War of the Dead

Considering the nearly limitless opportunities for pulpy action and rootin' tootin' violence, it's a wonder the pantheon of zombie Nazi movies isn't more robust. The campy German gore fest Dead Snow ("Ein, Zwei, Die!") struck a lot of the right genre chords in 2009. But in War of the Dead, the tone is strictly serious as an evil dead army of swastika-bearing soldiers rise up hungry for allied flesh. The setting is the Finnish-Russian border in 1941, where a ragtag team of American and Finnish soldiers are on a covert mission to take out a German bunker. After a creepy prologue that shows what they're going up against, the body count rises quickly when the enemy lashes out in savage attacks that hit the commandos hard. In very short order, the only ones left are the American captain and a Finnish sidekick, with the rest blown away by machine gun or laid low–at least temporarily–by the as-yet unidentified zombies. The pair reaches the bunker, where they discover a Russian soldier who has survived a previous battle. It's a little tricky because this early in the war the Russians are still associated as the enemy. But survival instincts prove to be stronger than geopolitical lines after the truth about the real enemy emerges. The prologue is perhaps the movie's high point in conveying dread by hinting at what was going on in the bunker: depraved Nazi doctors conducting experiments to create immortal supersoldiers. Now the underground bunker is deserted and the lone humans discover that those seemingly death-proof Nazis are the flesh-hungry creation of science gone horribly wrong. The battle to survive (war of the dead?) plays out in a fairly conventional war-movie fashion in spite of the fact that it's humans vs. zombies. These undead are of the fast-moving species, not the lumbering, "brains!"-muttering other kind, so the action is kept at a fairly fast clip. The same goes for the bedlam, except when things slow down for talk that the script and spare plot can't really support. A lot of the action takes place in murky dark, though the craftsmanship by the Finnish production team is good enough to offset lapses in the material. War of the Dead isn't campy and it's not really all that scary. It is a solid zombie shoot-'em-up that has enough war-movie clichés to make it click in two genres. It also ends with the suggestion that there could be more to come in the cinematic oeuvre of flesh-eating undead in Nazi uniforms, and that's a very good thing. –Ted Fry