If you took “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” mashed it up with some gonzo grindhouse pics, doused it in shaken-up cans of original Four Loko and then lit it on fire, laughing while it burned, you might begin to approach the craziness that is “Overlord.” That’s a lot for one metaphor, but “Overlord” is also a lot. Director Julius Avery takes the tropes of traditional World War II movies and turns into capital-B-Bonkers horror, adding gruesome lab experiments into the mix to melt your face off, because, well, why not?
The night before D-Day, kindhearted Private Boyce (Jovan Adepo) and his fellow paratroopers have an important mission: take out a radio transmitter tower in a French church so that the Allied forces can land on the beach. Led by goal-driven explosives expert Ford (Wyatt Russell), Boyce as well as photographer Chase (Iain De Caestecker), wiseass Tibbet (John Magaro) and French townswoman Chloe (Mathilde Ollivier) work to destroy the radio. However, they find more than your standard issue-Nazis, led by evil commander Wafner (Pilou Asbæk), in the lab at the base of the tower. The less you know going in, the better, but maaaaybe don’t bring the kids or the squeamish.
Uniting a gory war movie with horror makes perfect sense. No other genres traffic in as much viscera as these two. Despite their diverging settings, tones, and themes, violence often is the common thread, with either type of film just as likely to show you a character holding his own intestines. “Overlord” explores how truly horrific war is, even before it brings in its horror elements. Instead, from the film’s early moments, cinematography from Laurie Rose and Fabian Wagner puts the audience right into the chaos and trauma the soldiers experienced, and when we’re brought into true horror-movie mode about halfway through the film, it doesn’t feel jarring. We – and certainly the characters – have already been through hell; this is just another circle.
Director Avery (“Son of a Gun“) does take a premise that would feel at home in a cheap-o exploitation movie and makes it look like Paramount actually spent some money on the film. The early aerial scenes look great, whether they’re emphasizing the scale of a crowded field of fighting or showing us an intimate look at what a paratrooper might have experienced in their fall to earth. The later gore is impressively icky, earning more than a few audible reactions.
The script from Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith is fun, silly and not too bright. It often relies on the stupidity of its characters to move things in the direction Ray and Smith want things to go, even if the near-term result is the audience rolling their eyes. These characters should be smarter than this, but it’s easy to judge from the safety chair where there are no Nazis shooting at me.
J.J. Abrams serves as producer, and it’s clear why his Bad Robot stamp is on the film. This isn’t a “Cloverfield” sequel or prequel, but they share some of the same mutant DNA, along with the Abrams-produced TV show “Fringe.” But while the “Cloverfield” films had some squirm-inducing moments in the PG-13 franchise, “Overlord” really earns its R rating with some nightmarish visuals that I won’t be able to excise from my brain anytime soon. Avery really loves the gross-out moments – as did our audience – and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he wore out his VHS copies of “Toxic Avenger” and “Re-Animator.”
Avery also seems like the type of filmmaker who has a love for ’80s-era Kurt Russell (don’t we all?), and casting his son here is perfect. Wyatt Russell has the anti-hero air down, and it’s a great balance with the morality of Adepo’s Boyce, who is deemed too soft for war by his fellow paratroopers. But Boyce is our hero, and Adepo makes him someone we want to follow and we want to survive, which seems like an ever-more difficult task in this funhouse version of World War II. As Chloe, Ollivier is actually given plenty to do – a rarity for a woman in the genre – and the actress really rises to the occasion in her first big movie.
It’s a depressingly relevant time to have your audience rooting against Nazis, but here we are in 2018. The terrors of “Overlord” are fictional (I hope), but the real-life experiments by the Nazis hang like a shadow over the film. It doesn’t shy away from the pain of their victims here, but the movie does a good job of separating the scenes of horror at the on-screen cruelty with the whoops and cheers in the more celebratory moments.
“Overlord” is not your grandpa’s World War II movie. Avery’s film has more in common with “Dead Snow” than “Saving Private Ryan,” but Steven Spielberg might still feel a kinship with this director whose love for genre films is clear in every bloody frame. [B]