Strange tale of a World War II German Wehrmacht infantry unit sent to guard a mountain pass in Romania in 1941. Against the warnings of the local villagers, the commanding officer Woermann (Prochnow) decides to make his headquarters in a nearby castle. But the castle is structured not as a fortress to keep something out, but as a prison to keep something in. When the men in his unit begin to turn up murdered and mutilated he asks his superiors for help. What he gets instead is an SS Einsatzgruppen (roving death squad) commanded by an officer (Byrne) whose ruthlessness is exceeded only by his stupidity. Kaempffer, the SS officer, is determined to keep executing villagers until the "partisans" quit killing German soldiers. But the Thing doing the killing is no partisan.
F. Paul Wilson's novel, on which this movie is partially based, was definitely Mythos-connected and mentions the Al Azif, Abdul Alhazred, Cultes des Goules and the Pnakotic Manuscripts. This film, however, mentions none of the above and isn't very firmly "based" on anything other than its own screenplay.
Nevertheless, the film is interesting for a number of reasons: Prochnow's role as a haltingly compassionate Wehrmacht officer is almost overshadowed by Byrne as the SS officer whose cruelty is a mask behind which he hides his cowardice. As the monster overtakes him near the end of the film, he dissolves into a whimpering, begging wreck. (When you wear a black uniform, no one can see you wet your pants.) The monster comes off as a strangely sympathetic character, because the only people he kills are Wehrmacht and SS soldiers of the Third Reich. The film also features a very good score by Tangerine Dream.
1998 © John Wisdom Gonce III. All rights reserved.