Army of Frankensteins

Army of Frankensteins is a nice B horror film, shot in Oklahoma and recently released on DVD. Running time is 108 minutes, MAYBE a bit long but not really, as most films today, I've noticed, approach the two hour mark in length.

If you are a fan of Back to The Future, Night of the Living Dead, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, or maybe even another B offering from a few years ago, Bonnie and Clyde vs. Dracula, I am reasonably certain you will like this one. The story line is simple and far-fetched enough to be great fun: a young man and an even younger boy are thrown back into time 150 years, right into the thick of the American Civil War. To stretch credibility even further, an "army" of Frankenstein clones are produced to combat the "bad" monsters, all created by a greenish serum brought from the future. The goals of our heroes are to 1. Assist in helping the North win the Civil War 2. Make it safely home to the 21st century, and 3. Meet their ancestors. Do not assume any of this is necessarily in that order.

You do not a need a detailed critique of this film for several reasons, the main one being, this is a low budget B film and should be judged as such. It is grossly unfair to compare such a film to higher budget, Hollywood productions and I hate to see that when it happens, which is, sadly, pretty often. Also, I do not wish for you to know too much more about plot and story. As they say in show business, "Leave 'em wanting more," and so I shall. Instead, I offer comments and my impressions of what is a fun film to watch.

The young boy who played Igor, Christian Bellgardt, stole the show. I am certain his father, writer/director Ryan Bellgardt, did not plan for that, but what a nice surprise for both of them. Young Bellgardt has a future in acting, and I hope he stays interested enough to pursue it.

Oklahoma horror legend John "Count Gregore" Ferguson has a fairly small but important role as the mad scientist, Dr. Tanner Finski. Many years ago, Mr. Ferguson's career path took a turn towards Oklahoma, and here we see what might have been . . . if. John Ferguson could easily have been John Carradine, and it was good to him in a substantial screen role, one he handled very well.

The special effects were pretty good. I liked the occasional use of filtered lens for a rose tint look in spots, and Solomon's (portrayed by Rett Terrell) arm cannon was very enjoyable. The story was meaningful and poignant at times, campy and fun at other times. The beard on the villainous Confederate officer resembles a large piece of steel wool and the scene where the soldier caught a cannonball and threw it back the other way reminded me of an old Republic serial I viewed many years ago. Dialogue was embellished and over the top in a fun way in places, but the underlying theme of the entire story was the young boy Igor's loss of innocence for many reasons not of his own doing.

The story creators toyed around with what I will call, for lack of a better term, a combination alternate/revisionist history of facts pertaining to that era. You will have to view the film to see what I mean. All in all, they stayed true to history, within context of a fiction story.

I am hoping Mr. Bellgardt will add a director's commentary audio to future releases of the DVD.

You may learn more about this film on Facebook. Look for the Army of Frankensteins page.

The people who starred in this movie were obviously a troop of civil war reenactment actors. The most expense had to be the false mustaches and beards. These people should never be allowed in a theater or allowed within 50 feet of a camera ever again.

I needed someone to pull my eye out only 20 to 30 minutes into this slop. Can anyone explain why the mad scientist needed a living eyeball to complete his creation? The eyeball was the MacGuffin device! It was the only thing that drove the plot. Honestly, I was very concerned about that eyeball.

Every time someone said "Frankenstein" they acted like they didn't know what that meant. Yet Mary Shelly's novel was published 40 to 50 years prior to this event. Maybe no one had read it? Books were not that popular back then in 1864.

I never knew Frankenstein monsters are lighter than air, since the untethered balloon won't leave the ground until the monster is aboard. For some unknown reason, balloon rides with a former slave, now battlefield nurse, makes it cool you killed all those people because all along you just want to help. But when your Civil War balloon is shot down by World War 2 anti-aircraft fire, you are happy to have a lighter than air Frankenstein around.

The appearance of the video game character Megaman in this movie, was no surprise to me. At this point the drugs the writers were on clearly had taken effect. This reminds me, the writers should not be allowed near paper and pens, especially if the producers returned them to the asylum.

We couldn't end this travesty without yet more insult to history but to the iconic President Lincoln as well. I seem to recall Lincoln was shot after the war. Oh well, it didn't happen in this movie just as Hitler didn't eat a bullet in the bunker for "Inglourious Basterds". Let's make up some more history and have every child in America drooling at the TV.

Yes, there should be war crimes trials... for making this movie.

Within the first few minutes we can see the less stellar caliber of acting and production. Nearly everything is made for ironic purpose, either it's intentional or not. There's so much exaggerated premise and clumsy delivery, it's hard to take the movie seriously and even as parody it can barely register any response, aside from a few chuckles when the film delivers terribly out of place scenes where you can't help but slightly grin.

The plot is a jumbled mix or time travel and a bunch of sci-fi gimmicks, none of these really fascinate. Actors are often cringe-worthy in their performance, although the lead may be funny since he looks adequately like a normal guy. Characters are variety of unsuitable personalities with jarring costume and hairdo, or just simply over the top misinterpretation of the era. Even it plays with historic and scientific backdrop, the film has no accuracy in either aspect. I guess it's a tad optimistic to hope for those.

It will get worse towards latter half, if one can make it pass an hour of characters waddling on a random field and tons of gibberish. The effect is abysmal, literal green screen mess. It has slightly lengthier runtime than most movies but there's really not much it has to offer. You might find some amusement, but it's recommended to invest time elsewhere.

I'm not gonna waste your time with the standard review of how laughably bad this movie is, but the costume person should have done a better job with the facial hair, it's the funniest part of the movie.

This d-movie (or even lower in the alphabet if you actually think about the budget this had) is actually fun to watch. Because it knows what it is, and it makes fun of itself and that's a good thing. Take a politician for example, who looks at his portrait and says "This doesn't look like me" (I might be paraphrasing a bit here) - this is tipping your hat to the fact, that the actor actually doesn't quite look like the one he should be portraying and making light fun of that.

The whole time travel thing is muddled to say the least and character decisions sometimes feel forced to move the plot or make something happen that could've been avoided. But remember, this is just a very very low budget movie. Don't be too hard on it or just don't watch it