Iron Sky

The year is 2018. The president looks a lot like Sarah Palin. The Whitehouse is mounting a mission to the moon in a bid for electoral popularity. Unfortunately, what they don't know is that a colony of Nazis who escaped the failure of World War II by hiding out on the moon have been waiting for just such an opportunity to return to the Fatherplanet...

B-movies are often burdened with a concept that no movie could live up to in reality, and Iron Sky is a prime example. Nazis on the moon! And they're back! On earth! There's certainly a silliness and commitment to the idea that it's hard to wholly dislike. But if silliness and commitment were all that were needed to make a brilliant film, we'd be drowning in quality product. Of course, it goes without saying, it succeeds in being monstrous and daft, and has that grabby, can't-quite-believe-they-made-this hook that we look to trash cinema to provide. Unfortunately, it's not burdened with much beyond the basic hook, and while you can chalk some of that up to the low budget, it wouldn't have cost much to write some more decent jokes.

Iron Sky is probably more interesting as an example of a funding model in its infancy than as a piece of narrative storytelling: the film was crowdsourced via the internet with many independent filmmakers contributing to the finished product. This shows particularly in the effects work. While some is obviously relatively low budget, much of it is way better than you feel you have any right to expect. With a more developed script, this could have been a cult treat instead of a curio.