I swear the Germans will do anything to win World War 2. Now they've set up a lab for Frankenstein's grandson to mass produce Frankensteins. Stalin envies this technology so a squad of guys pretending to be Russians are sent to capture the doctor, but - and this is the fundamental pith of the film - they run afoul of his creations.

I think the medical industry is holding out on us. Limbs, heads, organs, mechanical devices - just rip 'em apart and stick 'em onto other ones and it seems to work fine. Even different brains cut into bits and squished together function immediately and nevermind sanitary surgical conditions. I dig the Geiger-Nazi industrial goth mechano-ubermenschen here. If the Borg from Star Trek had porn, this would be it.

I have to question their effectiveness as weapons of war however. Funding frivolous fantasy projects like this instead of building strategic bombers is one reason the Nazis lost the war. I mean a stahlhelm and gas mask monstrosity on stilts with drills for hands is admittedly pretty neat, but is it really going to turn the tide at Stalingrad?

Basically the same movie as War of the Dead 'cept with Frankensteins instead of zombies. War horror seems to follow a strict formula these days - the Germans do something horrible again and a small team of Allied soldiers are sent on a top secret mission to investigate the facility, whereupon they discover whatever nightmare the Nazi scientists/occultists have unleashed running amok. Certainly nothing wrong with that; it's a war horror classic and these movies are packed with just the sort of thing I like to see, but surely war has many other dreadful stories to offer.

Remember that great Weird War Tales comic from the 70s? Freaky shit like that. Maybe malevolent aliens could land during the war, see what the Nazis are doing, and be like "ha you call that genocide?". Or at the end of the war when the rest of the world is spent, Switzerland unleashes her army of flying vampires. It was their plan all along! Lot of stuff you could do.

Anyway I think they're actually calling this found footage, but not trying very hard to pull it off. It's basically framed like a real movie, and sometimes the camera operator sees monsters sneaking up and doesn't tell anybody, for the drama I guess? And of course they aren't really going to do a movie in grainy 1940s film camera style. Not that I'm complaining the movie isn't jerky and shitty enough looking, but it's obviously only a contrivance to shake the camera a little during action scenes. Can we all just agree collectively that it's okay to shake the damn camera or shoot P.O.V. without having to make up some unlikely reason for movie characters to always be making a movie?

I should probably mention the dialogue, because I take it this is a Dutch/Czech/American scheme and when that many countries make a movie all sorts of bad things can happen when the people talk. Most of the performers aren't Russian and they weren't going to have Russian soldiers speaking Dutch, so subtitles were out. The malevolent spectre of Euro-dubbing thus looms ominously over the first spoken line. Well I'm pleased to tell you they opted to have the actors speak English, but with the brilliant stroke of employing Russian accents so we know they're foreign. What, like you can tell the difference between a real Russian accent and a Czech Russian accent.

But war and monsters and gruesome human vivisection and I'm pretty sure a kid got killed in there. While I'm here I want to mention this odd Russian war movie called White Tiger I think you can still watch for free on YouTube. Not exactly a horror movie but it's got a phantom panzer and the god of tanks brings an incinerated tank driver back to life and weird stuff like that.