Step right up ladies and gentlemen! You are about to witness that which no living human eyes should ever see, and discover truths too awful for the human brain to comprehend. You have, I trust, all signed the disclaimer waivers you were presented with at the door? Ah yes, good, good. And the price was only that of your immortal souls. Pfah! You have no need for that, right? Most of you don’t even believe it exists. Indeed. So really, you’ve paid nothing…
Ahem! Where was I? Oh yes! Then right this way please, and take your seats. The show is about to start. Do be advised the doors will be locked upon commencement of the film and there is no escape, and certainly no refunds. You have all come here of your own free will, and have signed affadavits to that effect. What happens next is entirely consensual and the dangers have already been pointed out to you. Please note we have one of the finest legal teams in the world on our books, so any attempts to sue us for, oh, I don’t know, mental anguish or trauma experienced during our presentation will be fought to the very best of our ability.
As a wise man once said, you pays your money and you takes your chances…
Now, quiet please. Extinguish all cigarettes and combustible materials, turn off all mobile phones and tablets and please do not attempt to record the film; nobody will want to see it anyway. The burly gentlemen stationed at each exit are there for your protection, and for no other reason. May we just please remind anyone of a weak disposition or who has a history of heart problems to reconsider remaining before the doors are sealed? No? Nobody. You’re all quite happy to remain where you are. Do remember later, I asked.
Then let the lights go down, the curtain raise and prepare once more, you brave and foolhardy souls to
Back in the 1970s it was easy to spot a bad movie. Usually they were the ones with the likes of Doug McClure in them, scantily-clad young ladies running from monsters, or martians, or perhaps prehistoric creatures like dinosaurs. These days, things are a lot more subtle but you can still spot the dubious movies, often by their titles. I mean, “Strippers vs Werewolves” doesn’t exactly sound like anything that’s going to tax your brain too much, now does it?
But this one. Well, this one really has Oscar nominee written all over it. And yet, when I watched it for the first time I was shocked to find that --- yeah, right. This belongs on the cutting room floor with all the other unnecessary shots that were ripped out of it, leaving us with ninety minutes of preposterous garbage that goes by the glorious title of
You can just sense the class reeking from it as you look at the poster, can’t you? Not even McClure would be seen dead in this, in fact nobody who is anyone is in it. All these actors (I use the phrase loosely, of course) are unknown to me .. wait a moment! Dominque Swain? She was in “Face/off” wasn’t she? And isn’t Jake Busey the son of that action-movie powerhouse madman Gary? What ever possessed them to get dragged into something like this? Could it be blackmail? Are there compromising photographs floating around somewhere, or held under lock and key by the, um, director of this, um, film?
Title: Nazis at the center of the Earth
Year: 2012
Writer: Paul Bales
Producer: David Michael Latt/David Rimawi/Paul Bales
Director: Joseph Lawson
Genre: Science-Fiction/Horror
Stars: Dominique Swain as Paige Morgan
Jake Busey as Adrian Reistad
Joshua Michael Allen as Lucas Moss
Christopher Karl Johnson as Dr. Josef Mengele
James Maxwell Young as Adolf Hitler
Germany, May 1945 and Dr. Josef Mengele makes his escape as the Americans close in. Cut to present day and we’re in Antarctica, as a crew begins to drill into the perma-frost but their drill stops after a few moments, hitting metal! Scraping the ice away they reveal, of all things, a swastika. A moment later three gas-masked Nazis appear out of nowhere and knock the two scientists unconscious. They then blow up the drill. Back at the research station. Dr. Reistad (Busey) seems to be something of a Mengele character himself. His superior reminds him that he once infected a whole team with influenza, just as an experiment, and now he has been caught with a deadly flesh-eating bacteria, no doubt about to try something similar. It’s pretty uncanny how like his father Jake Busey is; it’s almost like looking back in time.
A quick break to explore some scintillating dialogue from the movie so far: one scientist, out in the freezing sub-zero temperatures of Antarctica, remarks “It’s cold!” Uh-huh! Where did you think you were going, idiot? The freaking Bahamas? When they get to the drilling site and see nothing there they think it might have been an explosion, Dr. Ross says “There’d be wreckage” to which another scientist nods and says “He’s right!” Yeah, he’s right. Was that necessary? It’s f
ucking obvious he’s right. Does this guy have so few lines that he needs to make pointless statements? Ans why isn’t there wreckage? All the Nazis did was throw a grenade at the drill. Wouldn’t that have caused wreckage? How about Busey when he leans down and sees red spots on the ice. After carefully examining them he declares knowledgeably, “It’s blood.” No s
hit, Sherlock!
Anyway, when they realise that the two scientists who went out to drill have not reported in a search party heads out onto the ice and find drag marks, which they begin to follow. Down below the ice (presumably) Paige and Mark, the two who were abducted, find themselves in a cell. Mark is taken from there by the Nazi soldiers and strapped down on a table, towards which a man (who is clearly the monstrous doctor who fled Germany) approaches, makes a cut across the top of his forehead and then Mark literally loses face as the Nazi rips the skin off, exposing the skull beneath. Yuck! It’s pretty gory, and I would assume also inaccurate. Surely the skin is anchored to the face, the head by more than just one point? I mean, it seems unlikely you could pull someone’s face off like stripping wallpaper! Mind you, I’ve never tried and never wish to, but it sounds a bit too simple.
(Somebody get my agent on the phone --- NOW!!)
