Thrills! Spills! Adventure! Intrigue! This film has all that and a local tie, too
Ten years after World War II, the lone survivor of a war crime goes Nazi-hunting in South America with one particular target in mind.
What could possibly go wrong?
If you like thrills, adventures and a healthy dose of plot twists, you might want to check out “Condor’s Nest.”
It opened Friday in selected theaters and on online streaming sites.
And it has a local connection.
It’s the brainchild of filmmaker Phil Blattenberger, who lived in Smithsburg as a youngster. He still has relatives in the area and comes back to visit from time to time.
It’s a long way from Smithsburg to the sometimes exotic locales in Blattenberger’s films, but “it was a kid’s dream growing up around that area, sort of rural America,” he recently told Herald-Mail Media, “bicycling around in cornfields and having a good time. But just a hop, skip and jump away from bigger areas if you had to go do something cool.”
They’re “fond memories,” he said. “I’ve been back a few times, checking out the old neighborhoods.”
He’s lived in lots of places since then — Minnesota, Colorado, New York, Ohio, Iowa — but has been settled in North Carolina for “about half my life,” he said, and holds bachelor’s degrees in history and anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a master’s degree in cultural anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte — “completely unrelated to film.”
But it was his graduate work that led to his first feature film, “Point Man,” set in Vietnam in the days after the Tet Offensive and, back in the states, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
He was