War of the Dead

I read the reviews after I'd picked this up and held little hope for it, Apart from the Dead Snow films I find Nazi Zombie flicks usually leave a lot to be desired (Still get suckered in by them tho').

There have been lots of 'Not historically Accurate' on here...But it's a Zombie film....erm...Last time I checked Zombies are fictional...

It held my attention (not always easy) and on as a pure 'Popcorn' film It's rather fun. If you want an hour and a half of undemanding entertainment it's worth a shot.

The audio (Dialogue) was low...I put subtitles on to make sure I didn't miss anything (Not that the Dialogue told you anything!) The film looks great colour wise too.

I watched the UK premier of this title at Fright fest Scotland.

It's your basic mystery story at the start. Bad things are happening behind enemy lines. What is the cause, well with a title like War of the Dead it is easy to say its Zombies.

What I liked about this movie was that it told the same old story of dodgy dealings behind enemy lines. It does it pretty good.

The effects whilst good are below par. The movie itself looks like its a low to medium budget movie.

This is not top of the class but it is good fun for what it is.Its better than zombies of war and Armageddon of the dead.

I found "War of the Dead" by sheer coincidence. I had never heard about it prior to accidentally stumbling on it. And the cover of the DVD made me pick it up and give it a go, as I do enjoy zombie movies. And zombie Nazis, well it just doesn't get any better!

Now, I will say that "War of the Dead" is unlike most other zombie movies that I have seen in my life. It has that whole "Band of Brother" / "Saving Private Ryan" feel to it, with the impressions that you are right there in the action with the soldiers. I liked that about the movie, because it is a cool thing. And taking place during World War II, but with zombies running around, well that is just an interesting concept. Sure it is used in other movies, such as "Outpost" and "Død Snø" ("Dead Snow") for example, but still it worked out quite well in "War of the Dead".

One thing did puzzle me, and that was why Americans were there helping out the Finnish soldiers. That just didn't strike me as very plausible. But hey, it is just a fictional movie. Moving on, some of the accents throughout the movie were also a bit on the less impressive side.

Effect-wise, then I found "War of the Dead" to be quite good. The movie had a heap of action with guns and explosions. But for a zombie movie, then the gore and actual mayhem caused by the zombies was a bit tame. Especially because the zombies were agile and running around, a feature in zombie movies that I am not a fan of. (Yeah, I am a Romero-zombie fan to the very core!) And also the zombies seemed to be capable of some brain activity, as they were able to do intricate fighting and blocking in brawling. And when the zombies jumped down from those tall trees, then I was ready to find something else to watch (but I didn't, I gave "War of the Dead" a fair chance). What was that all about? So now zombies climb 10-15 meters up into trees to hide and ambush those coming past? That was just too ridiculous.

The feeling of the atmosphere in the movie was really one of the better things that was working to pull the movie up. Because it was a great mixture of "Band of Brothers" but mixed with the gritty places and narrow corridors that you had in the first two original "Resident Evil" games. And that worked out so well, because it really put on a brooding sense of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I think that the people they had put in the movie in the various roles were actually doing good jobs with their roles. And it was refreshing to see a movie with no familiar faces popping up. The one who put on the most impressive and memorable performance in the movie was Samuel Vauramo (playing Kolya).

As for a zombie movie, then don't expect the classical Romero type zombies in the movie, and don't except to see a lot of gore and mayhem, and don't expect to see any real decomposition in the animated corpses either. So if you put these expectations aside, then "War of the Dead" is actually a good, wholesome entertaining movie from Finnish director Marko Mäkilaakso.

A platoon of American and Finnish soldiers is driven deep into a Russian forest where its Captain discovers a terrifying secret.

When produced in 2007, this was the most expensive film ever made in Lithuania. What does that mean? Since I do not know how many films are produced in Lithuania, and I have no idea what the budget was, it is hard to say. The budget must have been at least as much as Uwe Boll spends, though, because it looks like one of his movies.

Not that this is a bad film, but it is more action than horror. So if you like movies where guys shoot at each other for 80 minutes, you might dig this. If you would rather see horror with ghosts or chainsaws, this is not going to be your cup of tea.

Personally, I lost interest in it really quickly.

The plot: American and Finnish troops run up against Nazi zombies during World War II.

This was not an absolutely terrible movie, but it was still pretty annoyingly bad. The characters were basically interchangeable, and it was even worse during the action sequences, because they were shot so poorly that I couldn't even tell who was fighting whom. Unfortunately, the movie feels like a meth addict did all the camera work and editing. The plot and dialogue are about as bad as you're expecting, but the SFX are far more disappointing. Nobody really expects good plot or dialogue from their direct-to-video, low budget zombie movies -- especially when they're rated this low -- but they do tend to expect a certain minimum level of gore. However, thanks to the horrible camera work and editing, you can't really see much of the SFX or make-up anyway. There just wasn't enough story to stretch this out to feature length, necessitating lots of terrible action scenes. This really should have been edited down to the best few scenes, with a little bit of setup, and uploaded to YouTube.

Recommended only to people who like mindless action movies.