Zombies of the Third Reich lives in a critic-proof zone along with all the other Nazi Zombie movies. How do you approach something that’s designed to be ridiculous? A collision of genres, a mixed chow mein of excess, these movies come from the land that taste forgot. And that’s exactly as it should be. Good taste is the enemy of great art, as Marcel Duchamp once said.
In a funny preamble we meet a twittish British officer (Ellis J Wells) briefing Craftman (Zach Devereux), a plucky Brit, about a Nazi experiment into the creation of a supersoldier somewhere in Second World War France. On what’s clearly something of a suicide mission, Craftman is sent in to investigate with a team who have clearly been press-ganged into service, three Americans – offensively cocky Johnson and Russo (Jon Kerr, Andre Pierre) and prissy comms guy Plumb (Matthew Baunsgard). Plus three Brits, Craftman himself, bolshy tough-guy West (Rod Glenn), and Hayman (Taja Christian), who is as near to a normal everyday person as a black woman among a gang of white males in the Second World War can be.
They’re a Dirty Half Dozen (budgets being budgets) and the fun is obviously going to come from working out who’s going to die first. But first let’s meet the zombies, the supersoldiers (gone wrong, obvs) congregating in the lower reaches of the facility where, it’s also rumoured, Hitler himself might be hanging out.
They are a familiar phalanx of the murderously undead in Nazi uniform, stiff-armed (as both Nazis and zombies often are) though props to the make-up and special effects team (Anna Joyce, mainly, I think), who make them a grisly crew of ugly buggers, faces half melted off, blood half congealed, half liquid. Lots of scar tissue. Effective.
“Zombies… Nazi fuckin’ zombies,” Johnson says at one point, in case we hadn’t worked it out from the title. Director David Gregory and writer Sam P Green’s tongues are in their cheeks. Where is not exactly clear but they’re in there somewhere.
Isn’t that nearly always the case though? A Nazi who is also a zombie is inherently funny. In descending comedic order, of the ones I’ve seen, I’d go Dead Snow (my favourite tagline: “Eins, Zwei, Die!”), Frankenstein’s Army, Death Trench and Overlord, with Zombies of the Third Reich jostling around somewhere in the middle – not overtly comedic but not averse to the odd gag either… if it presents itself.
What sets it slightly apart is the insistence that this is more about human frailty than zombie moxie. As the zombies start coming and the good guys are forced to rise to the occasion, the actors get stuck into characters who are only thinly fleshed out at first. What starts out shaky tightens up and becomes much more involving.
Filmed almost entirely in Hack Green “Secret” Nuclear Bunker in the Cheshire countryside, on a budget stretched ingeniously thin by director David Gregory and crew, this is a film that takes place almost entirely in corridors and small rooms. It helps stoke the claustrophobic tension. Even so, no amount of red flags with swastikas can hide that Hack Green is Cold War era not Second World War. Push buttons with winking lights rather than switches and dials.
But it is what it is and Gregory uses it well. His direction is economical and doesn’t over-rely on editing. Building tension with longish takes eventually pays dividends as the elements come together in the film’s final act. Suddenly everything is tight when it needs to be as the zombies attack en masse and the soldiers meet the challenge with varying degrees of heroism.
I mistakenly believed Nazi Zombies were an invention of the 21st century. But in fact they were turning up even as the Second World War was still being fought in films like King of the Zombies. So it turns out that Zombies of the Third Reich is actually part of a long and venerable tradition. It keeps its end up admirably.
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2025
