Red Rose of Normandy

As a WWII reenactor and history enthusiast, I tend to be rather harsh on movies, but in this case I think a low rating is justifiable. I can appreciate Mr. Struckmann's enthusiasm for working with reenactors in film, but it is simply not working out for him. He seems to bite off more than he can chew in this movie, given his roles as lead actor, producer, executive producer, director, and writer. The plot was barely discernible, and even though I did sit through the whole movie, I'm still not exactly sure what happened. Perhaps if Tino decided to stick with one role, be it acting, directing, or whatever, and practiced it a great deal, then he might have more success. In addition to the flaws with the story, the historical inaccuracies are so glaring that they seriously made me contemplate shooting my television. Many of the "top of the line" troops are overweight and middle-aged, and the wide variety of individual reenactors with different impressions means that you have many people with different gear congregating where they shouldn't be (E.G. Heer, SS, Fallschirmjäger, and Luftwaffe troops guarding a Gestapo prison). While I appreciate that working with reenactors allows the movie access to plenty of period vehicles, weapons, and pieces of equipment for a minuscule price, it doesn't make the movie very convincing at all thanks to their often unprofessional appearance and actions. Overall, I can appreciate the amount of work put in my Mr. Struckmann, but I think that this movie spends too much time trying to be an epic with hundreds of troops on screen and not enough working out the many kinks in the story to be worth more than a laugh.

The jacket is by far the most interesting part of this movie and it isn't the worst movie of all time it certainly is in contention. At first I thought it might be a foreign film with dubbed in subtitles. Then I thought it was, perhaps, a Russian propaganda movie made to glorify the Russian military. My final conclusion, just before it was ejected from the DVD tray was that it was a high school movie class's final project. But even then it would have to improve. The director,producer and all the actors should be sued for malpractice! The acting is beyond stiff. The photography is dreadful with out of focus scenes and the script was awful. All in all it is a stinker and there's nothing good to be said about it.

I saw this movie last night- the title changed to "Normandy"- I can honestly say this is by FAR the worst movie I have EVER seen- war, or otherwise- it's one of those where you stay with it, because you believe in NO WAY could it get ANY worse, and then it DOES- The D-Day invasion was so pathetic- two landing crafts, and nine soldiers... and somehow, they manage to take over the entire Wehrmacht...

OK, I understand they were working with an extremely limited budget, and the majority of actors donated all of their time, as well as costumes, vehicles, arms, etc. But even with that taken into consideration, this movie makes "Abraham Lincoln vs Zombies" look like an Academy Award winner...

This is my first movie review. I have seen just about every WWII movie available. Most balance the action and underlying plot fairly well. The sub plot on this one was a romance between a German officer and his long time girlfriend. The acting was worse than a bad high school play. The majority of infantrymen looked mostly over 60 years old with a few in their twenties thrown in for realism? Being a small arms collector of that era, they did get that part fairly accurately..hence my one point rating. Obviously this was a low budget film since most of the armored vehicles were filmed from other angles to give the illusion of greater numbers. Most of the war flicks from the 50's outshine this one. Don't waste your time or money.

I rarely do reviews, since I don't like to harm a movie, as generally there is something, somewhere that makes it have at least some minuscule quality to it, but I can honestly say that I have found a movie that has none. Nothing. Nunca. Niet. Zero. I am sure they had a small budget, but at what point do you need to say, "Hey. We have no money. Maybe we should re-evaluate even doing a movie, rather than risk turning out a piece of junk, and damaging our reputation so severely, that no one will ever give us any funding to ever do this again."?

Oh, wait a minute. There was a V W beetle painted in camouflage, and I like V W beetles. There. Now I feel justified in giving it a "one".