While Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds contain a lot of great stuff, one of the best things about QT’s shamelessly revisionist war movie is that it sort of made it cool to make exploitation movies set during World War II again. However, despite being released all the way back in 2009, it’s taken a surprisingly long time for anyone one else to jump on the bandwagon unless you count all those zombie Nazi movies that goose stepped into popular culture.
Well, in now seems that everyone else is finally catching up as Netflix served up Blood & Gold in 2023, a merging of the war movie with something more akin to a spaghetti western as numerous desperate players descend upon a small village in order to get their hands on some Jewish gold. However, there’s only one real problem – Jalmari Helander’s Sisu did it a year earlier and incredibly better…
The year is 1945 and the end of World War II is finally approaching; but even though Hitler’s dream of a thousand year reich is hanging in tatters, there are still some Nazis who are not only going around, casually causing atrocities, but who are planning to use the end of the war to make their fortune. Take Obersturmbannführer von Starnfeld, a disfigured SS colonel who has his one remaining eye set on retrieving a stash of hidden gold that has been rumoured to have been stashed some somewhere in a small village. But before they do, there’s the small matter of executing decorated Wehrmacht veteran Heinrich for his recent desertion and the cruel Dörfler takes special delight stringing up the man to choke on the end of a noose despite the fact the man only fled to be reunited with his young daughter.
However, before life leaves the man, he is cut down by Elsa, a Jewish woman who is in hiding at a nearby farmhouse with her brother Paule, who has Down syndrome, but as she nurses Heinrich back to something approaching health, Dötfler and some men swing by to gather up supplies for von Starnfeld’s men. In the furious brawl that follows, the Nazi officer manages to escape but not before both Heinrich and Elsa manage to royally fuck up his men and attempt to make their escape.
Meanwhile, as von Starnfeld’s troops pick through the burned ruins of the house where the gold rumoured to be, it soon becomes apparent that some of the members of the village have already pulled some underhanded shit to stash the gold somewhere else and aren’t about to let a bunch of Nazis just march off with the riches they themselves stole. This all comes to a head when Paule is captured and brought to the village which means Heinrich and Elsa will surely follow.
What follows is a rapid fire stream of bloody murders, ruthless scheming and frequent backstabbing until the last one standing can claim those shiny, shiny gold bars.
While director Peter Thorwath (Blood Red Sky) is obviously borrowing more from the likes of Sergio Leone and Tarantino then any other classic war movie that actually exists, it’s still kind of cool to see that WWII movies are getting more fun even if that’s a weird fucking thing to say out loud. Better yet, it seems that Netflix has decided to pump some of its own bars of gold into the production as the film looks slick, the fights are crisp and impactful and there’s plenty of mean spirited gore to be found as a bloodthirsty cast of characters all circle each other until that pesky loot can be found.
All the characters fit into a neat archetype with Robert Maaser’s Henrich falling into the category of the lantern jawed hero who seems to be near impossible to kill despite all the life threatening injuries he accumulates throughout the film. He’s joined by Marie Hacke’s farm girl turned warrior who also gives as good as she gets, lunging at attackers with a knife in her hand of even taking out a sniper with the odd rocket launcher.
On the flip side of the deutsche mark are our cadre of villains and once again, Thorwath isn’t afraid to go big when delivering some thoroughly nasty pieces of Nazi shit for us to sneer at. In fact you can tell he’s really having a ball coming up with as much creepy baggage to pile onto his antagonists as he can – for example, Alexander Scheer’s masked von Starnfeld has a delightfully vile moment where we see someone pass a capsule into his mouth through the ragged hole in his cheek, or the moment when he reveals he keeps the wedding ring of a dead paramour stashed in his empty eye socket. Likewise, von Starnfeld’s personal thug, also manages to absorb just as much punishment as he metes out, gradually losing chucks of ear, racking up stab wounds and – in an especially wince inducing moment – takes a kettle full of boiling water dead in the crotch.
However, while the gore is nasty, the fights are cool and the twists are plentiful, there’s a feeling that somehow the plot is stretched a little thin despite the fact that the film is only 100 minutes long. In fact, while all the subplots of all the scheming townsfolk is all very well and good, you’d much rather be watching our leads continue to beat the living shit out of every dude they find wearing a swastika rather than turn our attention elsewhere. I mean, do you mean to tell me you don’t want to watch a young man with Down syndrome push one of his tormentors out of a church steeple and machine gun the other into a fine, red mist?
However, while this is all very well and good, there’s a massive issue that Blood & Gold simply can’t overcome and that’s the fact that Sisu simply outclasses it in every conceivable way imaginable. You name it (violence, gruff hero, tone, action) Sisu absolutely wipes the floor with anything and everything that Blood & Gold tries to come up with and you just can’t help compare the two no matter how much you try and like the latter on its own merits. As a result, it also ends up fixing a magnifying glass on the faults of the newer film and you feel that if Thorwath’s movie had more of a relentless pace, maybe it could have measured up better to the Finnish instant classic.
Still, as unfair as it may seem to compare, any movie that pulps Nazis with reckless abandon is still going to be some intrest to action fans and while it could stand to be a bit crazier, it’s still worth unearthing if you’re stuck on Netflix while at the mercy of their algorithm. Just don’t expect anything close to the kind of thing you got from other movies that choose to play fast and loose with the sort of dignity WWII films were afforded back in the 90s.
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