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.