Not Another Nazi Zombie Movie

Film: Overlord
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.

Genre mash-ups are fun when they’re done right. Combine Westerns and science fiction and you can walk out the other side with Serenity. Of course, you can also combine Westerns and science fiction and walk out the other side with Wild Wild West or Cowboys and Aliens. You have to be careful when you’re blending genres. Add in a third genre, and things can get very strange indeed. And that’s where we’re going to pick up Overlord, an alternate universe World War II movie that is going to throw in some weird science and some zombies for a war/sci-fi/zombie horror Neapolitan ice cream of cinema.

If you know even a little World War II history, you’re probably aware that “Overlord” was the codename for the D-Day invasion of Normandy. In this alternate history, we’re showing up on June 5th, the day before the invasion. A group of paratroopers are preparing to drop behind enemy lines with the goal of taking out a radio jamming tower to help with air cover for the following day. We can tell this is an alternate history right away because our paratrooper unit is racially integrated.

After suffering heavy fire, our paratroops hit the ground and try to reconvene with each other. PFC Edward Boyce (Jovan Adepo) watches his sergeant (Bokeem Woodbine) killed by German soldiers. He meets up with a few other members of his unit, specifically Corporal Ford (Wyatt Russell), PFC Tibbet (John Magaro), and Pvt Chase (Iain De Caestecker). They also encounter Chloe (Mathilde Ollivier), a local who eventually agrees to help them in their mission.

What soon becomes apparent is that there is much more going on in this town than a radio jamming tower. There are dark experiments happening here and many of the local people, including Chloe’s aunt, have been disfigured. All of this seems to be coming at the direction of Captain Wafner (Pilou Asbaek), who essentially threatens Chloe that he will take measures against her young brother if she does not have sex with him. This causes the Americans to act and propels us into finding out exactly what is going on.

What is going on is, more or less, terrible experimentation in an effort to create super soldiers. There is a terrible substance that has been flowing underneath the village and the German scientists have been experimenting with it, hoping to create soldiers who are nearly impossible to kill and who will not feel pain or fear. The serum that they have created works, after a fashion. It causes terrible deformities, but it also does make the person injected nearly impossible to kill. Also nearly impossible to control. And, naturally, it brings the dead back so they can keep fighting.

And that’s what we’re going to be following for the rest of the film. Boyce and Ford are going to clash over tactics—Ford wants nothing to detract from the mission while Boyce wants to save Chloe’s brother—but all of this is building up to zombies and confrontation and a final conflict. This will involve Tibbet and a rescued PFC Rosenfeld (Dominic Applewhite), since it’s Chase whose untimely demise teaches the team a great deal about the serum that is being produced.

Overlord is a fun idea for a movie. There’s a lot here that matches up with some other genre films but this one goes in different directions. War and horror movies should be more closely tied. Plenty of war movies are horrific, of course, but don’t dive head-first into the idea of supernatural horror. All of the genres here blend very well together. Overlord neatly fits into all three categories easily.

What I want is more zombies. They’re hinted at through a lot of the film, but we don’t get a ton of them, and they’re what makes this film different, fun, and interesting. I get that we have to have a final conflict, and that we’re expecting a showdown between a main character and Wafner, but that doesn’t mean that that’s all we want. There are expectations to be filled in any movie that is even tangentially a zombie film, and Overlord goes out of its way to not fulfill them. If undead super soldiers are going to be a MacGuffin of the plot, we need to see them much more frequently and in force.

Overlord is a great idea with a bit disappointing execution because of this. Sci-fi fans and war movie fans aren’t showing up for this one. It’s a horror movie first; the science fiction is a part of the horror and the fact that this takes place during a war is more of the setting than anything. Give the horror nerds what they want and seldom get: a movie that leans into the horror it wants to present.

Why to watch Overlord: It’s a great combination of genres.
Why not to watch: Honestly, it needs more zombies.