Director – Keith J. Crocker (The Bloody Ape)
Starring – Steve Montague (Bloody Christmas), Tatyana Kot (Witchmaster General), and Minerva Borack
Release Date – 2008
Rating .5/5
Tagline – “A new era of Nazi terror”
I am a fan of a wide range of horror and exploitation films but a sub-genre that I rarely venture into is Naziploitation. I watched a few of the Isla movies when I was in college and loved them but a few of the other films that I saw aside from the Ilsa films were not that good. Sometime ago Wild Eye sent me two films from director Keith J. Crocker.
The first film, The Bloody Ape, was a film I could easily say was one of the worst films I have ever seen. The other film Wild Eye sent me to review was the Naziploitation flick Blitzkrieg: Escape from Stalag 69. After seeing the quality of The Bloody Ape I had to put off seeing Blitzkrieg until I was in the mood for a bad film. Well, that time has come. I threw in the film and after four attempts to finish the film I was finally able to finish…which was a real accomplishment.
**Spoiler Alert**The film begins with two men sitting in a home reading when some men brandishing guns enter the home and kill the older man. The younger, bigger man leaps out the window and makes it to a church where he enters the confessional. He then confesses that he was in charge of a POW camp during World War II where he was a Nazi and ran experiments on the women until one they day they plan their escapes. Sadly, they are thwarted and tortured to death.**Spoiler Alert**
There is a reason I stay away from a few sub-genres and that is because they just don’t hold any interest for me. Nazi films have amazing artwork and the story always sounds fascinating but somewhere between filming and the final product the film loses everything it needs to be an entertaining film. I want to like these type of films but I can’t. Hell, who doesn’t want to see Nazi women torturing other nude women? Anyway, back to Blitzkrieg. The film felt like it was trying to be a war epic but on a micro-budget. It felt tossed together with no care and delivered with minimal editing. Yes, I do believe this film is worse than The Bloody Ape!
The acting in this one is horrible but it is horrible on purpose. That makes it hard to judge the acting but the horrible acting was done as a comedic effect and it did not work. The story for this one is one done in so many Naziploitation flicks. Prisoners are tortured, try to escape, only to be caught again and the hammer is dropped on them. This is old, however, this film is done with some humor while the originals were done in a serious tone setting this one apart from the rest. Sadly, the humor could not save this sinking ship of a film.
Finally, the film does have some torture scenes, as well as, a few deaths but the special effects are lackluster and they all fall short on the delivery. Overall, Blitzkrieg: Escape from Stalag 69 is not a film I can recommend unless you are a connoisseur of bad films. The film was made to be bad on purpose with the desired effect of being the opposite. Sadly, that failed and the film that tried to be bad is purely bad.
