Writer and Director: Phil Blattenberger
As an adventure film Condor’s Nest is a sort of comic romp. It begins stylishly, however. It’s 1944 in eastern France. First we’re in a trench with German soldiers, then we’re in the cockpit of a B-27 bomber when it’s shot down. All but two of the airmen survive. Most tumble out of the plane without a scratch, but one of them, Will Spalding, played with tense ferocity by Jacob Keohane, is traumatised. He alone is in hiding when he witnesses the sadistic cruelty of a German SS officer who interrogates the other survivors, shooting them when he dislikes their answers.
This turns out to have been all a dream – after the opening credits Will wakes in a sweat – it’s now 1954 and he’s in Argentina. We have to assume the dream, as movie dreams so often are, is frame-by-frame accurate to those events, although quite how he remembered the bit in the German trench is unclear. Will therefore has his motivation to go on a crazed hunt, hell bent on revenge on the SS officer, Col. Martin Bach, who luckily he spelled out his name in the first scene and who then escaped to South America.
There is no attempt at further back story – we don’t know what Will has been doing with himself in the intervening nine years. At any rate, he now himself proves a competent torturer. The first victims we see (we gather he has already strangled a Nazi-sympathising priest) are two ineffective middle aged men who are trying to hide the fact that both worked for the Third Reich, albeit in administrative posts. He dispatches them and buries them in a shallow grave.
Then it’s on to a local bar where in a complicated set of events, he ends up doing a deal with a German, Albert Vogel (an urbane Al Pagano), an atmospheric physicist who is, we are told, the only man in Germany who can build an atom bomb. We sense a key plot point. Vogel promises to lead Will to Martin Bach. They are wary of a young Israeli woman (Corinne Britti) who is spying for Mossad, who is also on the hunt for escaped Nazis and has Vogel in her sights.
Cut to a bar in Paraguay where Will continues his unconvincing cover story of being a banana salesman, Vogel his deaf father. Enter three Tarintino-esque Germans – the ludicrously camp Ziegler and his two henchmen who sit around obsessing about their favourite cocktail and snort cocaine off their weapons. There follows an action-packed car-chase in which, despite being in possession of a rocket-launcher, the Germans come off worse.
A lot more happens of the same nature. Eventually, of course, they will reach the Condor’s Nest where the Nazis who’d escaped from Germany nine years before have had the foresight to pack their Nazi uniforms. There follows masses of blood shed and the rather disappointing confrontation between Will and Col Bach.
The tone is blackly comic, though it’s unclear whether writer/director Phil Blattenberger wants us to consider the irony that Will, whose motivation was the cold-bloodied murder of six comrades in war, is now prepared to mow down countless extras in the interests of revenge.
Condor’s Nest will be available on Digital Download from 20th March & DVD from 3rd April
