Frankenstein's Army

It's that time of year again.  The time when I try to watch as many horror movies as my little eyes can handle.  Instead of my usual, long-winded reviews, I'm going to just post a few thoughts about each movie I watch.  That means I will likely be posting about movies I've seen before.  So, for the next month, this blog will become my own personal viewing log.  You're welcome.

Description from Netflix:
As they push into Germany near the end of World War II, Russian troops discover that the Nazis have used the research scientist Victor Frankenstein to create monstrous new soldiers that are pieced together from body parts of the dead.

Here is a list of things I knew about this movie before I started it:
1. Good creature design
2. World War II

That's it.  That's the sum of my knowledge about this movie.  Which is good, I guess.  I didn't really have any expectations going in.

Here's something I didn't know that would have been useful.  It's a found footage movie.
I hoped this would be good.  I'm a sucker for horror movies set in different periods (at least, I think I am.  I often find that I like the idea of these movies better than I actually like the movie).  And I love good creature design.  This should have been right up my alley.

Sadly, it was not.  It was pretty boring, and I wasn't overly impressed with the creature effects.  They pretty much looked like rejects from Hellboy.  Some of them looked pretty cool, but, if they were planning on driving interest in the movie based on that, they failed horribly.

There really weren't any likable characters, either.  It's hard to really get too invested in a movie when there aren't any characters to sympathize with.

The first-person style was really distracting.  These kinds of movies are pretty hit-and-miss for me.  When done well, found footage movies can be really good, and the style can add a lot to the movie.  When done poorly, they're extremely distracting to the story.  This was the latter.
I normally don't get too tied up in the camera logic of these movies.  Whether a person is filming under strange circumstances makes very little difference to me.  But this one was really obnoxious.  There were a number of times when the cameraman was running from a monster, dropped the camera, and took time to pick it up, hold it back up to his face, and film as he ran.  I understand needing to do this to keep showing things, but it doesn't make any sense here.  Again, I normally don't have these issues, but it was impossible to ignore here.

This was a movie that started really slow, and, even when it picked up, never really held my interest.

Rating: 1.5/5