A quick warning for anyone who hastily selected this title from an algorithm thinking that someone had gone and made a feature-length film based on Rob Zombie’s fake trailer from Grindhouse. That’s She-Wolves Of The SS, genius, and your mistake just cost you 90 minutes of your life that you’ll never get back. To be fair, I don’t think anyone’s actually dumb enough to make that error, but similarly, anyone who gravitates to this film assuming that the flashy title promises neo-grindhouse thrills is going to be profoundly pissed off at the lack of anything resembling fun – or even professionalism – that resides here.
The one responsible is Andrew Jones, the prolific, British-based overachiever who’s responsible for – among other things – unloading five films worth of killer doll movies under the radar thanks to the barely known Robert franchise. However, when not ripping off various doll-based movies, it seems that Jones is a sizable fan of Inglorious Basterds and whose only criticism of Tarantino’s film is that doesn’t contain nearly enough werewolves in it. Well guess what, neither does Jones’…
As World War II continues to rage, both sides seem eager to get a leg up by employing rather radical means. Under orders of the Fuhrer himself, Doctor Josef Mengele is experimenting with creating a super soldiers by introducing animal DNA into any hapless “volunteer” he selects from the death camp where he’s made his base of operations. Oddly, he’s opted for lupine genetics, but if he creates a werewolf, doesn’t that mean they could only fight three nights for every month? Anyway, further pressure is placed on Mengele when his spouse, Ilsa Koch, not only proves to be a little heavy handed with the prisoners, but ends up having an affair with one of the guards.
While this sounds weirdly like the film is treating the comings and goings of a Nazi concentration camp as a soap opera (with werewolves), a more standard war movie plot is abound with a quartet of disgraced military prisoners managing to escape their captors and go on a cross country, Nazi killing trip. Leading the excursion is “Mad Dog” Murphy and he’s flanked by the similarly imposing figures of Billy “The Butcher”, “Fighting Joe” Kane and “Reckless” Reggie Brown who all have issues with authority. But if there’s one thing they hate more than authority, it’s Nazis and after stumbling upon Mengele’s deranged experiments, they figure that werewolves or not, they’d better bring this operation down toute sweet.
However, while Mengele has to contend with a quartet of American maniacs shooting the place up, he also has to deal with the ramifications of his wife discovering that he’s transformed her boy-toy into a hairy-faced monster. Looks like Hitler’s going to have to wait a bit longer for those lupine shock troopers he’s got on back order…
The concept of the Nazi werewolf – or the notion of the Third Reich dabbling in any monster movie ethics for that matter – isn’t exactly new. The sight of SS wolf troopers tearing up a 1980s Jewish household in the frenzied dream sequence during An American Werewolf In London proved to be an incredibly potent image and it’s one that tweaked the imagination to stand with other such movies as Shock Waves (Nazi zombies) and Frankenstein’s Army (experimental, patchwork Nazi monsters). However, while the thought of the Third Reich tinkering with the forces of the arcane is a source of prime, pulp entertainment, Andrew Jones seems to have impressively stripped every shred of fun a Nazi werewolf film could potentially have. Where does he go wrong? Well, there’s plenty of things that this film does badly, but the main issue is that he doesn’t so much give us werewolves, as he makes us wonder where-the-wolves actually are.
Yep, in a film that runs an excruciatingly long 90 minutes (it feels like 400), there’s barely five minutes of werewolf footage in here, and instead Jones opts to mostly give us both a poorly shot rip-off of Inglorious Basterds and a baffling sub-plot about Josef Mengele’s marriage hitting the rocks. The latter plot thread is especially confounding because before seemingly trying to make us feel bad for Ilsa Koch that her husband has been neglecting her, we see her admiring a hawk tattoo on the chest of a prisoner only for it to turn up later on a human skin lamp shade in her quarters. Surely Jones isn’t really expecting us to feel bad for a woman who runs a concentration camp, is he? Well, it sure seems that way when Koch finds her boyfriend transformed into a rubbery-faced wolf man and tearfully laments her lost lupine love.
OK, so maybe a noticable lack of werewolves in a film with “werewolves” in the title isn’t a great start, but Jones compounds his errors by shamelessly constructing his entire film around the style of Inglorious Basterds, right down to the use of chapter breaks, a shouty parody-Hitler and lots of scenes that are desperately trying to be either the opening scene, or the bar sequence from Tarantino’s war epic. However, to do this you’d either need rock solid dialogue, or superlative actors to even have a chance of pulling this off – and by now you’ve probably guessed that Werewolves Of The Third Reich has neither in abundance. The plainly English cast audibly struggle with both the German or American accents they’re trying to muster, and the script gives us long, drawn out sequences that desperately try to ape Tarantino at his best – but instead just end up being boring as fuck. It also doesn’t help that the production values are painfully threadbare (a modern fire extinguisher and a building with double glazing can be spotted if you actually wish to give this film more than the advised, cursitory glance).
However, most frustratingly of all, Werewolves Of The Third Reich isn’t even entertainingly bad, even when the “Fearless Four” are slaughtering Nazis with awful CGI headshots like it’s going our of fashion. Despite the werewolves supposedly being the next stage in the evolution of war, they’re not particularly strong (Mengele physically holds off his transformed wife fairly easily) and they’re certainly not durable as they succumb to normal bullets every bit as easily as their non-werewolf colleagues do. As a result, we get a sloppy, unexciting and (most inexcusably of all) boring film that somehow botches an impossibly fun concept.
Flat, sluggish and fundamentally stupid, no amount of awful performances and slapdash direction can con us into thinking that Werewolves Of The Third Reich has any merit in the world other than moldering in a landfill for all eternity. Never mind the no-show lycanthropes, when the carefree shooting of swastika wearing goons fails to be interesting in even the rudimentary sense, something has gone very badly wrong. Inglorious Basterds? Unwatchable bollocks more like.
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