Jean-Paul’s rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: An effective but in the end, disappointing horror film because of a pacing problem. Has some amazing war action in it, though.

The premise of “Overlord” is brilliant. It is set during World War Two just before the Normandy invasion. A team of paratroopers needs to drop into a remote location in order to take out a radio tower that would surely cause the Normandy invasion to fail. As the clickbait articles say, what they find there will surprise you! The radio tower is just outside a small town on top of an underground bunker and inside that bunker are horrors beyond those you find in war.

The movie starts with all the main characters in an airplane flying towards their mission. They come under heavy fire as they approach their target and what follows is some wonderful special effects and camera work as you follow the main character Boyce (Jovan Adepo) from the airplane and through his harrowing descent to the ground. War is a horror show in and of itself and “Overlord” effectively portrays that both in the air and on the ground. This goes on for a while too. In fact, for the first 45 minutes or so, you feel like you’re simply in a war movie before it starts peppering in all these minor clues about the horror within the horror that is about to begin.

The horror portion of the film is a little cliche, but not in a burdensome way. You’ve got your brutish Nazi SS officer and your sadistic Nazi scientist and your rag-tag band of heroes and your damsel-not-quite-in-distress. These are good cliches for a horror film to build on and they work well for the story being told, but the problem is all in the pacing. As the movie switches from war film to horror film, everything slows down and it kind of ruins the effectiveness of the horrors yet to come. There is a really good creepiness factor to everything that follows and a satisfying fight with the big bad at the end, but much of the in-between feels like a lost opportunity for lots of fun stuff to happen.

I am being a bit nit-picky as I did legitimately enjoy the movie. I mean who besides our President doesn’t like seeing Nazis getting what’s coming to them? The war parts were great fun and the movie is worth seeing just for them and the horror parts have enough of it to be entertaining.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: Ridiculous premise. Cliches galore. Lots of lose ends. Some moderately cool submarine action.

Pretend for a second that you are the U.S. Navy. For years, you have been overshadowed by your much cooler brothers: The Air Force with all their cool gadgets and space stuff, the Marines with their oorah and general bad-assedness, heck, even the Army has drones and cyber-security and whatnot! Sure, the Navy has their SEALs,  but even if you asked people what branch the Navy SEALs belonged to they’d probably say Marines. What’s a poor Navy to do to up their cred? Create “Hunter Killer” would be my guess because this is the type of movie you get when a bunch of people who think it would be cool to make a movie but have no idea how to make a movie. Here is a conversation that I assumed happened between the Navy and the editor and director of this movie:

Navy: You know what would be cool? Let’s shoot a scene where it shows the submarine submerging quickly and all the crewmen on the bridge are shown tilted in order to stay upright since the submarine is going down at a steep angle!

Director: Hey, that’s pretty neat! I never knew that happened. We will film that!

Editor: I’ll throw these 5 seconds in showing them all tilt as the submarine starts its dive.

Navy: Yeah, but what if we throw in more? People are talking and stuff when this happens. Lets have some dialogue while they’re all tilted.

Director: Ooh, yeah, I like it! I’ll film these lines with them both standing tilted and various other ways.

Editor: Um, that’s probably unnecessary and will look a little weird, but I see where you’re coming from. We’ll throw in the next few lines with them tilted.

Navy: And what if we cut away to some other action happening in the sub to show what other people are doing while the sub is diving and then cut back to everyone tilted? And get this, what if we show them like that for the entire length it takes for the submarine to actually dive that far?

Director: You have given me money so I will do this thing you ask of me!

Editor: *head explodes*

Yes, that is an actual scene in the movie. Add to that a bucket full of Navy cliches and dubious plot points and what you have is a real flop of a film. The movie starts with a U.S. submarine being blown up by a rogue Russian submarine for reasons that are never really explained except for the fact that now the U.S. needs to send another submarine to see what happened to their missing sub. It basically gets more preposterous from there. Treaties are broken with abandon. Plots are hatched with little forethought. It’s a complete mess of a movie.

There are a bunch of submarine movies that are pretty awesome. This is not one of them. Go rent “Hunt For Red October” or “Crimson Tide” or “Yellow Submarine” rather than “Hunter Killer” if you have a submarine fix that needs sating.