Movie Info
Movie Info
- Director
- Peter Thorwarth
- Run Time
- 1 hour and 38 minutes
- Rating
- TV-MA
VP Content Ratings
- Violence
- 5/10
- Language
- 3/10
- Sex & Nudity
- 1/10
- Star Rating
Relevant Quotes
Therefore pride is their necklace;
violence covers them like a garment.
Their eyes swell out with fatness;
their hearts overflow with follies.
They scoff and speak with malice;
loftily they threaten oppression.
They set their mouths against heaven,
and their tongues range over the earth.
The Psalmist could be describing the Nazis in director/co-writer Peter Thorwarth’s bloody movie set at the end of WW 2. Lt. Colonel Von Starnfeld (Alexander Scheer) and his underling Dorfler (Florian Schmidtke) have run down a deserter, Pvt. Heinrich (Robert Masser) and are preparing to hang him. To prolong his angony the sadistic Dorfler arranges the noose so that the man will not die right away but slowly strangle to death.
The Nazis are in a hurry to get to a village where they believe is hidden Jewish gold, so they leave Heinrich to die alone. Fortunately for him farmwife Elsa (Marie Hacke), watching from her hiding place, rushes forward and quickly cuts him down. She conducts him to her farm which she shares with her mentally handicapped brother Paule (Simon Rupp) She hates the Nazis because they would have killed Paule due to his affliction of Down Syndrome. Heinrich explains that he had deserted because the war is almost over, and he wants to return home to find his young daughter before anything can happen to her. An Allied bombing had killed his wife, but he has heard that the girl has survived.
The Nazis arrive in the nearby village of Sonnenberg where the mayor Robert Schlick (Simson Bubbel) receives them at the inn that he runs. A few years earlier a wealthy Jew had lived in a large house which the locals had burned down. It is believed that the Jew had converted his wealth into gold and hidden it in the house, but their search had allegedly not turned up anything. The SS platoon’s search the grounds but turn up nothing, so they assume that someone in the village has taken and hidden it.
The series of incidents leading up to a bloodbath in the town’s church might satisfy Quinten Tarantino fans, but semed to me to be catering to addicts of screen blood and gore. The film certainly falls in line with those WW 2 movies that feature Nazis as perverted beasts and anti-Nazis as noble folk, justified in whatever they do to kill Nazis—remember what the “heroes” do in Tarantinos’s Inglorious Basterds? In this film Lt. Colonel Von Starnfeld wears a mask covering the part of his face that was disfigured by a wound, reinforcing his monstrous deeds. How can we not applaud whatever happens to such a human beast, we are led (or manipulaed) to ask.
No questions for this film. I am reporting on it as a cautionary report, in case you come across it on Netflix and are tempted to watch it.
