Boys from Brazil

The Boys from Brazil is a 1978 film fictionalizing experiments conducted by the Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.

7 out of 10 stars.  It’s a bit outdated, but entertaining enough to make it through the entire film.

The film is set in 1970s Paraguay.  A young Jewish reporter by the name of Kohler spots several known Nazi war criminals hiding out in Paraguay.  He films their meeting and gets a small native boy to hide a bug in the place where they are meeting.  Then he records their conversation.  In the meeting, Mengele tells his comrades that their mission is to assassinate 94 men over the next two and a half years.  Each man will be murdered four weeks apart in a particular order.  Each of the men will be sixty-five years old when he is assassinated.

Kohler is able to get back to his hotel to contact Ezra Liebermann, the famed Nazi hunter (modeled after Simon Wiesenthal).  He tells him what he heard and that he has the audiotape of the entire conversation, but their phone call is cut short when Mengele and his men reach Kohler and kill him, destroying the tape.

Without a list of victims to warn, Liebermann is forced to track Mengele’s men.  This eventually leads him to realize that after the war, Mengele preserved Hitler’s cells and created clones of Hitler through genetic manipulation.  And in an effort to duplicate Hitler’s environment, he gave those babies to domineering fathers who were 52 years old and civil servants with wives who were 29 years old and affectionate.  Since Hitler’s father died at 65 years old, he is killing off the fathers in an effort to finish what he started and mold these fourteen year old boys into small Hitlers.  And when you see the coldness and cruelty of these boys, you can believe it.

If you’re wondering where the title came from, it’s because all 94 of the boys were created in a lab in Brazil.

7 out of 10 stars.  This is fiction, but much of it is based in fact.