Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Things That Went Through My Poor Head While Watching Nazis At The Center Of The Earth (2012)

Before we come to the fun and games (which will turn out not to be all that fun and game-y), one preliminary thought: while I have no problem (except that their films suck) with The Asylum sponging off large Hollywood productions, it's quite a different thing for them to try and capitalize on a quirky low budget production like Iron Sky. Where the former has a certain rogue-ish charm, the latter leaves me with an even lower opinion of the production house than I already had. And don't even get me started about how low my opinion was after watching this piece of shit.

  • Oh Cthulhu please eat me now, this has the same "writer" as tA's Sherlock Holmes!
  • Wurzberg, Germany? Did a metal band attack tA's offices (also known as the toilet of Dave's Bar 'n' Grille), steal the umlaut, and turn a castle into a mountain?
  • The single digital tank of the US army attacks!
  • Look, I've got a sense of humour about these things, but did they really have to use fucking Mengele here? [oh, how hopeful and innocent I was here when I didn't know what would be coming. -cynical ed.]
  • Antarctica is the new frontier for medical research!
  • Nazi gasmasks come with their own Darth Vader voice sound.
  • "What is this?" - "Vibrio vulnificus." - "I know what it is. I wanna know what it's doing here?". Ladies and gents, meet our hero.
  • Even today, all people with German last names are evil.
  • Ah, good old tA CGI; ignoring sizes and proportions of things so that they are smaller on the inside than on the outside. This snow vehicle thing is like the anti-TARDIS.
  • An incision along the hairline is enough to then cleanly rip off a person's facial skin. Too bad nobody ever taught that trick to Leatherface.
  • Secret Nazi base security may be so bad prisoners can just stroll out of their cells, but at least they have a room reserved for corpses and body parts.
  • Now new at Disney World: centre of the Earth entrance ice slide!
  • Answering a short monologue about Antarctica crackpot theories with "I'm sorry, how do you know all this?" clearly demonstrates the Internet doesn't exist on planet tA.
  • What's the first thing the Nazis built at the centre of the Earth? A warehouse, of course.
  • Does Mengele's evil genius monologue ever end?
  • Apparently not.
  • Dear piece of crap movie, please don't pretend to have something to say.
  • As a Nazi collaborator, you only get the absolute uniform dregs.
  • Oh gawd, Mengele's doing another very…slow…monologue. I know the guy is old, but can't he just shut up?
  • Really, a suspense scene based on "are these really showers or gas chambers?" with lots of crying in slow-motion? Don't worry, though, it's just the rape room. Classy like an Ilsa movie, this is.
  • Pro tip for b-movie Nazis: if you're so desperate to get help from the scientists you kidnapped, it's probably a good idea not to murder and rape them before they are through with their work. Unless your writer suddenly decides the whole needing scientific help angle bores him. Of course, then there was not much reason for you to kidnap the scientists at all except as skin providers, and the film's plot doesn't work anymore, but hey, you are in a tA movie.
  • You know, I generally don't have problems with movies being nasty, but this one's nasty, dumb, and way too smug about itself to get anything but derision from me.
  • Of course the woman who complains about nausea is pregnant; it's a movie after all.
  • And now comes the abortion scene. If you go into this one, expect less a rip-off of Iron Sky and more of an extended homage to the nazisploitation genre.
  • It's also totally tone deaf: you can't follow a non-consensual abortion with CGI Robo-Hitler. It's as if the film was written by two people - one going for a fun, gory pulp movie with Robo-Hitler, the other one somebody who thinks making references to Auschwitz is funny and should be punched in the face.
  • Robo-Hitler has a very non-Germanic accent. Just sayin'.
  • "Jetzt herunter!" does not mean "Take it down!", by the way, but rather "Down now!". Robo-Hitler confuses flying saucers and dogs.
  • This long, long sequence of people running through corridors nearly makes me wish for the film to turn nasty again. But only nearly.
  • Ironically, on a technical level, this just may be the best tA production I've seen; at least direction, practical effects and editing are competent for most of the time. CGI and acting still suck like a hoover, though. And I think I've already made quite clear what I think of the script.
  • "Come on you bubble-headed Nazi son of a bitch!"

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