Overlord review – Painting with broad bloody strokes

Horror exploitation films set during the Second World War can rub some people up the wrong way.

After all, the evil inherent in the Nazi Reich is filed and documented and loathsome to the extreme. The horrors it perpetrated (including attempted genocide, human experimentation, torture – the list goes on) are legion. So does a schlock horror flick filled with US jingoism, snarling undead, villains so evil they may have well have been nicked from a pantomime and enough gore to make Quentin Tarantino blanche have any right to use WWII as its backdrop?

If you can get over that moral conundrum, though, Overlord is something of a guilty pleasure, especially if you’re into splatter flicks. Everyone else should be cautioned, though, as this is a film that paints unapologetically in broad strokes and most of them are coloured arterial red.

Overlord opens like gangbusters with the movie’s clutch of protagonists huddled into a plane on the eve of D-Day. As the flack explodes around them, they’re briefly established; the two greenhorns (Jovan Adepo, Dominic Applewhite), the wise-cracking sniper (John Magaro), the gruff corporal (Wyatt Russell) the no-nonsense sergeant (Bokeem Woodbine) and the squad’s cub reporter (Iain De Caestecker) who you know won’t last the movie’s full 90 minutes. The squad are on their way to take out a radar tower in a French town, so that D-Day will have air support that instantly isn’t shot out of the sky.

When their plane is shot down and one of their number is killed, the remaining troops hot-foot it to the town where they encounter a local named Chloe, who informs them the Nazis based in the nearby church (which houses the radar station) have been kidnapping town locals. It’s not long after that the US soldiers find that something rather sinister is going on in the church’s basement. Gore and bone-cracking violence then ensue.

Overlord isn’t going to win many prizes for originality or nuance; seasoned horror fans will see many of the plot developments coming from a mile away. Characters occasionally act like idiots if the story demands it and while the protagonists boast some slight depth of character, the Nazi foes may as well be moustache-twirling villains; they’re inhuman monsters – particularly the SS commander played with hateable glee by Pilou Asbaek from Game Of Thrones – who deserve everything coming to them including, in one scene, torture. The monsters for their part are mucous covered feral killers with veins bulging on every limb, although not frightening enough to pull one’s eyes from the screen.

While Overlord is something of a box-ticking affair, director Julius Avery thankfully keeps the jump-scares to a minimum, instead ramping up the viscera and gore to flesh-crawling levels. The film will likely never be a classic, but fans of this sort of spectacle know who they are and are likely to be satiated.

Score: ★★★☆☆

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.