BEFORE: I know that I'm still behind on sleep, because in addition to falling asleep during scary movies, and sleeping on the plane both ways, it's just not enough. Now I have to write my blog posts very quickly, in between my post-work and pre-dinner nap and the point where I start my nightly movie that I'll probably fall asleep in the middle of. How many damn days does it take to catch up on the sleep I missed when I was on vacation? Jeez, it's like you start out with the best intentions, you go on vacation but then you miss sleep to catch your plane, you miss more sleep to get up and go to the State Fair, you miss sleep to go to Waffle House a few times, and now I need a week off to rest after taking five days off. Is it just me? It turns out I had the right idea this July and August, to just sleep in a lot instead of finding a two-month temporary job - but now I wish I could have somehow banked those sleep hours and used them now. That's not possible, right?
Bokeem Woodbine carries over again from "In the Shadow of the Moon". Let me write a quick wrap-up before I have to start another movie and fall asleep on the couch in the middle of it.
THE PLOT: A small group of American soldiers find horror behind enemy lines on the eve of D-Day.
AFTER: Hell, a Nazi zombie movie sounds like a GREAT idea. Surely there must have been one video game made over the years with this premise, right? Castle Wolfenstein, did that have zombies in it? No? Ah apparently this IS a THING in the video-game world, a couple of the "Call of Duty" games set during World War II used zombies in the enemy forces. Then there's also the "Zombie Army" trilogy, which is a separate set of games - there's no shortage of zombies in the game world, after all, there are an infinite number of them for you to kill.
But then maybe this movie didn't take the concept far ENOUGH, because I wanted to see a whole army full of NaZombies and it just. didn't. happen. There were a couple of Americans and one German soldier who got turned, and really, guys, come on, take it just a bit further, why don't you? This is a MOVIE, anything can happen, think more like "World War Z" with hundreds of zombies swarming and forming big pyramids together to climb over walls and stuff. But I guess they just didn't have the budget for it. It's a shame, because the title "World War Na-ZEE" was RIGHT THERE.
Thankfully, our U.S. soldiers, or at least four of them who collectively come from diverse ethnic and class backgrounds and who are the last surviving members of a planeful of soldiers that crashes, are right there on the spot in the occupied town of RandomVillage, France, which just HAPPENS to be the place where the Nazi scientists have created a serum that they believe will resurrect the dead German soldiers and then allow them to continue fighting for the Third Reich forever, because they can't be killed a second time. You may not believe this, but I have a screenplay to prove it - this was almost the plot of the proposed sequel to "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?", in which a bunch of the cartoon characters from the first film would have been drafted to fight in World War II because much like zombies, the toons can't die. Think about it, how many times have you seen Daffy Duck or Wile E. Coyote get blown up by TNT, and then in the next scene, they're totally fine? And it would have been called "Roger Rabbit 2: The Toon Platoon". I swear I am NOT making this up, for once.
Anyway, somehow the African-American U.S. soldier, who is somehow able to walk around in occupied France without standing out (there's got to be a NITPICK POINT in there somewhere...) manages to discover the underground lab where these unholy experiments are taking place, and while rescuing a U.S. soldier he finds there, he also grabs a very cartoon-like hypodermic needle full of the zombie serum. Gee, I wonder if that will be important later on... Then the woman who has agreed to hide the U.S. soldiers gets a visit from the Nazi Captain who visits her nightly (of course he demands sex from her to spare her life and her family's lives, that's just the sort of thing despicable Nazis would do...) but this also gives the U.S. soldiers a chance to take this Hauptsturmführer hostage to try to get intel from him. (What could POSSIBLY go wrong?)
The Nazis are also using the CHURCH of the town as their base, with the zombie lab in the church basement, while they go out and burn random villagers with flamethrowers. You know, just for fun and all that, because Nazis. Dead bodies from battles are brought by the truckload to the church so they can test out the zombie serum on them and resurrect the army they need to win the war. Oh, if only there were a ragtag group of ethnically diverse American soldiers nearby who could figure out what's going on, infiltrate the Nazi base and destroy the radio-jamming church tower AND the zombie lab from within...wait just a minute....
Of course, if anything like this ever came close to happening, you have to figure that the soldiers involved would deny anything, because the world is better off not knowing just how close the Nazis were to cracking that zombie code. But since they never really succeed at that, then the movie doesn't really come close to depicting something that could have been really visually cool, alas, it just wasn't meant to be, it seems. What a shame, I mean, whew, that was a close one but I think they pulled it off, no Na-Zombies in recorded history to date. And then D-Day went off without a hitch, and without turning into Z-Day.
Also starring Jovan Adepo (last seen in "Mother!"), Wyatt Russell (last seen in "Ingrid Goes West"), Pilou Asbaek (last seen in "Uncharted"), Mathilde Ollivier (last seen in "Boss Level"), John Magaro (last seen in "The Many Saints of Newark"), Iain de Caestecker (last seen in "Filth"), Jacob Anderson, Dominic Applewhite, Gianny Taufer, Joseph Quinn, Erich Redman (last seen in "Rush" (2013)), Mark McKenna (last seen in "Sing Street"), Hayley Carmichael (last seen in "Tale of Tales"), Mark Rissman, Meg Foster (last seen in "Leviathan"), Ben Tavassoli, Shubham Saraf, Andy Wareham, Nick Roeten, Patrick Brammall, Eva Magyar (last seen in "X-Men: First Class")
RATING: 5 out of 10 landmines
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