War of the Dead (2011)

In World War II, Finnish troops and American troops attempt to investigate a Nazi bunker that lies inside Germany.After spending some time with Wikipedia, I see that there was little historical support for the idea of American and Finnish troops to be operating together against the Germans. America was the ally of the Soviet Union. Finland had been fighting the Russians off and on for about 150 years. During most of World War II, the Finns were allied with the Nazis based in Norway and Germany against their longtime enemy, Russia.So, the setup of the film is nonsense.The 'action' scenes are boring or inept.As a zombie film (the bunker in Germany supposedly contained experiments to re-animate the dead), this is a bust. The main clue that a walking biped was a zombie was 'did we not already kill that one?' or words to that effect. A few zombies had glazed over eyes. The gloomy, heart wrenching threat one expects from the Zombie Apocalypse environment was absent.-----Scores-----Cinematography: 3/10 Dark. Poor camera angles. Colour palettes so reduced as to be only slightly different than greyscale.Sound: 4/10 Horrible accents. Background music was not an asset.Acting: 0/10 Terrible performances.Screenplay: 0/10 There was a screenplay? Where was the exposition of motivations? There was a lot of stilted dialog that generated confusion. The joint group just drifted from one disaster to the next. The film seemed more of an elimination derby of nameless characters that were impossible to care anything about.

Don't be fooled by the title or the plot summary, both of which are typical of many low-rent sci-fi and horror vehicles that populate the genre market. War of the Dead is a surprisingly effective low-budget thriller. Though not the first film to combine Nazis and zombies, War of the Dead is perhaps the most effective. Direction is taut and rarely succumbs to camp, and a genuine sense of dread overlays the picture from beginning to end. Character development is paramount, and while the acting isn't always great it is generally competent. Special effects aren't necessarily cutting edge, but they are good enough and the zombies are effectively realized and quite threatening. Indeed, these zombies are rather unconventional examples of the species, and exhibit a certain degree of intelligence to go along with their enhanced strength and resiliency. And unlike many zombies, the ones in War of the Dead are fast and there's none of the traditional "zombie shuffle." Of course this isn't a perfect movie--the aforementioned lack of funds does make everything a little rough around the edges, and like many films of its kind the director makes the mistake of shooting many of the action scenes in the dark so that it's sometimes hard to discern just what is going on. But overall War of the Dead is a fine production, and one that genre fans would be well-advised to check out.

This movie started out having a score of 5.9 and went down all the way to 4 sadly. Believe it or not, I did like it. The set up and the atmosphere are great. Acting is OK. And the movie has some good action scenes to keep the audience interested. And it's one of those ''Nazi zombie'' or ''War horror'' movies that I really love. But the downfall of this movie is it's story. I think this movie would have been much better if it had bigger work put into the story. Explain more about the experiments, show some flashbacks, etc. the one thing I didn't like was that the movie is VERY fast phased. You can see that movie does not leave out character development, but it's just not enough. Needs more character development and more dialogue and more suspense.the movie is not bad especially if you're a fan of the genre. 6/10

Giving this a ten because it deserves higher than 4 overall Non-stop action with good acting and a story that is believable and engaging, character developments shine brightly & you feel like you progress as a soldier with these characters as they uncover the infection/outbreak, it really quenches your thirst for soldier vs infected action and the threat level is so high that the characters barely get opportunities to rest which keeps the pace of the movie going throughout, excellently believable setting and wardrobe, and the unique infection compared to other films of the genre keep War of the Dead refreshing and interesting