Overlord

 



Director - Julius Avery (Son of a Gun, Flash Gordon)
Starring - Jovan Adepo (Mother!, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan), Wyatt Russell (The Walking Dead: Webisodes, Escape from L.A.), and Mathilde Ollivier (The Misfortunes of Francois Jane, Walking Home)
Release Date - 2018
Genre - Horror
Format - 4K Ultra HD (Personal Collection) (Screener)

Rating (out of 5):

 

     

     When I was in elementary school I was an avid gamer.  The local video store had a huge selection of games so I was often renting games on Friday so I could play them all weekend.  I moved from the Sega Genesis to the Playstation One.  I had an uncle that was just a few years older than me so we would often game together. One game series we became obsessed with was the Medal of Honor series.  One of the secret characters in the game was a zombified Otto Frank.  Even though he never died during the Holocaust it was still an interesting concept to me at the time.  Nazis turning people to zombies was something I had become fascinated with and several horror films since then has been released.  Most are actually pretty damn good but they did not have big budgets to work with.  That changed recently when JJ Abrams produced the WW2 horror film Overlord.  This was a movie I wanted to see in theaters so fucking bad but work and life got the best of me.  Thankfully, when the film was released I was lucky enough to get a review copy.

     The film follows a group of American soldiers tasked with shutting off a radio jammer before the soldiers hit the beach for D-Day.  They encounter heavy German forces and are forced to stop in a small village where they meet a young woman trying to protect herself and her little brother from the Nazis who are performing horrible experiments on the townsfolk.  The location for the radio jammer just happens to be the same location as the lab where the scientists has discovered a serum that will bring the dead back to life.  The group must not only fight Nazis to complete their mission but stop them from creating a super army of undead soldiers with enhanced strength and no sense of pain.

     Overlord is a fun film and one of those movies you could really enjoy yourself with while in a theater but it wasn't the type of film I was expecting.  The trailer for the film painted a much more darker film full of reanimated corpses and gruesome kills.  Sadly, that was not the film we were given.  The acting in this one was great.  My favorite performance comes from Wyatt Russell.  His character was one of the more entertaining ones and he did an amazing job with it.  This is one man I can easily see following in his father's footsteps and portraying strong leads in horror and action films.  Jovan Adepo does a solid job as well but his character is one you don't really get behind.  He is awkward, shy, and reluctant to fight.  Viewers may find themselves wishing he would be the victim in a death scene but it never happens.  The supporting cast is great as well.  The bring so much to the table and make every scene entertaining.  The story for this one is mostly a war and horror take on Captain America: The First Avenger.  We follow a group of soldiers who try to stop a group of Nazis from creating a super serum for their soldiers.  This is the same as the last portion of Captain America where they try to stop Hydra from using the super serum that was injected into Cap from being used on Hydra soldiers.  With that being said, this film was more war than horror.  The first hour or so is a solid war drama before we take the dark turn.  I enjoyed both elements of the film but I feel the horror portion was underutilized and so many possibilities were missed.  Finally, this one has some amazing practical effects, some decent visual effects, and some not so great visual effects.  I really loved the practical effects that we got.  They were top notch and looked fantastic.  The film, also, has some solid visual effects but there was several scenes where the CGI was horrible.  It stuck out horribly and really brought the scene down.  Overall, Overlord is a surprisingly fun popcorn war drama with horror bringing up the last half of the film.  There is some missed opportunities but that doesn't take away from the film.  I would suggest checking this one out!