Over a few days, I watched several B movies that had similar theme. All were on Tubi and after watching one, I went down to the “If you liked this, here are some suggestions…” section and watched another. All have one theme in common – Nazi and the Third Reich. Two are pretty much science fiction with a little horror thrown in and the last was purely horror – body horror to be more precise. The order I watched them in was The 25th Reich (2012), Nazi’s at the Center of the Earth (2012) and then Frankenstein’s Army (2013). In all of these, the only actor I recognized was Jake Busey, son of Gary. The ending of The 25th Reich gave me an idea after watching the rest of them.
Apparently the The 25th Reich is supposed to be the first of several movies, perhaps a trilogy (or it ended with a cliffhanger as a gimmick). As I have found no evidence of any sequels, I decided to try to make all three of these into some kind of RPG series of adventures. Although I ran a very similar series of Nazi/flying saucer/alien technology type adventures before (that also involved time travel and zombie-like bots), I think this will be different enough that it would be fun.
One key aspect that all three movies have is that there is a traitor in the group. In two of them, they are working for military intelligence secretly with special ulterior motives. Not sure this would carry through into an RPG game but maybe. Playing a traitor is always tricky unless it is a one shot.
But first, let’s summarize these movies and then highlight key aspects from the individual movies I plan to use.
The 25th Reich
In this gem is set in the 40s during the way. It is sort of a spoof and an homage of old 50s and 60s WWII movies, we have a squad of stereotypical American WWII soldiers (the mysterious lieutenant from California, a New York street kid from the Bronx, a southern hillbilly, etc.) into the jungles of Japanese occupied Philippines sent on a special mission. They are told they are hunting some kind of panther (huh?) that escaped before MacArthur ordered the retreat, but that was not the truth. The Traitor among them in this case is their sergeant who claims to actually be a captain and member of the Army intelligence office, brought out here to test a device that they have been lugging along in the Philippine jungles – something they were told was a device to find the panther (huh?)
Turns out, the device was a time machine designed to take them back to pre-historic times so that this sergeant turned special agent can go back in time to retrieve an alien spaceship that crashed there. Additionally, the agent is actually a double agent for the Nazis and the time machine was the only part of the ship they were able to retrieve intact from the crash sight in the 1940s. The Nazis thought it would be a good idea to use this device to attempt to retrieve the whole thing.
Long story short, after many fights, cheesy effects and b ad acting, the Nazi turncoat was able to steal the alien ship after damaging the original time machine. However, the mysterious lieutenant reveals he has deeper knowledge of the device than he even thought he had and was able to repair it only to arrive in the future in 2243 where the Nazis have taken over, everyone is turned into Nazi spider cyborgs, and the Reich is launching a fleet of flying saucers to take over the universe. The End!
Yes, that was the end. Key aspects of this movie that we can use is the Time travel device and the alien space ship. This can be connected to a mad scientist character in the rest of the movies.
Nazi’s at the Center of the Earth
I did not realize until about half way through the movie that I had seen this movie before. It was just that rememberable. The movie opens in WWII as we witness Nazis SS commanders trying to escape advancing Allied soldiers on an airfield carrying something very important – some kind of steampunk container looking thing. One man – someone we find out later is Dr. Josef Mengele (our mad scientist) – escapes in a plane that later crashes lands in the Arctic.
The rest of the movie takes place in modern day, in the Arctica North Pole. A team of scientists are doing what scientists do in the arctic when they stumble across Nazi zombies. This leads to a secret base in hollow earth where Mengele is keeping his little army of Nazi’s alive through regrafting of body parts and organs as they fail, from victims brought to him by the Traitor – Jake Busey’s character – who was also of German decent and easily seduced by Mengele and his experiments for immortality. His ultimate goal involves the steampunk container – which contains Hitler’s head. Mengele installs into an alien tech/steampunk robot body to resurrect the Führer. Also, the whole base is actually a giant flying saucer built by the Nazis from alien tech they found (earlier mentioned).
