It’s Nazis on the F&cking Moon! What more do you really need to know?

This week I’m introducing the first of many in my new segment B Movie Madness!!  Keep an eye out for future entries from the old (do I hear a Plan 9 review coming?) to the new (Megashark vs. Giant Octopus!).

I can’t remember any time I was more shocked and awed by a movie trailer than I was for Iron Sky‘s.  Many of you may have seen it during the Super Bowl or later online and like me many of you probably thought it was some sort of joke.  A joke it wasn’t however, and this 7.5 million dollar creation of Finnish, German and Australian studios has recently been released across Europe in all of it’s ridiculous glory.  While it’s American release date has not been set, look for it to come our way within the next several months or so.

I could describe the intricate details of the plot to you but those details aren’t that important.  What’s important is that the Nazis have secretly been building up their forces on the dark side of the moon for the past 70 years and have decided that 2018 seems as nice a time to take over the Earth as any.  Oh, and Sarah Palin is President.  It’s always fun to see how foreign movies depict us Yanks, and the movie’s take on our One Nation Under Grizzly-Mom is not the most flattering one.

Still better than any Michael Bay movie

Luckily though, Iron Sky doesn’t draw the line at Americans on the stereotyping front.  Aside from some heavily overdone “brotha” charicatures, we also see the Space faring Nazi’s of the new millienium who are all pretty much exactly the same as your historically typical Earthbound Nazis with the one exception being that their Zeppelins have gotten a whole lot bigger and can now throw meteors at all of us Untermenschen.  Complete with mad scientist and doomsday device, Iron Sky sends up nearly every Nazi stereotype you could think of while always maintaining a tongue-in-cheek air of seriousness.

The characters themselves are all mostly stock and ultimately forgettable, and at 89 minutes the movie feels pretty short.  After the climax I was sort of left with a feeling of “oh, was that it?”  (Also that’s what she said).  The effects are pretty cool and are especially impressive considering the comparatively low budget of the movie, and how can you not love a space battle between Nazi Zeppelins and America’s first armed spacecraft, the U.S.S. George W. Bush?

Verdict:  6/10

If I were rating this movie solely on it’s quality as a movie I’d probably give it a 4/10, but the awesomeness of the premise combined with the so-bad-it’s-good quality possessed by every great B movie elevates Iron Sky above similar indie Sci-Fi Material.  There were definitely some moments that dragged on a little and even more scenes worth of extended “WTF?” responses, but every one of those scenes is balanced out by the way in which the movie never takes itself too seriously.