Overlord

It sounded more promising on paper. Overlord is a well made action horror film with undead, Nazis and undead Nazis. It's just that they didn't have a lot of money to spend on it, so it takes a long time to get going, and in the end Julius Avery and J.J. Abrams don't show enough to make it a real hit. But thanks to the good cast, the proper cinematic violence, and solid pacing towards the end, it's ultimately pretty good, though I guess more was expected. (06/18/2019)

Audiovisually it’s great, but in terms of script and direction, it’s a shabby grindhouse shoot ‘em up with a story that would work better as a video game – two thirds of relatively realistic war action and cheap psychology, followed by a final level tuned to action-horror where you have to kill the enemies with something a bit thicker than a stick. In a film, this approach is twice a shame: on the one hand, it can’t fulfil the expectations of a brisk and gripping carnage, and on the other, it excels in the impression of a serious war drama that takes the plot with the undead very seriously, but finishes it with an avalanche of action clichés and a wisecracking self-sacrificing hero. It’s not bad, because within the set standards, the script unfolds in a logical and well thought-out way, but it’s such a shame that the premise remains unfulfilled because they chose motives that are the total opposite (we follow a war mission into which the zombies get somewhat by mistake, and it doesn’t feel like the cruel, realistic horror they probably intended), and it’s too soft, too (it should have been much stronger visually). The excellent opening twenty minutes and the interesting alternative to the war genre with lots of minor ideas are worth the attention, but don’t expect a great B-movie with an intentionally silly bloodfest. For many people that might be good, but not for me. (02/04/2019)

A bit of a cheat on the viewer from my point of view, because instead of jacked-up zombie action (as the posters enticed), it's basically an unremarkable war movie with a stylish look and an altogether appealing cast. The whole storyline with the helper on the French side wasn't entirely bad, but I honestly expected a more significant revenge payoff (given the nastiness the French girl was subjected to). As a one-off, though, it wasn't bad. (06/28/2020)

If Overlord was a typical war film, I would have probably given it a boo rating, but it was a standard slasher film for people who can appreciate Wolfenstein or Resident Evil, so I enjoyed the mayhem and suppressed my criticism of the historical inaccuracies. It would have been pointless in this case anyway. If you don't mind a few hectoliters of spilled blood, the occasional deeper insight into the human anatomy, and a little French baseball fan, just relax, switch off your brain (except for the basic functions, that is) and there's a pretty good chance you'll be entertained. (03/08/2019)

An over-the-top war battle between five American paratroopers and Nazis brewing experimental medicine in France to transform dead bodies into mutated super-soldiers. This is a total victory of polished production values in an otherwise entirely below-average story full of one-dimensional characters and stupid American clichés. The film is a lot like Frankenstein's Army, with an extremely generous budget and ostentatiously exhibition-like action scenes, relying heavily on horror stylized elements and explicit brutality. When you have a leaky and stupid screenplay, first-rate assertiveness and a large budget seldom tend to save it. The visual gloss can work as a band-aid, but in this case it peels off quickly if you don’t buy into the very impressive parachute introduction and realize that the rest the film takes place in two locations, that you can count the zombies on one hand, and that even the best tricks and masks don’t cover up the barren dialogues, lack of exaggeration, lack of imagination, a predictable ordinary plot, and the fact that a six-year-old boy with ball in hand constantly gets in the way of the heroes, probably to make it even more American. (10/13/2018)