Wednesday 5 September 2012

Review: Battlefield Death Tales (2012)



First I´d like to thank James Eaves for providing me with a DVD-screener.
3 interlocking stories from the dark days of World War 2. A soldier on a suicide mission.  A supernatural investigator on her most dangerous assignment yet. A troubled family with a monster in their bomb shelter. Battlefield Death Tales is written and directed by James Eaves, Pat Higgins and Alan Ronald. The first story is Medal Of Horror and is written and directed by James Eaves. The acting is pretty bad. The camerawork and editing is decent but the battlescene is just silly, frankly it looks like shit... If you´re gonna try to pull something like that off you need to be aware of your limitations even if you are ambitious. I know several independent flicks that has managed to create quite good world war 2 scenes (often with the help of willing reenactors). The weird and eccentric fightscene (small spoiler) between the german and the japanese zombie is ridiculous, overlong and actually made me think of pressing the fastforward button on my blu-ray player. Some cool ideas but a big disappointment as it´s overlong and incoherent.
The second story, Harriet's War is written and directed by Alan Ronald. The acting is pretty bad with one or two exceptions one of which is Lara Lemon as paranormal investigator Harriet Price. The camerawork and editing is pretty decent. There´s no creepiness init but what works in the second story is the concept and the steampunk gadgets which are pretty nice.
The third story, Devils of the Blitz, is written and directed by Pat Higgins. Yet again the acting is pretty bad. The camerawork and editing is decent and the scenes supposedly taking place in the warzone are really bad and cheaply made. The story is confusing but there are some nice ideas to found in it. Battlefield Death Tales is a big letdown in the gore department as there´s only brief gore and it looks very cheaply made. The monster make-up fx design in the third and final story, Devils of the Blitz, is.. well let me put it this way. I think that they bought a rubber puppet monster and it looks like mediocre to say the least.. In the T & A department there isn´t much to report...
Battlefield Death Tales is also known as Nazi Zombie Death Tales but in my opinion that the title is missleading, this isn´t zombie flick but this is the distributors fault no blame should be placed on the filmmakers..
This review is based upon a DVD-screener supplied by James Eaves.
Rating: 1 out of 7. After Bordello Death Tales of the same directors I had some expectations that the filmmakers would have improved craftmanship between the two movies but while Bordello Death Tales actually had two short stories that were pretty good this anthology only has one and that´s Harriet's War which is the best of the three stories.

/JL



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