WTF. Literally, WTF?
BQB here with a review of “Overlord.”
I tried to do a good dead, 3.5 readers. I took an old relative of mine to the movies. He picked Overlord. Sounds good to me. On the way he’s talking about the Normandy invasion during WWII (i.e. Operation Overlord i.e. D-Day.) He’s a history buff after all.
Suddenly, it dawns on me he doesn’t realize what he’s walking into. I tell him this isn’t just a World War II movie. It’s a zombie WW2 movie. He is disappointed but decides to give it a shot.
All I can say is, “Meh.”
The movie starts out like it was written by a high schooler who saw a few WW2 movies and brought together all of the tropes and cliches. It’s all exceedingly woke. Bokeem Woodbine is the commander barking orders at everyone…fine for today but historically accurate? Probably not. Then again it’s a horror fantasy and it probably says a lot about our terrible past that in a movie about the dead coming back to life, a black man ordering around white men in the 1940s is the most unbelievable part of the film.
NOTE: Yeah, don’t get upset 3.5 readers. I’m glad we fixed all that. I’m just saying, this is a woke version of the 1940s that didn’t exist at the time.
Back to the review. The first half of the film is spent watching our heroes crash and wander about the French countryside, evading enemy attacks and mines and shit. For awhile I felt like Dr. Malcolm in “Jurassic Park.” “Uh, you do intend to have zombies in your zombie movie don’t you?”
Eventually, they give you a glimpse of potential zombie-ism but that’s just because someone must have picked up the script and said, “Jesus, we can’t bill this as a zombie film and leave the audience jerking off for an hour.”
Finally, our heroes discover a secret underground bunker where Nazi scientists are conducting experiments to turn humans into zombies i.e. soldiers that can last a thousand years or as long as how long they hoped Hitler’s reich would be.
Oddly, the bunker has lax security. The heroes move between the bunker and the attic of a French house with reckless abandon. It belongs to a young woman who gets to boss everyone around because again, this is super woke 1940s.
Here’s where I hate to dump on the film. When we finally get to the zombies, there is some scary shit. Scenes that will scare you and make you fear for our heroes’ safety.
It just makes you wonder why they didn’t bring that all up in the beginning because the overall problem is that the writers couldn’t decide if they wanted to do a straight up war movie or a horror movie and in the end, they don’t do either well.
It’s hard to criticize because I think the point was to make a crappy B horror movie but still…when you bill this as a zombified war movie, don’t make me wait all day to see the zombies.
STATUS: Borderline shelf-worthy although honestly, this is a movie I have no interest in ever seeing again and if you miss it, you aren’t missing much. It had potential and they blew it. Sadly, somewhere out there is a WW2 Nazi scientist experiment gone wrong horror movie that would reel us in and scare the shit out of us…but this is not it and now because of this movie it will probably not be made.
Bookshelf Battle 