We’ve talked about this before on the ZRC blog (a phrase I’m sure you’re tired of hearing by now), but the persistence of the Nazis + Zombies horror genre keeps it coming back year after year.

It also helps to illustrate a double standard in our society. If Nazis summon the demon-spawn of Satan to Earth, that’s apparently ok, and he gets to be the protagonist of graphic novels, animated features and relatively big-budget film, but if the same admittedly evil fascists create some Zombies, that’s just terrible.. for some reason.

Bigotry most likely.

Keeping that double-standard in mind, we have another ‘Zombies created by secret Nazi experiments in World War II’ film to talk about, ‘War of the Dead’:

March 1942. Captain Martin Stone (Andrew Tiernan – 300, The Pianist) leads an American unit on a mission to destroy an enemy bunker; joining forces with an elite platoon of Finnish soldiers; Cpt. Niemi (Jouko Ahola – Kingdom of Heaven) and Ltnt. Laasko (Mikko Leppilampi). The troops are torn apart by the same enemy soldiers they had killed a few minutes earlier in an ambush. The living dead? Evil forces? Or SS experiments gone wrong?

Oh sure; if they’re Zombies there must be evil involved, or an experiment ‘gone wrong’. Naturally. Look a gift horse, practical immortality, in the mouth why don’t you?

There’s another rather big problem with this scenario, however: the timeline. In 1942 Finland was, err, allied with Nazi Germany in their Continuation War against the USSR.

Given that Finland was allied with Nazi Germany, and we were *at war* with Nazi Germany, why does this movie have US and Finnish troops banding together to fight the Nazis?

It makes very little sense.

Granted, Finland did eventually agree to an Armistice with the USSR and turned on Germany… in 1944. After ceasing hostilities against the Soviets they turned to dealing with Germans in the far North in 1944-45, but of course, this movie is set in… 1942.

Yeah. You’ve got me. While there doesn’t seem to be a lot of historical coherence, ‘War of the Dead’ does have a teaser trailer out:

Maybe one of our attentive readers can make sense of this.

‘War of the Dead’ will apparently be out in 2011.

Tags: Euro-zom, Movies

This entry was posted by John Sears on Saturday, June 18th, 2011 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.