Making plain the inherent relationship between “found-footage” horror films and first-person-shooter (FPS) videogames, Frankenstein’s Army so doggedly delivers World War II mutant mayhem in the style of Wolfenstein and Doom that it practically begs to be turned into a user-operated experience. Unfortunately, there’s no way to exert any control over these dully familiar proceedings, which purport to be the lost audio and video recordings of a Russian military squadron on a reconnaissance mission to find missing comrades in East Germany, who instead wind up hunted by the stitched-together creations of a Nazi-employed Dr. Frankenstein (Karel Roden).
The action’s shaky-cam conceit is familiar, and its aims for vérité realism—already undermined by the usual questions about why anyone is filming homicidal terrors rather than combating and/or fleeing them—are undercut by the fact that these Russians all speak in the heavily accented English generally reserved for cheeseball B-movies. Although director Richard Raaphorst handles his aesthetic stunt with reasonable aplomb from a technical standpoint, it remains a distracting device, exacerbated by the characters’ penchant for chastising the cameraman for his incessant recording. Those moments emphasize the phoniness of the central gimmick.
More frustrating still, when not calling attention to its own structure, Frankenstein’s Army repeatedly recalls its videogame ancestors via its legion of undead creatures, whom the Russian troops first encounter in the underground tunnels of a remote village where some sort of unholy massacre has taken place. In those confined corridors, the Russians are forced to fight monsters fashioned from the body parts of dead soldiers, who boast a variety of metal helmets, armored torsos full of robotic gears and protruding pipes, lobster claws and electric drills for weapons, and other assorted mecha elements that exude a distinct steampunk-by-way-of-Bioshock vibe.
But despite their unoriginal nature, these fiends have been beautifully designed, especially one gas-masked villain that moves around on spiral stilts and has enormous blades for arms. The nagging question, however, is why these beings have been built with such a focus on close-quarters lethality and almost no emphasis on speed—an issue that surfaces when the camera operator evades a horde of enemies by simply picking up the pace. It’s a sequence that again recalls FPS—specifically, those moments when running for safety becomes the sole option—while also highlighting the basic, nonsensical silliness of the supernatural action at hand.
At every turn, Frankenstein’s Army exhibits a preference for jolt scares and gore over actual suspense, which never materializes, thanks to a general indifference to plot and minimal interest in character. Constructed with far less inventiveness than their Nazi-monster adversaries, the featureless Russians elicit no empathy or concern for their well-being. Roden brings a gleeful insanity to his Mary Shelley-inspired mad scientist, cackling with deranged enthusiasm as he goes about his cyborg-corpse-hybridizing business. But even his motivations are ultimately revealed to stem not from any kinship with Hitler or his genocidal aims (or, really, any political agenda), but just from outright lunacy, one final example of the creative barrenness of this derivative genre mishmash.