“Overlord” mixes the war film with horror…of the supernatural kind. The screenplay is presented by Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith that is brought to the screen under the direction of Julius Avery.
A group of WWW II paratroopers survive an air attack and are out to destroy a radio tower in the heart of Germany, an act which will aid the Allies in their struggle against the Nazis.
Jivan Adepo plays a young private who infiltrates the compound but finds that the denizens of a nearby village are subjects of some ghastly experiments. By that, I mean experiments more terrible and implausible than those recorded by history.
Let’s face it…the story is rather ridiculous, but I ended up enjoying it more than I expected when I just started to roll with it. The visual effects were impressive. The mutated results of the experiments were quite formidable and appropriately disgusting.
Those that made up the surviving squad members were a little cliché but likeable. There were even some quite heroic moments from the American soldiers in the face of even more horrors of war.
Pilou Asbaek plays the repulsive lead villain and does well enough even when it seems to have gone over the top.
The performances were pretty solid. There are some glaring historical inaccuracies, but I found myself being more tolerant of them as the film progressed.
As with any film of this sort, it’s not a masterpiece, but it serves its purpose as being a macabre yet reasonably entertaining distraction from the pressures of real life.
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