(Isn't this a scene from "Castle Wolfenstein"?)
Of course, now is when it gets really stupid. No, really. Norway Girl chooses this moment to tell Busey that she is pregnant, and it must be his baby because suddenly he gets all emotional and supportive, and they embrace tenderly while trying not to slip on the discarded brain of their former colleague and friend. Nice. And then he punches her out, after which she finds herself strapped to a table as loopy Busey prepares to harvest the stem cells from her baby. Now where was I? Oh yes, der fuhrer. Well, did you ever see Futurama? Of course you did. So you’ll understand when I mention how President Nixon ended up in that.
(Ach du liber! Who iz pushink who arount now, ja?)
Yep: Hitler’s a gigantic fighting robot, ready to reclaim his kingdom in the name of the German people. Oh, and in case you were wondering how they were going to get back to the surface in order to install the glorious Fourth Reich? Yeah, they have a spaceship.
(Now that's how to break the ice! Oh I really am sorry...)
Mecha-Hitler finally does us all a favour and puts an end to Mister One-Liner, slicing his head off, which I must admit is a part at which I cheered, then prepares to pilot his massive starship out of the centre of the Earth, while the others (those who are still left alive) being of no further use are taken to the labs. Now I assume that for some reason at this point the writer (I use the word very liberally, I assure you) seems to think that nobody has sussed out that Paige is not really working for the Nazis and is just biding her time, waiting for her moment. Really? So it’s a total surprise when she suddenly turns against Mengele, slicing his throat open and proving she was just playing along? Yeah. Yeah. Me too. Didn’t see that coming at all…
And come
on! There has to be some weird connection between the fact that one of the major films Dominique Swain is known for is “Face/off” and this film involving people ripping people’s, you know, faces off? It’s even underlined near the end, when, having beaten the zombie who was wearing Mark’s face, Lucas rips it off saying “This isn’t yours!” Oh, the subtlety! Hitler, meanwhile, is still heading towards the surface in his spaceship, while Mark, oddly enough, is still alive, minus skin, which makes it rather awkward when they head back to rescue him and find that there’s very little to rescue. They have to put him out of his misery, which unfortunately won’t happen for me for another twenty long minutes.
Some more inspired dialogue to while away the time: Airbase replies to the sighting of a “UFO” with a question as to whether it is hostile, to which the pilot replies “It’s covered with Nazi swastikas! I’m calling that hostile!”
(That is one BIG motherfuckin' ship!)
And as the group remaining below trying to get away from the Nazi zombies runs into a locked door, dead end, one of the others remarks “I think I saw some other doors along the corridor!” And you didn’t think to fu
cking mention this at the time? You waited till they were trapped and THEN considered bringing it up??
So now we have a sort of Star Wars escape and laser gunfight (and the bad guys still couldn’t hit a target if their lives depended on it, which of course they do) while Hitler’s spaceship proves equal to the very best the air force of, um, New Zealand can throw at it. Kind of hard to see how this thing is going to be beaten, unless there happens to be some sort of override at the base. But then, they would never be that stupid, would they? Answers on a postcard please … what? Oh, f
uck off and ask your parents!
Okay, okay, they weren’t
that stupid. Hitler is on his merry way, intending to bomb “all non-Aryan countries” --- that would be all of them, then, including his beloved Germany --- and has had Busey put the flesh-eating virus (remember that? Yeah, they’re actually connecting the dots up here! This is almost proper writing. Well, I wouldn't go
that far...) into the bombs. Oh no, hold on: he’s returned in a “lifeboat” and is now chasing the remaining two scientists around the complex. Huh? He abandoned his spaceship to go back and deal with two of his enemies? Does that sound like der fuhrer we all know and love? Back on the ship, Norway Girl grabs a grenade and twists the cap. A chain reaction begins to tear the spaceship apart, but not before they can get off one ---
Doodlebug? Seriously? They’ve had seventy years to perfect their delivery system and they’re still using the old V1 rocket? Nobody thought of upgrading it?
Ok, wait what? No, it’s not a bomb, it’s an escape craft and the two heroes are in it? When did that happen? Oh I guess this is Hitler’s lifeboat, which he used to get back to the base and which they’ve now appropriated. It flies out of the --- what? The ship? Weren’t they supposed still to be on the base? Or were they on the spaceship all along? Ah, okay, now I think I get it. When the massive ship lifted off, it was basically most of the base, so everyone has in fact been running around on the spaceship. Really, Trollheart! When someone goes to all the trouble of writing such fine dram you should really try to keep up with the intricate plot! Right. I’m caught up now. So the hero and his girl have escaped from the exploding spaceship and have landed back on the ice, just as the behemoth topples down out of the sky. Perhaps not the best of moves?
Well, the spaceship crashes and sinks through the ice, and that’s the end of that, but old Hitler is not so easily done for, and he comes snarling out of the wreckage, bent on destruction. A fighter jet distracts him just long enough --- before being blown out of the sky --- for Moss to get on his back and inject the flesh-eating bacteria into his shell, which happily chews away his flesh and Hitler’s a goner, sinking dramatically through the ice and falling into the chasm.
