Review by Nia Edwards-Behi
I wanted to like War of the Dead. I really did. The film even got me on its side right from the off-set, where the historical(ish) basis for the film is written on the screen, followed by the words ‘this much is true.’ How droll, I thought. How knowing! Alas that the film did not live up to this brief shining moment of promise.
Basically, the film is about Nazi zombies. Sold! The film even places these Nazi zombies in a very specific historical and cultural moment – an elite squad of American and Finnish soldiers attack a Nazi bunker in Soviet territory, and the men they kill come back to life. These zombies are the result of Nazi genetic experimentation, and as a result they’re also those fast, modern buggers that everyone argues about. Zombie pendantry aside, the film attempts to be somewhat serious in its depiction of the conflict and the, er, zombies, and really, that’s where its biggest flaw lies.
The film just doesn’t convince, either in its historicity or its horror. A great deal of the film’s run time is taken up with small-scale battles between the American and Finnish group of soldiers and the Soviet forces. Unfortunately, they just don’t make me believe in what I’m seeing on screen. Although the location shooting in Lithuania offers some wonderful landscapes, the battle sequences never really feel like they fit in with this naturalistic environment, and always therefore come across as blokes playing war in a field. This isn’t helped at all by the incredibly weak acting, which I can only attribute to the various cast members either acting in a second language, or putting on terrible accents, compounded by painfully on the nose dialogue. This probably shouldn’t really matter in a Nazi zombie film, but because the film seems to strive for such a serious tone, it’s quite jarring.
That the film also features three of my biggest pet peeves probably didn’t help, the first being CGI blood. It looks stupid. It’s not impressive. It doesn’t even look like gore, it looks like pixels. It achieves nothing. At this stage I actually feel that the most effective way of enunciating my feelings about CGI blood misuse would be to smash my face against the keyboard in a futile fit of rage, but I fear I may break my glasses. Second pet peeve is the god awful, incessant music used throughout. Think bland, movie-score strings, and that is the soundtrack to every single second of this film. There are moments in the film when the strings swell in some sort of emotional high-point, and all it did was confuse me because I wasn’t aware I was supposed to be feeling anything at that point of the film, which smacks of lazy scoring and lazy plotting. Perhaps my biggest personal annoyance with the film was the tokenest of all token girls. Introduced half way through the film, as the girlfriend of a friendly Soviet, her sole purpose is to be a bit scared for a while, before dying at the hands of her boyfriend after being attacked by a zombie, presumably in a bid to add ‘emotional’ ‘depth’ to the film. You know what? No. Just…stop that. Don’t randomly put a girl in the film if that’s all you’re going to do with her.
I’d say more about how the film progressed, but the film completely lost me two thirds in, to the point that when it ended, I literally have no idea what happened. As far as I can tell it didn’t really even have an ending, but I suspect that it might just have seemed that way because my mind had wondered. Poor form, I realise, but there was not a single thread to hold on to that would sustain my interest in the film – not humour, not talent, not plotline, not even Nazi zombies.
War of the Dead is released to Region 2 DVD on 28th May, from Momentum Pictures.