Frankenstein’s Army is a 2013 American horror film directed by Richard Raaphorst from a screenplay by Chris W. Mitchell and Miguel Tejas-Flores. It stars Karel Roden, Joshua Sasse, Robert Gwilym, Alexander Mercury, Andrei Zayats, Mark Stevenson and Hon Ping Tang. The film was released theatrically by Dark Sky Films on July 26th, 2013 and will be released on DVD and Blu-ray September 10th.
In the waning days of World War II, a battalion of Russian soldiers find themselves lost in enemy territory. Stumbling upon a village decimated by an unseen terror, they discover that a mad Nazi scientist (Hellboy‘s Karel Roden) conducts experiments to fuse flesh and steel, creating an unstoppable army of undead soldiers. Leaderless and faced with dissention amongst their dwindling ranks, they must find the courage to face down an altogether new menace…
IMDb | Rotten Tomatoes | Official website
” … you don’t go see a movie like Frankenstein’s Army for story or dialogue. Rather, you go so that you can see some cool monsters, and in that regard this definitely delivers. There’s all kinds of gruesome monsters, including one particularly memorable zom-bot with a propeller for a face. The gore level is also ratcheted up to possibly NC-17 levels, with a brain-surgery scene that makes the brain-eating in Hannibal look positively tame by comparison.” Chris Bumbray, JoBlo.com
“There are some nice ideas at work in Frankenstein’s Army and the monsters look great, but the ‘found footage’ conceit brings little to proceedings and for a horror movie there just aren’t enough scares.” Chris Tilly, IGN
“This action will inspire more bursts of giddy, incredulous laughter than jolts of fear — a mood that only intensifies when we meet the mad scientist himself, played with midnight-movie gusto by Karel Roden. ”I can end the war by creating a new being!” he declares at one point, bisecting the brains of a Nazi and a communist and combining them crudely into a single corpse’s skull. If the film had played up this type of satire-friendly theme and offered a little humor to balance its initial wartime realism, Frankenstein’s Army might have been sufficiently re-watchable to attract a small cult following.” John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter
” … less interesting as a self-contained work than as a promise of things to come. It’s a bravura if deeply silly demonstration of what clever moviemakers can do on meager resources. I wish it satisfied on its own terms, but its energy is engaging, provided you have a strong stomach for gore and are amused by old-fashioned analog monsters made of latex, rags, and diving helmets gutting Russian infantrymen… ” Roger Ebert
“The brutality of war is certainly felt in Frankenstein’s Army, even when the man-machine monsters are off-screen. There’s a foreboding sense of collapse here, seen in the panicked German citizens who, despite their uniforms, don’t quite feel villainous, and, of course, in Frankenstein’s bloated creations as they lumber down hallways and chambers. Raaphorst clearly knows what’s scary and what isn’t, and he’s succeeded in creating a fun and creepy midnight monster romp that every horror fan will appreciate.” Bloody Disgusting
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