A Coincidence Written in the Stars (or the Ice)
Every so often the release calendar hands us a gift: two movies about secret Nazi holdouts, both landing in 2012, both convinced they alone hold the deed to the "what if the Third Reich never actually surrendered" premise. On one side: Nazis at the Center of the Earth, a lean, unapologetic B-picture where an Antarctic research team gets dragged into a subterranean war-machine nightmare. On the other: Iron Sky, the polished Finnish-German production where a Nazi moon base finally sends its saucers earthward.
Here at Mockbusters.tv we have a running joke — and we mean joke, please don't quote us in a thesis — that the scrappy, lower-budget title is the true original, and the shinier, better-funded one is merely the "million-dollar copy" that arrived to cash in. It's house satire, not film history. Nobody actually believes a Finnish sci-fi co-production spent years staring at a direct-to-video horror flick and thought, "yes, that's the one, let's just add moon rockets." But it's too fun a bit not to run with, so let's run with it.
Exhibit A: The Setting
Nazis at the Center of the Earth keeps its evil empire exactly where 1970s pulp paperbacks always insisted it would be: underground, beneath the Antarctic ice, in a hidden world of grisly labs and unspeakable experiments. It's claustrophobic, gnarly, and gleefully committed to retro-futurist war machines that look like someone's garage workshop had a fever dream about the Wehrmacht.
