0.25 out of 10
REVIEW Below
Release Date: 16th February 2015 (DVD Premiere)
Director: Tom Sands
Cast: Mark Drake, Sophie Barker, Rosie Akerman, Miles Jovian and Julian Glover
Writer: Mick Sands
Trailer: NAZI VENGEANCE
See review below by Matt Usher aka Himmler’s Sausage Butler
WHAT HAVE I SEEN THAT ACTOR IN BEFORE?
- Julian Glover: Gangster Kittens, Brash Young Turks, We Still Steal The Old Way, Game of Thrones (TV), UFO (2013), Airborne (2012), Shoot On Sight, Troy, King Ralph, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, Cry Freedom, James Bond – For Your Eyes Only, The Empire Strikes Back
RISE OF THE ZOMBIE HOOLIGAN FILMS 
NAZI VENGEANCE by Matt ‘Goering’s Leg Waxer’ Usher aka Joe Bon Jovi II
NAZI VENGEANCE is a film about consequences and how fate traps us before we are even born. In that sense it is a profoundly pessimistic film. It is also a film that arouses pessimism in the viewer because it is a profoundly bad film.
We meet four protagonists: a journalist, a psychic, a bimbo and a prat. The journalist has been having strange dreams. Fortunately his girlfriend (the bimbo) is having an affair with the prat whose girlfriend (the pyschic) knows all about dreams and past lives so she pops her hand on his forehead (like you do when telling someone they’ve got a temperature) and reads a self-help manual and both he and she are plunged into a very bad 1940s flashback. (The irony of both a journalist and a psychic not noticing they’re being lied to is never explored.) It turns out that the journalist is dreaming about, but also remembering, a place called Plumpton. We know this because he has incredibly vivid dream-memories which include detailed maps. But what can it all mean? Puzzled and troubled, our fearless quartet sets out to investigate.
On arriving in the countryside, and having been hiking for about thirty seconds, the prat and the bimbo declare themselves exhausted. They want to go to the pub. Much of the next half hour of the film revolves around people wandering along a hill, going to the pub, coming back up the hill, putting up a tent, going to the pub, then coming back. The journalist and the psychic reach Plumpton, a village which time forgot, and go to the pub, where they meet a chatty publican (possibly played by a real publican and definitely not an actor) who fills in much of the plot. Meanwhile the prat and the bimbo are interrupted in the Tent of Sex and Death by a grumpy farmer who wants to torture and kill them.
He takes them to his Mysterious Barn of Torture and Death and explains the rest of the plot. If I remember rightly he’s a Battle of Britain fighter pilot who was badly burned by the Nazis and has ever since wanted to wreak vengeance on Nazis. He’s in Plumpton because the Nazis tried to infiltrate the area and spread terror through small acts of hostility. We see glimpses of these small acts in flashbacks which are both incredibly tasteless yet strangely twee, and generally revolve around torturing / murdering women and small children. Although we expect no better from the Nazis, it’s the pleasure with which the film-makers approach this that worries most. Understandably unhappy with the Nazis, the grumpy farmer takes it all out on the prat and the bimbo, who he tortures with a blowtorch. Again, the film-makers seem to be more interested in the effects of a blowtorch on flesh than in anything else (like character, plot, motivation etc).
Meanwhile the journalist and the psychic return to the campsite and work out that the bimbo and the prat have been both unfaithful and abducted. Understandably perturbed by this they decide to sit around reading and waiting for something to happen. Then they get in the Tent of Sex and Death but they don’t have sex because they’re the nice characters and are too busy trying to find out about their past lives, or working out where the next nearest pub is. But the tent is the worst place they could have gone! In a scene which must’ve looked good on paper, the grumpy farmer arrives, hooks the tent to his tractor and drives off, dragging the tent across the field at high speed. But he hasn’t bargained on the plucky heroes unzipping the tent and getting out! So they go off to the pub which is shut (possibly). But then he catches them anyway and takes them to the Mysterious Barn of Torture and Death as well.
Arriving there, we find that the prat has long since died from his burns, but the bimbo is hanging in, though she looks bored more than anything. The final parts of the jigsaw slot unsatisfactorily into place. The reason this quarrelsome quartet have been selected for gratuitous maiming: according to the Akashic Records (a kind of celestial Facebook) they were all Nazis in their past lives! And they were the ones who were wreaking havoc in Plumpton! But now the grumpy farmer, who has been praying to the devil for decades, finds his wish has come true because they’ve come here on holiday, and he can wreak his vengeance on them all! Except they turn the tables, kill him and escape. But there’s a twist at the end. Of course there is. It’s a rubbish twist obviously.
I think we here at Britpic have finally got to the bottom of the barrel. This is shoddy, pointless rubbish. The title is misleading enough (as the summary above suggests, it’s not the Nazis doing the vengeance, it’s a misguided devil-worshipping UKIP supporter), but it fails to convey just how crass this mess is. It’s the sort of film where people run off in different directions in one shot but are standing next to each other in the next. It’s a film where characters just say everything they think, in complete sentences, ignoring subtext and nuance. It’s a film where people say ‘If you look through her belongings I think you’ll find the only thing not missing is her shirt as that’s the only thing she was wearing when they were being unfaithful to us.’ It’s a film where the hero will leave his badly scarred (albeit faithless) girlfriend tied to a post whilst he ambles about with a vague intention of looking for a phone. It’s a film where actors walk into shot as actors, stop on their mark, remember that they’re playing characters, and deliver their lines, then walk out of shot whilst the cameraman fumbles about looking for the ‘off’ switch. It’s a film where we see the journalist and the psychic decide to look for their philandering soon-to-be-exes, pack up all their stuff and then (slowly) go.
As far as the acting is concerned, the general rule (for our four leads at least) appears to be that the smaller the role the better the performance. Or so I thought. The bloke playing the prat seemed almost pretty good, but the blooper reel suggests that the actor was being himself. The bimbo looked bored rather than fearful, the psychic had all the spontaneity of a bad railway announcer, and the journalist (played by the most experienced actor) has the charisma and urgency of a dead frog.
But there is another. Top billing goes to Julian Glover. At first it looks like they’ve just recorded some voice-overs and dubbed him over a body double (which is the case). But eventually he appears, physically on set with this shower of incompetents. I hope they all learned from him, and I hope it doesn’t stop him getting further work. He turns in a reliable performance, but the problem is he dignifies this rubbish. I hope they paid his bus fare. I hope they didn’t pay the pub landlord, who was like the farmer in SHAUN THE SHEEP but less animated.
If any part of the plot piques your interest then I urge you to see the 1942 British propaganda film WENT THE DAY WELL? It doesn’t have any of the supernatural stuff in it, instead it’s a film about how a squad of German soldiers infiltrate a British village during the war, and how the village fights back. Alas, I have a horrible feeling that it might have unwittingly served as an inspiration for this nonsense, but honestly WENT THE DAY WELL is one of the best British films I’ve seen. NAZI VENGEANCE is the worst.