Review: War of the Dead (2011)

Ah yes, what could be better than World War II soldiers fighting against zombies?  Well, if this movie is an example of said conflict, I vote anything.  War of the Dead, despite having the ominous “…of the Dead” tacked onto it, has nothing to do with the many movies put out by the zombie-master George Romero.  This one is a turkey of a film that never focuses on anything other than ludicrous action scenes topped with a thin slice of random slow-motion camerawork.

The general plot (if even it deserves that name) is that a group of Finnish and American soldiers have been sent out to investigate some strange goings-ons at the Finnish-Soviet border.  There, they face off against a squad of Soviet soldiers and a bunch of people get shot and killed. But, those dead soldiers begin to return to life, albeit in a less human state than previous.  These creatures are mostly zombie-like, although they’re quick and seem to prefer brawling to biting.

From this point, the movie progresses through a basic pattern.  We get, from beginning to end, soldiers vs. soldiers in the forest, soldiers vs. zombies in the forest, soldiers vs. zombies in a house, then more of the same in another house and, eventually, a bunker.  We also get, for some WTF reason, the leader of the soldier squad coming back as some sort of uber-zombie that knows how to brawl and pursues the survivors all the way to the bunker.

Okay, so that’s most of the movie.  But why are there zombies and what’s going on?  Well, it turns out the Nazis once used the area for experiments in bringing people back to life.  They created something awful and then burnt it.  The squad is really there to find this bunker (for reasons unknown to us).  But the evil of zombie-ness is not connected to the serum that the Nazi’s invented, because everyone who dies rises.  Why is this?  I’m guessing it’s supposed to be the soldiers stumbled on the burnt remains of the previous experiments, but the movie doesn't really bother to explain too well.  Or explain much of anything for that matter.

Even for a horror flick, this one is a pile of crap.  Honestly, I have no idea how it even made a 42 percent at Rotten Tomatoes.  The dialogue is predictably painful, the action scenes are done in darkness with the shakiest camerawork you can imagine and all character motivation seems to have been determined by the flip of a coin.  Oh, here’s the best part - this straight-to-DVD mess ends with a set-up for a sequel.  Good luck with that, guys.

Unless you have an uncontrollable mental problem that physically makes you watch zombie films, avoid War of the Dead.  I’ve had better times passing kidney stones.

War of the Dead poster courtesy of beyondhollywood.com