I came to this one as an adult. And thanks to Michael Sayer and Photo Play, the fabulous Greenpoint, Brooklyn movie rental shop that sadly closed its doors in 2014, I saw this as soon as it was released, as luck would have it, with the notorious warlock, Bobby Frederick Tilley. And Bobby will tell you that my threshold for found footage horror is pretty low, but Bobby's is lower, and that stands to reason because Bobby is friends with the folks who delivered the concept fully formed unto the horror genre, the filmmakers who made The Blair Witch Project. And of course, while Blair Witch was not the first found footage horror film, it is the best, regardless of how much it may have been lampooned in the 20-something years since it was released. It has launched leagues of pale imitators that simply do not deserve to be mentioned alongside it. So when we popped this little morsel into the DVD machine upon its home video release in the fall of 2013, we were not particularly thrilled to see that it employed such a sort of maligned narrative device.
But of course, being the non-judgmental, very nice guys that we are, we decided to let it spin for a minute. And I think we were both awfully glad that we did, because the device is pretty quickly justified by its being a Russian-made documentary, or probably propaganda film, ordered up by Stalin, and it's being captured behind enemy lines in the dying days of World War II. And I think while the seeds of the story that are ultimately going to unfold are planted pretty early, I think within the first five minutes of the film, it's easy to miss clues that'll seem pretty obvious upon successive viewings. I think especially if you're watching it as you ought to on your first viewing. without captions.
The gruesome discoveries that this recon team stumble upon: are they simply the horrors of war? Or are they somehow something even sicker? How is there artillery damage to a church in this region, wherever we are, when there have been no soldiers deployed here? Why is there a giant pile of immolated nuns? And why is there a churchyard that's just punched open with empty graves? And to return to the idea of watching the full-frame without distraction, I think this is especially important, because the director utilizes it in very complete, imaginative, and surprising ways that you might not be able to appreciate if you're not giving his composition your full attention.
As we go, the found footage device pays off more and more, because the very specific and limited point of view creates an experience in which the audience can be, I think, continually, by reveal after reveal of some of the slickest, sickest practical monsters that I've seen, which are being captured by Raaphorst, who was clearly inspired as much by like John Carpenter's The Thing, which of course we covered last season at Scare U, as he was by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or James Whale's Frankenstein in long single takes. And all of this is to kind of say that Frankenstein's Army is not a film that tells its story to provoke an intellectual response from the viewer. I think that while it does ostensibly make a statement about the sickness of humanity on both sides fighting a war, and perhaps about the objective truth of a thing that is filmed, I think it's sort of quite the opposite.
It's short on story, but I think it aims to tell that story in the most authentically gonzo way that it can. I don't think that it cares anything about interactions among the protagonists or their disagreements or their jealousies during wartime. It doesn't matter who's a Russian soldier or who's a German survivor. That's why the narrative found footage device pays off, because the viewer is placed directly into the story, knowing nothing more than the soldiers know, right in the center of the action. And extending that idea further, I think it is at times satirizing the escalating.Byzantine depravity that it unveils in an almost kind of Hunter S. Thompson kind of way that's both completely and bizarrely unconventional — and continually surprising. Liberating rabbits from fascist oppression is a great example of that.
But twenty minutes in, when the soldiers fire up a generator, they're setting in motion this series of events that would make Rube Goldberg jealous, and probably shit his pants. And it nearly instantly spells the doom of all of these characters. And it brings down the lap bar on this roller coaster ride that the audience is gonna take. It's not a brief one, but it's one that is going to last for the lion's share of an hour, because it is relentless. And it is going to keep us breathless as it goes hill after hill and makes us scream every time that it just goes down deeper and deeper into these chasms of total chaos and insanity, which are drenched in blood.
I think that we are, at points in this story, completely turned around in this labyrinth of tunnels. Like the characters, we have no sense of where we are, where we're going, what's going to jump out at us in Raaphorst’s kspook house that he's created. The tempo increases. The assault on our eyes, brains, and nervous systems just builds in this strange and ferocious wav. We find ourselves in something akin to what I would imagine a first-person immersive video game. Of course, the last time I played a video game was like Super Mario Brothers on Nintendo, so I may be off in that interpretation.
Of course, this is also nothing new for the horror genre, because Silent Hill and Resident Evil and House of the Dead and many, many more offerings have attempted to adapt video games for the screen to varying degrees of critical or box office success. Frankenstein's Army succeeds where those other antecedents fail. And I think it's beyond competent filmmaking. The first time I saw it, it made me jump. It made me laugh. It impressed me nonstop with the totality of its inventive production design and execution.
Because we're not asked to relate to the soldiers in this, but merely to experience what they experience, I think the actors deliver performances that are totally sufficient to what the characters are meant to accomplish. And the film succeeds exactly at what it sets out to accomplish. It kept me enthralled for the sort of entirety of its hour and 29 minutes of runtime. I think it’s unusual for a film, especially one that doesn't require me to think, to accomplish that. Sometimes you just need to unstitch vour brain and just go on a ride. And this is a ride filled with monsters and explosions and shocks and surprises. And I enjoy it again and again and again.
To hear our discussion of Frankenstein’s Army, click here.
Bradford Louryk