Fans of JJ Abrams may know about his Cloverfield series (about aliens), but little is known about his latest project, Overlord. Set in WWI in a quiet Nazi-occupied French village, Overlord is very much a war movie first, and horror flick second (actually, it’s less of a horror movie than it is about horrific monstrosities committed during the war).
This screening of Overlord for the Scream Asia Film Festival 2018 is actually ahead of its official global release date in November.
The movie’s first 20 minutes is a hardcore war film, complete with high octane action that puts you right in the hot seat – with bombs exploding everywhere, and bullets flying all over you. War itself is gory, never mind the horror show that comes afterwards.
The story follows a small team of survivors – part of an aerial crew sent to parachute into a quiet French village to knock out a German-occupied comms tower in a church – who are holed up in a home belonging to a young woman who lives with her 8-year old brother and ‘very sick’ aunt (ok, she’s a zombie, but a harmless one).
As you’d expect, the village is crawling with trigger-happy German soldiers and the US Army boys have to get past them in order to infiltrate the church tower to blow it up. But along the way, the team discovers that the Nazis have been experimenting with a serum to reanimate their dead to make them ‘1,000-year soldiers’ – a zombie army.
So, instead of simply blowing up the tower, the team now have to figure out how to kill two birds with one stone. This is partly due to the fact that one of their own comrades was injected with the serum after he was shot – he did come back to life, but only as an angry zombie, forcing other members to kill him (again) by smashing his head in.
There is a lot of gore in the film, and we’re not just talking about zombies with gaping jaws or bones for arms. However, don’t expect this to be a full-on zombie movie where the protagonists are chased by an undead army – the movie is first and foremost about the war, and the zombie situation is akin to the real-world horrors of WWII holocaust experiments.
Overlord is a high-budget war-horror movie, heaped with a ton of gore, a dash of WWII realism, and peppered with a number of jump scares. It’s an entertaining movie for those who love the genre. Just don’t call it a zombie movie.
Overlord was part of the inaugural Scream Asia Film Festival 2018 which happens until 28 October 2018. You can catch it when it officially opens in cinemas in November.
