Zombies of War (2006)

Do you know what there's quite a lot of? Zombie Nazi's. They've become popular since 'Call of Duty: World at War' had the zombie mode which involved defending yourself from zombie Nazi's, what with recent films like 'Dead Snow (2009)', 'War of the Dead (2011)', 'Outpost (2008)', and 'Nazis at the Centre of the Earth (2012)'...apparently. There have been Nazi zombie films from long ago, like 'Zombie Lake (1981)' and 'Shock Waves (1977)', but it has been more popular in modern times.

Insert 'Zombies of War', known as 'Horrors of War' over in the US. Here a squadron of American soldiers go behind enemy lines to find a German scientist, but find themselves being hunted by something other than Nazi soldiers.

The plot...mmmmmeh. I would say it's good, but the problem is it feels like the film restarts multiple times, namely because the film changes its cast about every twenty minutes. And that also leads to a problem, namely you don't feel invested in the film because you don't really learn much about the characters.

Really, the only permanent character is Schmidt (Jon Osbeck), and even then you struggle to like or get to know him. The only other character, off the top of my head, I believe was Simpson (Chip Kocel), and whoever his supporter was, and that's only because they infuriated me so much, through their dialogue and their actions.

The acting meanwhile, was really bad. I mean, every single actor basically portrayed their characters in the same way, and this lead to not really knowing which character was which, even if you were paying attention. I suppose Osbeck was slightly better than the others, but, really, there isn't much to go on. The same can be said for lines of dialogue which are bad or have no point, one example being when the group of soldiers had a little argument on how to pronounce 'For Sale' in a French accent.

The effects, oh my God, the effects. In the very first shot of the film you can see how bad the effects are, especially for the CGI planes. Look at the photo, that's not a cutscene from a video game, that's a shot from a film. I mean, the Asylum do better effects than this! Not only that, but there are shots from a creature's (I'll come back to this in a second) point-of-view which is all stringy. Look, it did not work for 'Zombie Attack: Museum of the Dead', it isn't going to work here, basically for the same reasons; the audience can barely tell what's going on. And then there's the combat effects, where grenades give off a little smoke, cannons sound like a tennis ball machine.

Okay, I know I said that I would say that the plot is good, but, it isn't. Firstly, it drags out. Again I believe it's because we can't really connect with the film when it changes cast (It does this twice, so we have three main groups). There's that, but there's also another thing, there are hardly any zombies in this. There's an opening zombie, which disappears at the third minute, and then the next time we see a zombie is literally forty-nine minutes later, that's over half the film gone. In fact, for those forty-nine minutes, we are subjected to a pointless rape scene which is only in there to make us hate a character who will be killed off in ten minutes. And we also see that the squadron is being hunted (For the most part of those forty-nine minutes) by a werewolf.

Yes. A werewolf. I bet you didn't expect one of those to turn up in this did you? Well, two turn up in fact. And do you know how many zombies are in this film? Six. Six bloody zombies, and they don't even turn up at the same time, they come along one at a time, so the last half of the film ends up being 'zombie turns up, squadron kill it', rinse and repeat. Then again the squadron is stupid, because, despite knowing that these things are only killed by head shots, they continue to waste bullets by shooting the zombies everywhere else until they remember the head shot.

You know what? Let's take a look at the cover for this again.

Look how many zombie Nazi's are on there. There's an entire squadron of zombie Nazi's there! Hell, see that zombie Nazi Commandant at the top there? He doesn't turn up either. Nor at any point is this film set in a...a village let alone a town or a city. Wow, I didn't think I'd be able to steal a line from one of Spoony's reviews, but basically this entire cover is a lie. Apart from those planes, there were some of those. Then again apparently the UK distributor decided to zombify the cover/title, like I said in America it's called 'Horrors of War', and here's that cover.

So basically, the Nazi squadron look a bit less zombyish, so the non-zombie Nazi squadron that appears in the film counts for them, but we still don't go into a city, nor is Hitler in this film. The 'Horrors' part of the title though suits the fact that zombies and werewolves are in this.

You know what else? SPOILERS We see a fight take place between a zombie and a werewolf. And guess what? THE ZOMBIE WINS! How is that possible?! As much as I prefer zombies to werewolves, a werewolf should not be able to lose to a zombie!

Basically, this film is bad. Everything in it was bad, the acting, the effects, the story, everything. Really, it wouldn't be that bad, if the film wasn't so boring. That's the main problem with this, the film makes no effect to appeal to the audience, it drags on, it just isn't interesting. Still, at least it had a more coherent plot compared to 'Zombie Attack: Museum of the Dead', and the low budget gave it an excuse for the boring action scenes, unlike the multi-million pound budget 'Resident Evil: Retribution' had. Bottom line, this film is just dull, uninteresting, and bad.