{"id":1375,"date":"2012-02-11T22:55:39","date_gmt":"2012-02-12T04:55:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=1375"},"modified":"2012-02-11T22:55:39","modified_gmt":"2012-02-12T04:55:39","slug":"nazis-in-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=1375","title":{"rendered":"Nazis In Space"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A sci-fi black comedy about Nazis from the moon invading Planet Earth is one of the hottest tickets at the Berlin film festival, which is better known for its gritty political fare.<\/p>\n

“Iron Sky”, a B-movie spoof drawing the crowds at the 11-day event in the German capital, imagines that Hitler’s surviving henchmen set up a lunar colony after the fall of the regime in 1945, biding their time to strike back.<\/p>\n

The opportunity comes in 2018 when a US astronaut exploring the dark side of the moon comes face to face with a Nazi soldier clad in a black uniform and a breathing mask.<\/p>\n

Behind him, a secret military base shaped like a swastika looms into view, prompting giggles from the packed audience.<\/p>\n

The intergalactic farce produced mainly in Finland pits the would-be Fourth Reich against an America led by a Sarah Palin double, who is seen incessantly jogging in the Oval Office.<\/p>\n

“This basically came from a stupid joke dreamed up after a trip to the sauna,” said director Timo Vuorensola, who generated much of the financing for the film among fans online.<\/p>\n

“But we couldn’t get the idea out of our heads and we got more and more ambitious as we worked on the story.”<\/p>\n

The film-makers see themselves as part of a long line of eccentric cinematic dreamers such as Ed Wood, the 1950s cross-dressing kitsch impresario immortalised by Johnny Depp in a 1994 movie of the same name by Tim Burton.<\/p>\n

Just over 90 minutes long, the film screening in the festival’s Panorama sidebar section shows the black astronaut’s skin being bleached white by a Nazi mad scientist, SS officer Klaus Adler, who dreams of becoming the next Fuehrer.<\/p>\n

The space Nazis use airships shaped like Zeppelin dirigibles and a giant craft called “Twilight of the Gods” to launch a batty Blitzkrieg, while an Earth-based coalition of the willing deploys a navy cruiser called the USS George W. Bush.<\/p>\n

The cast includes a host of camp regulars including Germany’s go-to psychopath, Udo Kier.<\/p>\n

The special effects are little to speak of compared to the film’s Hollywood antecedents but the 7.5-million-euro ($9.9-million) movie is long on imagination.<\/p>\n

Beyond the high concept, the film has also attracted attention for its innovative financing model: donations on the Internet, which ended up covering the total budget from supporters around the globe.<\/p>\n

Its producers say “Iron Sky” is one of the first films to successfully use “crowd sourcing” to generate cash, and are also launching a series of prequel comics, video games and licensed merchandise.<\/p>\n

The Berlinale, the first major European festival of the year, runs to February 19.