Blitzkrieg: Escape from Stalag 69 (2008)

Blitzkrieg: Escape from Stalag 69 (2008)

Directed by: Keith J. Crocker
Screenplay by: Keith J. Crocker and Keith Matturro

Genre: Horror | War
Running Time: 135 Minutes
MPAA Rating: Unrated
Viewed: Owned DVD

A new era of Nazi terror!

[IMDb]

Comments: Let's start at the beginning. I was at Saturday Matinee (an offshoot of FYE, which in turn is an offshoot of Suncoast) with my friend. Having a similar taste in flims, he showed me with great delight Blitzkrieg: Escape from Stalag 69. It looked like a low budget WIP film, set in the Nazi era (one of my favorite genres). Upon looking further, I noticed that the film was 135 minutes long (!), which is at least 45 minutes longer than any exploitation film needs to be. That's when I assumed that the WIP-style cover (barely clothed tortured females) was to sell the film only, and this was going to be a pain to watch. If only I knew what lied ahead...

It took me two weeks to finally watch the film, and what a fool I was for not watching it sooner. Never has it been so hard for me to decide whether to give a film zero or five stars (so I settled in the middle). The acting, sets, script, camerawork - pretty much everything - are godawful. The "hero" of the POW camp, Jack Jones, is about 20 years too old and 50 pounds overweight. Not to mention, he can't remember his lines and is clearly looking beyond the person he's speaking to and reading lines off of a card. Much of the interaction and dialogue between characters is overlong and a pain to watch; however, it's so bad that I enjoyed the hell out of it. The sets are hysterical, as it's supposed to be in the 1940s, yet everything looks modern. Most of the film is shot in some abandoned buildings out in the woods. The prisoners are kept in what looks like a shed, which was reused so as to appear as a different place for each group of prisoners.

There were a few things I did genuinely like. There's a lot of (explicit) nudity, and a couple times I hoped thought the film was going to turn into a porn. There's also a very clear reference to I Spit on Your Grave (the bathtub castration), one of the first exploitation films I ever watched, so I enjoyed that. Also, while the acting was never good, I enjoyed the performances of Charles Esser (the main baddie, Helmet Schultz) and Tatyana Kot (the main female prisoner, who was nude for almost all of the film). For inexperienced actors, they were given a lot of material, and they handled it reasonably well.

Blitzkrieg: Escape from Stalag 69 is by no means a good film. Actually, it's an abomination if not watched with a sense of humor. But if you're slightly off-center and can appreciate the humor in things, Blitzkrieg: Escape from Stalag 69 is a wonderful film (it's best if viewed with people of a similar mental state, too). But nonetheless, the film should be a crowd-pleaser, although for all the wrong reasons.