I found this for free, which is good, because I might have been annoyed if I spent actual money to watch it.
The Nazis set up an outpost in a small Rumanian town, and choose a big old castle the people maintain, but where no one stays the night. The Nazis, naturally, don't care abut such warnings. They are only months away from capturing Moscow, and so they're masters of the world. Yeah, about that. . .
A couple of the soldiers can't help themselves from trying to steal a cross they think is silver because it glows, and a cloud rips one of them in half. More soldiers die, the guy in charge asks to be able to move, and instead a bunch of SS guys show up. Which the movie tries to distinguish as being worse than the Wehrmacht, because the regular soldiers just traveled quietly through the village, but the SS guys immediately start pushing people around and killing "partisans", vowing to kill 5 for every Nazi that dies after.
Somehow the village still had people left by the end, even though the thing keeps killing Nazis and growing steadily more corporeal. The SS bring in a sickly professor (Ian McKellan) and his daughter to translate a warning, and the creature offers him his health if he'll remove a talisman. Which Scott Glenn and his weird contact lenses are not supposed to allow.
Most of the Nazi killing is alluded to rather than shown. Instead we get a lot of arguing between McKellan and the village priest, who seems to abruptly lose his mind part way through. Maybe he's picking up on the bargain McKellan made, but where's the compassion, the plea for McKellan to not sacrifice his humanity in a misguided pursuit of vengeance? Also a lot of arguing between the Wehrmacht captain and the SS commander. How the SS guy loves to talk about his courage as he and his ilk murder women and children. Oh, but the captain stood aside and let them murder those women and children, so what does all his compassionate talk count for?
Eh, maybe it's for the best. The more the creature kills, the more corporeal it becomes, and the stupider it looks. The early versions, where it's like a walking smoke machine that crackles with red lighting that outlines its limbs, that was pretty cool. Then it starts looking like a Power Ranger monster-of-the-week. There's actually a lot of smoke machines getting used in this thing. Between that and people running in slow-motion, it's like watching a music video. I don't know for which band. Maybe Meatloaf? Night Ranger? Some overdone Phil Collins song?
There was one shot that stuck with me, very early on. The Nazis just arrived and the camera watches the captain from behind as he strides up the bridge towards the keep. As he actually enters, the angle switches to a shot from directly above. But it's such a quick transition, and the way the captain's overcoat trails on either side, and almost glows in the light from outside, my first thought was the view hadn't changed and we were seeing some ethereal winged creature rising up from somewhere ahead of the captain. It took me a second to correctly interpret everything, but it was very cool while I was confused.
2 comments:
This one has a fascinating -- in the same sense that a car crash is "fascinating" -- production history. No one had decided what the main monster should look like, so it changed many times. The visual effects designer died during production and left behind no notes, so no one knew how the film was supposed to look. The ending required a lot of vfx, so that got changed.
Then the studio cut it to bits, from 210 minutes (!) to 96 minutes, so the end result is a bit choppy.
Then they cocked up the rights to the soundtrack, so the home releases have a different score to the original.
I've never seen the film, but I feel like it's entertained me enough with all the behind-the-scenes drama.
Wow, that is a lot. The movie being cut would explain the jump between the Wehrmacht guys showing up and breaking the seal, and then the SS guys show up and we're pretty much just told soldiers have been dying in droves. I was pretty surprised by that, because I figured we'd get to see more Nazi killin' straight off, but I guess that got cut.
It also seemed like the romance between Scott Glenn and McKellan's daughter was put on fast forward, so maybe they cut a bunch of that, too.
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