Nazis at the Center of the Earth (2012)

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2020) The only amazing feat ever pulled off by movies produced by The Asylum is how they manage to suck all possible enjoyment out of loopy premises. Their modus operandi of producing mockbuster in support of a business model predicated on audience confusion wasn’t enough – they also went for wacky premises as well, except with their usual abysmal standards. In Nazis at the Center of the Earth, well, you have the premise in the title itself. It leads all the way to a robot Hitler. But don’t get your hopes up: a mixture of incompetent horror schlock and incomprehensible low-budget trash, this is a film made to hook viewers with a premise or a trailer, but it doesn’t manage to fulfill those expectations by anything feeling like an acceptable movie. The plot is unimportant, but if you really insist, Nazis at the Center of the Earth has something to do with students discovering a portal to the centre of the Earth and, well, Nazis. There’s some serious gruesome and dark material in the minutes that follow, but little of it is effective: detached from reality and clearly made over-the-top to earn attention, even the worst stuff falls flat. The excessive violence and gore make the bad movie even worse (especially when they kill the cutest characters first) and the exceptional lack of imagination of a script seemingly accumulated from cheap jokes doesn’t help things. By the time robot Hitler shows up, it’s too little too late – the film doesn’t even have a perceptible sense of humour about itself, and whatever bad-movie self-awareness it may have is drowned in far too dark material to be enjoyable. If tortured, I may allow that as far as The Asylum movies go, Nazis at the Center of the Earth is probably one of the least awful ones. But we’re grading on a scale of zero-to-one stars here, so this doesn’t mean much. Just avoid, as I should have the moment I saw “Produced by The Asylum” on-screen.