OVERLORD : Tuesday 18th December 2018.

I saw 'OVERLORD' this week, and here we have an American WWII horror offering that spins a new slant on the historical D-Day Landings. Directed by Western Australian Julius Avery, whose only other feature so far has been 'Son of a Gun' in 2014, this film is Co-Produced by J.J. Abrams and is set on the eve of D-Day. Initially thought to be the fourth instalment in the 'Cloverfield' series, this rumour was subsequently denied by Abrams earlier in 2018. The film was released in the US on 9th November, cost US$38M to make, has so far grossed US$42M and has generated mixed or average Reviews so far.

On the eve of D-Day in early June 1944, American paratroopers are preparing to drop in behind enemy lines to penetrate the walls of a fortified church and destroy a radio transmitter. When their plane is shot down the five remaining soldiers Corporal Ford (Wyatt Russell), Private Boyce (Jovan Adepo), sniper Tibbet (John Magaro), photographer Chase (Iain De Caestecker) and Dawson (Jacob Anderson) must continue on foot.

When Dawson inadvertently steps on a landmine and is killed, the remaining four must continue steadfastly onward. In doing so they encounter French woman Chloe (Mathilde Ollivier) who agrees to escort the group to their ultimate destination. They learn en route that Chloe lives with her younger brother Paul (Gianny Taufer) and her aunt who was the subject of Nazi experiments in the vicinity of the church and has consequently been horribly disfigured and is in serious ill health. The group arrive at Chloe's home in the village where the church is located, and take time to take stock of their munitions and rest up, agreeing to start their mission at 3:00am, and have the church destroyed to rubble by 6:00am - the planned time of the commencement of the allied forces landings on the coast of Normandy.

Corporal Ford orders Tibbet and Chase to check on the planned rendezvous site in the event that any of the other soldiers from their downed aircraft survived and made it. Meanwhile, Ford and Boyce hang back while a routine inspection is conduced on the household by a Nazi patrol, led by SS Hauptsturmführer Wafner (Pilou Asbaek). The two soldiers remain motionless upstairs in the attic looking down on the unfolding events below through cracks in the floorboards. When Wafner attempts to rape Chloe, Boyce intervenes and they take him prisoner, with Ford rendering the Nazi Officer unconscious with a swift headbutt.

Boyce goes off in search of Tibbet and Chase to the rendezvous point, but en route comes close to the perimeter fence of the church. There he sees a cart load of naked disfigured bodies all lined up and torched several time with two flamethrowers, overseen by some official looking doctor type wearing spectacles and a white coat. Boyce is chased down by a very angry dog, and hot on his heels he manages to evade attack by jumping into the back of a truck containing the dead bodies of several of his paratrooper colleagues. The truck passes through the heavily fortified gates of the church, and the bodies are unloaded by two German soldiers. Boyce escapes the truck and begins to snoop around. He comes across a lab where seemingly bizarre experiments are being undertaken on humans.

Boyce is shocked and horrified by what he has witnessed and notices a black tar like substance that is rising up from under ground that seems to be distilled into some kind of serum, which is being injected into the less than willing patients. Boyce takes a sample of the serum already prepped up in a syringe, and rescues Rosenfeld (Dominic Applewhite) a fellow paratrooper being prepped up for experimentation, who was captured by the Nazis. The pair escape the church building through a waste tunnel.

Boyce and Rosenfeld make it back to Chloe's house, where Rosenfeld has his wounds attended to. Wafner refuses to explain what the serum is when questioned and as a result is strung up and gets a serious beating at the hands of Ford. As the squad prepare their assault on the church, Wafner attempts to escape, shooting and killing Chase in the process. Boyce is distraught by his death, and seeing the syringe close to hand injects Chase with the serum. Within minutes the serum brings Chase back to life, but he immediately begins to mutate, showing inhuman strength, a resistance to rapid close quarter gunfire, and turns hostile, forcing Boyce to pulverise his head with his rifle butt to stop him. In the ensuing chaos, Wafner escapes taking Paul as hostage, although he sustains a serious gunshot wound to his face by Ford in the subsequent shootout.

With time quickly ticking down the zero hour of 6:00am, Boyce convinces Ford that their priority must be to destroy the underground laboratories. So Tibbet and Rosenfeld are dispatched to create as much mayhem as they can at the main entrance and kill as many pesky Nazi's as the can possibly mow down between them, leaving Ford, Boyce and Chloe to enter the church through the same waste tunnel that Boyce had fled from earlier. Ford and Boyce split up to plant explosive charges - Ford to the radio control room and Boyce to the labs, while Chloe goes off in search of brother Paul.

While setting the charges, Ford is attacked by a mutated Wafner, who had previously injected himself with a potent mix of untested serums, which gave him near superhuman strength, the ability to heal his wounds while driving him increasingly insane. A fight breaks out and Wafner this time gains the upper hand. Boyce intervenes and is able to distract Wafner, so allowing the now badly injured Ford to inject himself with a sample of the serum.

They fight again, but the combination of Boyce and Ford this time forces Wafner down the pit where the compound was discovered courtesy of a gas bottle explosion. Wafner is down but he's not out, and in the ensuing minutes it takes Wafner to climb out of the pit, a badly injured Ford forces Boyce to leave him behind to finish what he started. Ford ignites a fuse to a stick of gelignite and waits for an advancing Wafner and now a number of other Nazi soldiers risen from the dead to approach, before kaboom!

Boyce successfully blows up the laboratory and with it the radio tower and the church escaping just in time for the church and radio tower to collapse behind him in a ball of flame and rubble. Following the destruction of the said target building, Boyce reports in to his commanding officer who has set up a base in the village, that is was Ford's decision to lay the explosives inside the church rather than outside to ensure its destruction, while electing to not mention the serum or the lab as Ford believed that neither side should have ownership of such a product. The officer in charge accepts Boyce's recounting of the story, and advises him that his company, what remains, will be reassigned to a new company as the war rages on.

'Overlord' starts out as any WWII actioner might, with a plane carrying its cargo of Uncle Sam's paratroopers flying over enemy lines at night with a clear cut mission in mind. As the tension mounts and the sky all around turns orange as the enemy anti-aircraft fire explodes in comic book colours of that era creating mayhem aboard and downing a squadron of airborne troop carriers wiping out too many lives in an instant, you just get a sense that this film is gonna be in yer face! And this where the normalcy of a war film of the modern era comes to an end, giving way to a horror Sci-Fi mash-up that delivers on the body horror, the gore and the nigh on immortal almost indestructible Nazi soldiers and French locals that are the subjects of clandestine underground laboratory experiments. The film is good fun, at times intense, often completely insane, the FX are well executed and it provides an alternate D-Day Landing account possibly like none you have ever seen before . . . . which is no bad thing! That said, it was not quite the horror gore fest I was imagining, and Boyce as the lead character seems as indestructible as those other antagonists all around him and manages to stumble around the old church with all its hidden secrets for the duration with nary a scrape. That said, for lovers of WWII actioners, blood and gore, wanton death and destruction underpinned by a reasonably tightly woven (alternative) story, then this is the film for you.

'Overlord' merits three claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard, from a possible five.

-Steve, at Odeon Online-