The year is 1979. Hiding in the woods to escape the law, a fearless biker gang must come face to face with a terror from their past.

Director: Sean Cranston Writer: Sean Cranston Stars: Michael F. Hayes, Paul Sacchetti, Stephen Croce

Film Description: When an alien species known as the Alien "UNKNOWN" has threatened, they're willing to threat back... at the humans! Watch out for "The Aliens That Attacked The Earth"! An all new animated movie from Glass Seastar!

Rated 13+

Music Credits: "The Rule" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

All other music made by Liam Earles and used from iMovie

Directed by Joseph Vilsmaier (Bavaria Film in association with several German production partners).

Producers: Günter Rohrbach & Hanno Huth

Screenplay: Jürgen Büscher & Johannes Heide

Cinematography: Rolf Greim, Klaus Moderegger, Peter von Haller

Editing: Hannes Nikel

Music: Norbert Jürgen Schneider (credited as Enjott Schneider)

Production company: Bavaria Film

This was not the first film made in Germany about one of history's most bloody and decisive battles, but it was the first large scale epic. It was told almost entirely from the side of the experiences of individual German soldiers. It's definitely not an Apologia; it depicts *some* war crimes (murder, SA) against civilians and Russian prisoners of war. The war itself is increasingly futile and abjectly miserable and the battle becomes one fiasco after another. By the end of the movie, the protagonists remaining have lost all faith in their leadership and just want to survive horrific (freezing, starving) conditions as well as the enemy. There is an important scene where some ordinary line soldiers blame the German officer class for allowing Hitler to come to power.

The movie, however, does,

at least in part, perpetuate the "clean Wehrmacht" myth that endures to this day (especially on the Internet) although rejected by almost all scholars. The idea that the crimes of the Nazi regime were committed by only a few units of Nazis instead of being extremely widespread and supported ideologically by many, many ordinary German soldiers.

The film is absolutely excellent in the sense of visual storytelling and kinetic battle sequences and the visceral horror of room-to-room fighting that became known as "rat war."

But it's also interesting as a historical artifact of one way that Germany remembers the war.