The search party meanwhile finds a chasm or sinkhole or crater, or whatever you call it when there’s a big deep hole in the ice, and they abseil down, finding themselves in a massive cavern under the ice. But all is not as it should be. As if there being a bloody cavern under the ice is not odd enough! It seems to be warm, and the heat is coming from a tunnel off to the side, which they duly head towards. Our man of few lines again adds his wisdom to the dialogue: “I’m ready”, he tells them. Nobody asked. And what were they going to do if you weren’t ready? Wait till you were? Our intrepid Paige, face for the moment still attached, manages to escape by jamming a fork in the steel door as it shuts. Let’s examine this for a moment, shall we?
First, how stupid is the Nazi to give her a steel fork, a weapon she can use if she’s quick enough (which she isn’t?) --- surely a plastic one would have done just as well, or f
uck it, let her use her fingers. Why should they care? They’re probably going to kill her anyway, so what does it matter? Secondly, are we supposed to believe that jamming a small piece of stainless steel into a massive hydraulic door will stop it closing? Surely the fork would just be splintered? And even if not, how does she then exploit the tiny gap this provides for her? They expect us to believe that she rolled back that big, heavy door all on her own? In her weakened state and also being, you know, a girl?
In the event, she finds Mark, or so she thinks, lying on a bed in a cubicle. Mark is in fact in the cubicle adjacent, and has lost not only his face but most of his skin, which appears to have been attached to the man she saw originally, thinking him to be her friend. This charming man then appears before her, speaking in German. She hits him and runs as klaxons blare. Suddenly she’s surrounded by these zombie things. Dr. Moss goes down the shaft (oooer!) into the darkness and is followed by a female member of the team, whom I am going to refer to as Norway Girl, as she says she's Norwegian and it's easier than figuring out what her name actually is. So we have Busey, Moss, Norway Girl, One-Liner and two others who I especially don't give a toss about, all of whom go down the chasm after the first two. At the end of the tunnel they find, to their amazement, a city, a world, a whole ecosystem including trees, mountains and lakes. This will of course all be explained in the best scientific tradition, and we will be left with no doubt that such a thing could indeed happen, fifty miles under the ice.
(
Yes, choose beautiful Antarctica under the ice for your next holiday! Just remember to bring a spare face and brain! )
Ah, no. Busey just talks a lot of bull about people writing about this in the eighteenth century, the hollow Earth and so on. No explanation. And where does the sunlight come from? Surely the sun, powerful as it is, can’t penetrate through fifty miles of ice? Isn't that why it’s dark underwater? Sigh. Anyway, our heroes blithely blunder into a large building that looks a lot like that hangar they met the aliens in on
The X-Files and rather surprisingly the doors shut and they find themselves trapped! Oh no! But worse is to come, when Dr. Mengele reveals himself and it turns out Busey is working for him, having been captured ten years previously and now turned to the Nazi cause. Just in case we’re unsure, he gives the salute and shouts “Heil Hitler!”
Mengele then weaves a rather fantastical story about having replaced over sixty percent of his skin and having survived down here under the earth, with access to all sorts of hi-tech, one of which, a sort of disintegrator weapon, he uses on one of the scientists who is --- anyone? ---- a jew. He dies particularly painfully. Good: saves me having to learn his name or refer to him again. Mengele tells the shocked crew that Busey saved his own skin by agreeing to deliver a fresh supply of “human parts” to the crazed Nazi, so that he can keep rebuilding himself as parts fail. He now shares with them his master plan which is --- anyone? Anyone at all. You there, up at the back, waving frantically --- yeah. He wants to take over the world in the name of the Nazis and bring about the Fourth Reich. Ah, bless!
Even little Paige seems to have given in to the inevitable, as she appears wearing a fetching Nazi uniform. But this particular group, Mengele tells them, aren’t to be recycled and used as parts. Oh no: they’re the finest minds of their generation (apparently) and they are to help the mad Nazi and his cohorts remain alive so that they can fulfil their grand destiny. We next see cliche city (as if we haven’t been living there for some time now) as firstly, with our intrepid band imprisoned one of them bounces a ball off the wall, “Great Escape”-style, while Moss goes on about evil triumphing when good men do nothing, except here Mengele is not suggesting they do nothing, but very much indeed. The best line comes from one of the other scientists (no I could not be bothered to learn all their names) when he says matter-of-factly “We’re going to die, aren’t we?” Well, at the box office, yes.
I love the way the scientists get all interested and professional when they meet the guy wearing Mark’s face, and are all eager to help his issues with rejection of the facial tissue. Talk about getting lost in your work! And they’re allowed to work without supervision, with all these surgical tools, chemicals and other potential weapons to hand? No wonder the Germans lost! And nobody has yet explained why all the soldiers are wearing gas masks? Seems even Nazi zombies get hungry for a bit of t&a, so we have a gratuitous gang rape scene (or it could be cannibalism; it’s never made that clear; one thing is certain though, and that is that afterwards one of the zombies has taken part of her skin and grafted it onto his neck, so I assume she didn’t live through the ordeal!) while the other girl loses the top half of her head, as Busey extracts stem cells from her brain with a syringe.
(I must be out of my mind to have accepted a role in this picture! (Sorry...))
Now. Let’s recap. Sorry. I will have my little joke, won’t I? These Nazi lunatics, led by the insane Angel of Death himself, are below the ice experimenting on human bodies --- apparently; though there’s been no mention of people going mysteriously missing over the years, which would have been something of a clue. And this is fu
cking
Antarctica after all: it’s not like you’re going to be able to trap unwary travellers passing through! --- and plotting the return of the Reich. Can anyone guess who’s about to step into the picture? Come on now, think hard. What’s a Reich without a fuhrer to lead it? Adolf Hitler, come on down!