RE:VIEW ~ “Nazis at the Center of the Earth” (2012)
A friend of mine once said “any great film has Nazis in it.” He cited as examples The Sound of Music, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Great Escape; wonderful pictures all.
It is unlikely he would ever call attention to Nazis at the Center of the Earth.
I am aware of the spelling error in the movie’s title, but it’s from the American production studio The Asylum. This is only the least in a list of problems I have with the film, so let’s try to ignore that shortcoming, shall we?
Aside from the phenomenon which was the Sharknado films, this may be the best-made film by the studio, which really is isn’t saying much. The production values are uneven, the plot more than a little dodgy, the dialogue tending towards drivel, and the acting of the variety which gets a muttered on-set reaction of ‘yeah, I guess that’ll do . . . we’ll fix it in editing.’
While it’s often that a production will use one location or lighting situation for another one — ‘Day for Night,’ say (you underexpose slightly and shift your colour timing into the blue range); or shooting in the GVRD Demonstration Forest north of Vancouver and claiming it’s a place in New Hampshire (The X-Files used that location for all sorts of places in the contiguous United States) — it’s understandable and you can suspend disbelief for the purposes of the story. But this film has the ground-breaking use of ’San Fernando Valley for Antarctic Cavern’ technique. The sky is replaced with something approaching a rock ceiling, but if you say to yourself wow, they’re replacing the sky with some rock graphics, then you know it’s not done well enough.
The sound, additionally, is a less-than-stellar at times. There’s a scene in which our heroes are kept trapped in a metal shipping container (or possibly just a big metal box dressed up by the Art Department to look like a big metal cell). Sadly, the place they shot and recorded the scene in was — you guessed it — a big metal box which included the ceiling and with nothing to mitigate the result of people speaking inside a metal box. The result is a sound quality which makes even the non-audiophile think what's up with the echo on this dialogue?
Speaking of the cell they were kept in, one of the people in the metal box has happened to bring a baseball with them, allowing for a fairly obvious reference to The Great Escape. Sadly, the ball isn’t elastic enough, or the wrong kind of baseball, or the actor wasn’t able to throw it hard enough, so it doesn’t have a decent return arc, making the homage a bit limp (and Steve McQueen would have had a fit seeing it).
The plot is the usual fanciful nonsense from a B-movie: a whole bunch of Nazis, including Dr Josef Mengele, have been hiding in this sub-antarctic cavern doing what they call ‘medical experiment’ on human subjects with little success, other than the removal of excess scientific interns from the populations of the world. The purpose of the experiments isn’t clear to me anymore (I watched this a couple of weeks ago), but it probably doesn’t matter. The longest-serving Antarctic Scientist — played by the surprising casting of Jake Busey — has become smitten with the ’progress’ the research is making, and has been helping by recruiting / kidnapping the scientists sent to the research station.
As for the dialogue, some of it is more than confusing. At one point, Mengele is examining a young woman who he is considering for a particular experiment. It turns out that not only does she have blue eyes and blonde hair, she speaks fluent German! Because she’s in Antarctica for scientific reasons, she’s also a cellular biologist with a PhD! This interests Herr Doctor Mengele considerably, who then examines the young woman more carefully; seemingly confirming she’s a doctor from examining her eyes, boobs, and hip diameter. There’s probably some sort of reason her physicality is important to him, but that line of dialogue wasn’t written or wasn’t included in the final edit, or something. As a result, we’re left seeing him cop a feel a number of times while he is considering her intellectual prowess.
The plot does have a point in it which I wish was more explored than it was. During the Holocaust innumerable individuals were used as subjects of experimentation in the interests of ’science.’ People today do not have a second thought about the source when hearing that ‘fatal exhaustion will be achieved in X time,’ or ‘death from exposure in the ocean is reached after Y minutes.’ The reason we know this is because of those people who died to create enough data points to arrive at the answer. That point is made in the picture that it is indefensible for the scientists to be repelled at the thought of the potential research being done on them, when they happily use the data collected during WWII. It’s fairly obvious that using the Nazi-collected findings hardly qualifies as consenting to their study methods; especially when one is in a position to stop the process. Being the one who will be experimented upon is an additional incentive.
There are a few predictable ghastly scenes of physical torture. A man is given an involuntary complete epididymectomy at one point, plus there is a heavily-implied (ie: off camera) gang rape of one of the scientists by three individuals. This is probably the harshest stuff I’ve seen from this studio. If you don’t like the sound of this, I urge you to avoid watching, because I’ve been fairly light-handed describing things you see in this picture.
That said, there are some semi-decent digital special effects, editing, and action to been seen here.
However, it’s not enough to make this worth your time.
Not entirely badly made, there are some redeeming technical values here, so I can’t make it a one-star. Consider this 1½ stars, I suppose.
★★☆☆☆
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