After several cheesy special effects scenes, more bad acting, a contrived plot involving flesh eating virus bio-weapons, the surviving scientists defeat robo-Hitler and destroy the huge Nazi-saucer. Yay, a real ending finally.
Obviously, the alien space craft can carry over from the previous plotline. I like the secret base in Hollow Earth and the location being the Arctic. We can expand on this if we want, with more Hollow Earth encounters or something like that.
Frankenstein’s Army
Finally we come to the best of the three – a body-horror gore fest that merges the Frankenstein legend with Nazi Germany. But it’s a hard movie to completely buy into because of one factor – it is done in the found-footage style. Found footage?? I had to suspend A LOT of disbelief for this one. One solider apparently has one of those hand-held film cameras that was recording (1) in color and (2) recording sound! And he had enough film to record and hour and a half? Yea, I just had to go with it.
A Soviet squad is sent into the Eastern front, deep into what I would guess is Germany, to rescue another squad of Russian soldiers trapped somewhere. One particular soldier is assigned to document the mission with his hand-held camera. They work their way into a town, terrorize the people trying to find clues to the whereabouts of the other Russians and then find a very large old church.
As they approach, it is a pretty horrific scene. They find a pile of dead bodies of nuns from the church, most of which were burned alive. There was also some familiar references to Frankenstein tropes laying about – like a iron cross wrapped up in old electrical wires like the ones he used in the old Hammer films. Inside the church, it looks more strangely like an old laboratory or factory, with old rusted metal structures standing around, an industrial elevator and cables all hanging around. Probably more detail than I needed to go into but the production value of this movie was well done. The set design and make up was outstanding.
To summarize, the team is picked off, one by one, by creatures created by someone the villagers call the “Doctor.” There are a ton of creatures and some of them are quite brilliant. Collectively, according to IMDb, they are called Zombots but there are several very different creatures that would be fun to stat out. A complete break of these creatures can be found here on the Villian Wiki. But notable creatures are:
- Burnt Match Man – The first creature they encounter, it is attached to some cables in the main laboratory, it has a distorted face, distinctly feminine body, a pneumatic blade replacing its right hand and mechanical clawed fingers for its left hand.
- Wall Zombots – Creatures that wonder the catacombs under the church, harassing the Russians as they try to dig deeper into the mysterious church.
- Razor Teeth – A nasty armored creature with a Iron-Maiden like head that can clamp down on another victims head and chew it up.
- Propeller Head – Propeller head is one of the largest Zombots encountered by the Russians. It is massive humanoid creature with, as the name implies, a airplane propeller for a head. It uses it as a weapons, charging victims and catching them in it as the propellor swirls.
- Mosquito Man – Mosquito Man is zombot whose limbs are implanted with metal rods that enable it to move around faster and with dexterity. It head is implanted with machine parts to power their proboscis-like drill, its main weapon. It is capable of stealth-killing a soldier by impaling its drill on the back of his head, and burst through his mouth.
The Russians go deeper into this surprisingly vast facility where the Doctor, Frankenstein’s descendant (son?) has taken full advantage of the war around him to collect body parts (preferably live) and build a zombot army. The whole facility is a massive processing plant for his creations, with mining cart on rails transporting body parts, a while medical section with a menagerie of creations, and a crypt disposal area where more creations are disposing of the waste. It is a great peace of story telling. It is shown that he is using a more advanced version of his ancestor’s techniques – a generator – to animate these modified corpses.
Of course, because of the “found footage” nature of this film, it does not end well for anyone. The Doctor escapes after experimenting on most of the Russians, and only one survives (one of the insignificant ones) who takes the film to Stalin himself and is rewarded with medals (or so the story implies).
Key aspects of this one is the mad scientist, his generator and of course, his creations. The Generator can be anything, even alien tach
Some would say I was obsessed with the Nazi’s finding alien tech because much of one of my convention campaigns was based on that. They would not be wrong. This is probably why I watched these movies.
See Part 2 for the RPG series of adventures based on these movies.