Outpost (2008)

There has never been a more vile and vicious villain in the movies, or real life, than the Nazis. The Bunker meets Shock Waves meets Dog Soldiers as a team of mercenaries search for WW2 German technology in an old bunker. Inside they find a strange, deranged survivor, and then find themselves fighting for their lives as the results of the experiments reappear. This is a tense, suspenseful, violent film that has, thankfully, a satisfying ending.

Nazi zombies or zombie Nazis, either makes for great viewing.

Shock Waves (1977)

My love for zombie Nazis in movies is well known, at least it is by those that know me. Outpost and Dead Snow are recent, wonderful films using them as villains, but the idea started back in the seventies in Shock Waves.

You should realise you are in trouble when the captain of your boat is John Carradine, but that doesn’t deter the heroes/victims of Shockwaves from their adventure. The young cast (including Brooke Adams who would later star in The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and Dead Zone) find themselves stranded on an island, its only (living) inhabitant is Peter Cushing (a former SS Officer). Being on an island with no one but a thin, bedraggled Peter Cushing should be another warning that things aren’t right, but no one is suspicious until dead bodies appear, and then Nazi zombies (who “are neither dead or alive, but somewhere in between”) rise out of the water. Cushing is a former SS officer and the zombies are his former troops, engineered to not need oxygen so they could stay on U Boats for an indefinite period.

Like all movies of the seventies, it seems slow by today’s standards, and the low budget means there aren’t many Nazis or much action, but it has the atmosphere and ideas that so many other films lack. It’s a classic. Director Ken Wiederhorn would later write and direct more zombies in Return Of The Living Dead 2.

Mister J's Top 5 of 2009

Well, another year is almost over... so without further ado, here's my top 5 for the year...

5. Dead Snow - Sam Raimi meets sensible Scandinavian knitwear. Subtitles for the "arty" crowd, and Nazi zombies fighting guys with chainsaws and axes for the less discerning amongst us. Remember, If you are in the mountains of Norway and you find a box of WW2 German trinkets and gold, don't touch them, otherwise zombie Nazis will hunt you down and kill you.

4. Movies on the Sci-Fi Channel - They all are so wonderful, it's hard to pick a favourite, but I'd imagine Aztec Rex ( which stars Steve Sanders from Beverley Hills 90210 as the Spanish explorer Cortez arriving in Mexico to find the locals worshiping a t-rex from their badly designed 3 foot-tall concrete altars ) is going to be hard to top.

3. New Zealand's Next Top Model - It may be the accents ( and the "butchinuss" ), it may be the low budgets ( I think African nations have Top Model shows with higher budgets ), it may be the hosts ( who appear the only people in the NZ fashion world who actually do NO work )... but watching these girls, fresh off the farm, mangling vowels, and bitching about their jandals fast became this years guilty pleasure.

2. Hulk Hogan's press conference - The press conference for Hulk Hogan's Australian tour was a thing of media manipulation and beauty. Hogan and his adversary face off, with Ric Flair belittling and bloodying the elephantine Hogan. The media goes into a frenzy covering it, giving it much time and space, as they try to wittily doubt its believability. Unfortunately, Hogan himself dampens the mood for us all by later saying that he hadn't meant to fall off the stage, and how much that hurt... condemning all of us who had the tickets to the show, with the knowledge, he wasn't leaving his feet again ( even for a crap ) for the remainder of his stay in the country.

1. Amy Winehouse and her breast augmentation - There are many things in this world Amy Winehouse did not need more of this year... alcohol, drugs, hair, controversy... boobs... but, like the trooper she is, in 2009, the divine Miss W decided to have more of all of these things anyway. Don't you just love her??

Dead Snow (aka Dod sno) (2009)

High in the mountains, a group of medical students head to a cabin for a relaxing vacation. It’s not so relaxing when zombie Nazi’s (not to be confused with Nazi zombies – Nazi’s turned in to zombies not zombies turning Nazi) turn up and start slaughtering them.

This Norwegian movie starts of with some jokes about American horror movies before adding its own twist on the zombie genre and playing out well right to the end. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, there is no better villain than Germany’s Nazis (except maybe the Vatican) and it is even better when they are undead. Another quality European horror film (Dog Soldiers, Outpost, etc) putting the Americans to shame.

This just in from Mister J -
Just watched "Dead Snow". Subtitles for the "arty" crowd, and Nazi zombies fighting guys with chainsaws and axes for the less discerning amongst us.

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Quentin Tarentino gives us his take on World War 2. This includes Brad Pitt leading the Basterds (a group of soldiers who lurk around France scarring, killing, and scalping Nazis), Christoph Waltz as the Jew Hunter (a German with a talent for finding Jews), and Mélanie Laurent as a Jew on the run (and hiding in plain sight). The characters come together as plots to kill Hitler unfold.

Inglourious Basterds has a good plot, good characters, and a good ending, but it suffers from Tarentino’s usual problem, his dialogue. The script is full of conversations that are long and not as clever as Tarentino thinks. Basterds is a very long two and half hours, rather than the punchy one and a half hours it should be.

The Unborn (2009)

Odette Yustman (Cloverfield, Transformers) is having visions of an evil looking child and the message “Jumby wants to be born now”. Our tortured heroine goes looking for answers and her grandmother tells her of a Jewish legend and of the nefarious Nazis and their experiments on twins. Odette then seeks the help of Gary Oldman (The Dark Knight, The Fifth Element) who is a rabbi with a horn for exorcism.

Jewish folklore and Nazi experimentation deserve better than this unimaginative, unexciting, illogical expedition in to the supernatural. The only positive is the hotness of Odette, and the filmmakers must realise this because they keep showing her in her underwear in an attempt to distract us from the banality of the film. It’s not enough.