritty realism. However, as it gains momentum, the movie manages to grab my attention with some truly bizarre gory scenes.Story follows a team of Russian recon as they ventures to a desolated village where, as the name suggests, an enigmatic army is being assembled. Unbeknownst to them, Nazi isn't the main threat to their earthly continuity as odd occurrences and clues are found along the village. The very movie itself oozes B-movie air, the old filter is a poor excuse for the muddy graphic. The main disbelief is the cast as these so-called soldiers, they lack fundamental discipline and seems to be in much disarray to be a reconnaissance team in the first place.Costumes of the titular army are completely strange. Perhaps it tries to display a creature so close to be human but still not nearly enough to be viewed as one, but they come off like the rejects from circus or modern art gallery. One even has fan for head, at least that's a point scored for authenticity. With everything is done by CG, these real life looking monster uses their odd nature as strength. Even though there isn't much characterization or convincing plot, the latter arc is still interesting. Tension rises significantly as they face their fate and some mysteries are deciphered.The use of gore is silly, excessively so. They applied generous amount of fake limbs and blood to various scenes. This approach is a bit shameless, but surprisingly competent later on. Its reliance of heavy gore and many plot holes throughout the movie makes it just barely a watchable horror flick. Addition of the found footage gimmick, while it has some perks, but ultimately it's not compelling enough to add anything new.Thanks to its more vivid third act, Frankenstein's Army is a barely decent horror film.
ms-omen73
Everything about Frankenstein's Army is a bit of a strange Hodge Podge of things that don't normally fit together. Lets start with the fact that the film itself is billed as a Dutch-American-Czech film, that in itself says strange things and definitely worked to pique my curiosity, as strange is often under rated as far as I'm concerned. One other thing that caught my attention with this one was the art attached to it. Sometimes we tend to take it for granted how much the poster art on any particular film colors or perception of what it may be and whether it would be worth our investment in time or money. So with so many various points pushing me towards the play button I gave in, I mean really we all know it was just a matter of time before I lost the battle anyway!The setting is WWII, and we have an elite recon unit of Russian soldiers who are making their way across the countryside, occasionally coming across some very unusual corpses. These corpse don't appear to be entirely human nor do they appear to be anything actually know to the men. War makes the nerves sketchy enough with out strange half man half something else sparking corpses showing up. Anyway I digress, our band of soldiers receive a distress call from another platoon, so our hero's rush off in aid of their comrades.While searching for their "boys" they come across a farm house, where they make the acquaintance of a German going about feeding some of the animals. (Now I should not have to tell you buuuuuuttt just in case you slept through history, the Germans were the primary enemy of WWII). They try to get info out of him in regards to the whereabouts of their fellow countryman, to no avail. After a bit of torture the German offers to take them to where they boys are, which is where things get really strange...Frankenstein's Army is a hard one to review for me because on one hand its really kind of awesome, but on the other its really not! I find myself both loving and hating it at the same time, and my viewing buddy had much the same reaction to the film. So I guess to be fair I need to speak about both sides.Some of this movie is really very successful. The story itself is fairly simple, war torn land, soldiers trying to find and rescue their comrades, and evil mad Scientist bent on finding his own solution to the raging war, fairly straight forward. Granted there are a few twist and turns I haven't expressed, but as always I do my best not to give everything away,because wheres the fun in that? The film also has some honestly creepy moments in way of visuals. The monsters that make up the Dr's.Army are awesome. Easily some of the most diverse and interesting creature I have seen in some time, and really well executed. It also has some nicely done gore effects, that work well with-in the story line and don't go overboard, which would have been easy to do in this kind of context. The film also has almost a classic feel to it, it looks aged making you feel like your watching something that would have come out in the 60s or 70s era. All of those things are really fantastic about this one.Now onto the other side, what didn't work for me in this film. The biggest singular problem in this one is that its another in the long line of Found Footage genre, which works for some things but not this one. It starts out with a bit of promise with the quality and colors of the film appearing to be what you would expect from the time period. However as it moves forward the found footage concept losses something in the translation and just doesn't at all fit. This film could have been hugely successful had they just filmed it as a straight forward film, instead of trying force it forward as found footage. It has some other slight issues here and there but they are pretty inconsequential in comparison.This is a film that would have been almost guaranteed cult film status if it had been filmed differently. It could still garner a strong following, for no other reason than the Mad Doctors creations which make the film worth watching for sure. Its just difficult to fully engage in this one, I found it impossible to really stay focused on the film, so take a word of advice, before you pop this one on. Make sure all shiny things are removed from view or you may notice a twinkle out of the corner of your eye and be pulled away completely for a few!!! *HeatherOmen* TheHorrorNation.net