Frankenstein's Army

Le film entier est basé sur la prémisse étrange de Karl Roden assemblant des monstres steampunk zombies-Frankenstein à partir des corps de nazis et de Soviétiques, et mis à part l'atmosphère oppressante des caves hantées et des monstres bizarres et  terrifiants, il n'offre rien d'autre pour justifier de son existence. La réalisation et le scénario sont affreux, d'un autre côté, on ne pouvait probablement pas attendre autre chose d'un tel film. Les fantasmes dépravés des amateurs de sang seront satisfaits, mais ce n'est pas un bon film. (02/07/2013)

Frankenstein’s Army is above all a horribly squandered opportunity. It has an attractive premise (I have a weakness for WW2 Nazi experiments), a brilliantly designed monster, the atmospheric setting of a dilapidated factory… and boredom, bad actors (with the exception of Roden, in basically a big cameo, and he’s having fun), uninteresting characters and a very unconvincing found-footage format. The third star is basically because of the sympathy I feel for the project. (29/07/2013)

A functional design quirk, with the creators spending perhaps too much time in Rapture City and Wolfenstein Castle, it is dragged down by the absence of anything remotely resembling a plot, and thus the docu-cam can't be defended. More than half of the film, before "it" gets going, is unwatchable hell. (21/06/2015)

Frankenstein’s Army is a purely conceptual film, or even a concept art film. The whole project is built on Richard Raaphorst’s crazy designs, which combine the iconography of the Second World War with the Frankenstein myth, Japanese body horror, cyberpunk and ero guro aesthetics. Unfortunately, it is hopelessly obvious from the resulting film that even though Raaphorst succeeded in creating bizarrely imaginative set designs, costumes and effects, there is an utter lack of screenwriting, dramaturgical and directing skill. The film constantly highlights the found-footage form, which in this case isn’t used conceptually or imaginatively, or even as a purely formalistic device, but serves to excuse the filmmakers’ cluelessness. If the film’s creators didn’t know how to get the characters from point A to point B, they just teleported them there by obviously turning off the camera. The format is similarly supposed to disguise the fact that the film’s monsters are thoroughly incapable, which would be exceedingly obvious if standard filming techniques had been used. The overall concept – a found-footage film about the legendary Dr. Frankenstein’s deranged grandson, who manufactures biomechanical monsters using the bodies of Nazis and Red Army soldiers at the end of the war – represents the be-all and end-all of the whole project, as it serves not only as the starting point of the narrative, but also as the ultimate excuse. Given all of the screenwriting deficiencies, lack of internal logic, historical inadequacies and the fact that all of the film’s characters here speak English regardless of their nationality, it can simply be said that it would be a fool’s errand to look for any kind of meaning in such a harebrained film with the given concept. (30/06/2013)