Nazi Dawn Movie Review

Written by Daniel Benson

DVD Released by Revolver Entertainment

Directed by Roel Reiné

Written by Ethan Wiley & Roel Reiné

2008, Region 2, 90 minutes, Rated 18 (UK)

DVD released on August 31^st, 2010

Review:

Lance Henriksen kicks Evil’s ass as Special Ops Col. John Willets, sent to investigate a WWII era battleship that has fallen silent somewhere in the Persian Gulf. His team finds that almost all of the crew has been murdered, victim of an evil force awakened by the torture of a suspected terrorist. Except it’s not an evil force, it’s a WWII weapons experiment gone wrong and the suspected terrorist is actually an American computer programmer.

Confused? You will be.

Borrowing from Death Ship (1980), and trying to genre-mix an Iraqi war action movie with supernatural horror — all while having constant cuts between scenes — makes Nazi Dawn a very testing 90 minutes to endure.  While it starts off reasonably well, with a lot of crew members being offed by an unseen foe, it quickly degenerates into the kind of film that can have you questioning whether you fell asleep and missed a great chunk of story that validates what you’re currently seeing. It must require absolute 100% attention to follow every last plot twist, unfortunately it’s a film that is never going to command that much interest from the viewer.

Originally sailing under the titles of Black Ops and Deadwater, this 2008 offering has been picked up for UK distribution by Revolver Entertainment. No amount of title changing is going to disguise the fact that it’s a clunker. Lance Henriksen is solid as the lead, but he always plays himself so there’s nothing to differentiate this role from any other he’s ever taken.  There’s not much to complain about with the rest of the cast; no-one’s going to set Hollywood alight, but they’re hardly likely to offend either.

The main issue with the film (other than the story chopping all over the place) is the pacing; it starts strongly with a lot of action, but once the Special Ops team lands on the boat there’s a whole lot of nothing going on until the final 20 minutes.  Word has it that the producers of this film had the chance to shoot on a battleship and hastily put together a script and a cast to make use of the floating location.

Unfortunately it shows.

Video, Audio and Special Features:

Video, Audio and Special Features not graded as this was a screener disc.

Grades:

Movie:
Video:	n/a
Audio:	n/a
Features:	n/a
Overall:

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