Just to ensure there is no cliche left unused, Moss proposes to Paige and she smiles. “Where do you want to go for the honeymoon?” he asks. “Somewhere warm!” she quips. They seem mighty happy, considering all their colleagues and friends have died in particularly gruesome ways. Oh well, at least they're still alive, though their acting career may be on life support after this!
Well, they may have saved Hitler’s brain but not the brain of the writer of this trash. Funny in its absurdity, totally failing to be horrific even despite the small amounts of gore, factually up its arse and totally unbelievable with a ridiculous ending, it’s everything that makes it a candidate for derision and review in this dark cinema of the crappiest of the crap.
Questions?
Apart from the obvious --- who would write this garbage and why? --- there are several which raise their heads.
What role does Norway Girl play in the movie? She seems linked to Busey’s character, as if she’s working with him, but then she slips Moss a surgical scissors, which seems to have been noted and ends up with the three girls heading off to the showers, one to be gang-raped and presumably killed, one for experimental brain surgery, and she’s left alone, until Busey discovers she’s pregnant, whereupon he helps himself to the embryo’s stem cells, which I imagine kills her baby in the process. Then, later, she seems all sort of pally with Busey and when she grabs the grenade and he takes it from her (not sure who activates it but I think it might be her) they embrace just before the ship blows up. So, were they in it together, was there a relationship, was the baby his and did he regret his actions at the end? Seems unlikely at least for the last, since he’s grinning like an idiot and saying “Bomb them all!” Very confusing.
Speaking of bombing, what exactly was Hitler’s plan? He says to bomb all non-Aryan countries, but lunatic though he was, and not averse to the odd spot of genocide, Hitler had enough sense to know that you need to leave a living workforce to carry out your labours. If he infects the entire population of the Earth, who’s he gonna rule? The Fourth Reich will be a very sparse population indeed. And isn’t he going to need servicing, regular battery charges, oil and a tuneup, that sort of thing? Who’s going to do this if there’s nobody left alive? Maybe he means to bomb a few cities, show his enemies that, to quote the Borg, resistance is futile, and expect then that everyone will be his slaves? But of course he
is mad, so maybe he hasn’t thought that far ahead. Like the writer…
How did good ol’ Mark survive for as long as he did without any skin? Surely shock and trauma at the very least would have done for him? Yet it’s nearly the end of the movie before they come across him again and put him out of his misery. Could he really have lasted that long?
How did the sun manage to shine through all those layers of ice, and allow crops, to say nothing of trees and hills, to grow?
What is it with Mengele’s “explanation” of his death being misreported? He goes on about replacing body parts but is told that his bones have been conclusively identified, so how does that work? He tries to tells us that by replacing his endoskeleton (outer skin) this stopped the decay of his bones and any health problems, but that’s just ridiculous. You may as well say you can stop a car from seizing up by giving it a new coat of paint. The skin is just a shell; replacing it doesn’t stop any problems going on inside.
And how is it that if this massive research lab is here, deep under the ice, it’s manned only by Mengele, his zombie, Hitler in a box and a few drone soldiers? If this is to be the birthplace of the new Reich, don’t you think there’d be thousands, even millions of staff here? We’re supposed to believe that a few hundred --- or less --- built the staggering technological marvel we see take to the sky? Even in seventy years that’s far beyond belief without a massive army of technicians, engineers, scientists and all the backup crew.
And how have they been eating? Sure, they’re the next best thing to zombies but they can’t replace their body parts all the time. They must have to eat. And yet there are no visible sources of food. Perhaps they grow crops, but who harvests them? Don’t see no agricultural machinery, nor no slave labour force toiling in the fields!
Oh, and we still don’t know, even at the end of the movie, why those Nazis are wearing gas masks! Maybe the actors were just too ashamed for their faces to be seen. I wouldn’t blame them.
Not to mention that if we're to believe (oh dear God Trollheart, stop it!
Believe! If we're to
believe. You're killing me...) --- oh-kay. If we're to believe
within the context of the movie that Hitler has just been brought back to life just recently by the stem cells so generously donated by Norway Girl's baby, then why should he choose America as his first target? Why not go for the nemesis of his winter campaign and bomb Russia to hell? Would that not make more sense? And why go bombing the Falklands? What's there: a few thousand farmers and a bunch of sheep? Great way to start your world domination, mein fuhrer!
So that’s our feature presentation for this time around. Makes “Battle beyond the stars” look like “Star Wars”, don’t it? One thing is certain though: while there are some very good movies out there, there are some unbelievably bad ones, and I fear the latter outweigh the former by some considerable margin, which means we will never be short of chum to throw into these particularly dark and choppy waters as we sail on another voyage of decrepitude and into the very heart of this huge cemetery where bad movies go to die.
As the man says, we’ll be back!
And once again, may I repeat, there are no refunds. As a suitably crappy science-fiction anthology programme that really wishes it was “The Twilight Zone” but is nothing close once declared: