Lordy

The Cloverfield movies might be one of the weirdest film franchises around: a not-truly-connected anthology featuring a found-footage take on the classic city-destroying monster, a brilliant psychological thriller with an oddball twist, and a subpar space horror dumped to Netflix. The only real common thread to the Cloverfield movies is that they're released by Bad Robot, J.J. Abrams' production company. And because of this, people not wanting to be fooled again are always wondering when a new and mysterious Bad Robot movie comes along: is this another Cloverfield?

So it was in 2018, with the release of Overlord. The movie's secretive premise was barely teased in its promotion: you got monster movie in my World War II film? It was a cast peppered with "I know that guy from somewhere" actors, but without any big names most people would know. How much was it a war movie? How much was it a monster movie? What kind of monster movie was it? Alien invasion? Zombies? No one really knew. Maybe it was a Cloverfield movie but not explicitly labeled as such, after The Cloverfield Paradox had sort of tainted the brand?

Without giving those secrets away, I can say that Overlord plays it straight for an almost uncomfortably long time. For the first half hour of the less-than-two-hour movie, you're watching a normal "important mission for the war effort" movie. It's punctuated by elaborate (though not always convincing) visual effects and flashy camera tricks, but it's standard war movie fare from the stock characters to the stock plot elements. Though it is familiar, it's not quite boring... unless you actually know too much about the movie. If you're unaware the story is heading for a sharp turn, you'd probably stop expecting one. If you're wondering when the pulp sci-fi is going to arrive, the wait is awfully long.

When the fantastical finally does arrive, it's very much more "horror" than "sci-fi." And in particular, the subgenre of horror not as interested in suspense as in extreme violence and gore. Here, not knowing what to expect perhaps works against the movie; while there are great movies of this type, you're never going to "sneak one" on an audience member who doesn't like gore and make them enjoy it. Maybe the assumption is that war movies are an often-violent genre, so getting this gross shouldn't come as a surprise?

In any case, if you like the bloodiest of the bloody horror movies, Overlord may well be for you. There are veritable fountains of blood in this movie, along with body trauma and tons of upsetting imagery. And this is decidedly not in the school of filmmaking that tries to put you in the action all the time with a shaky roving camera. Most of the time, the camera lingers on these horrific images for you to take them in in all their gory. If the digital effects aren't always top notch, the makeup effects and live-on-set gags definitely are. The movie knows what kind of movie it wants to be, and spends its production dollars accordingly, aiming straight at the bullseye for viewers into this sort of film.

Like I said, most people would not know most of the cast. Still, there are a few people in it who give fun performances. Pilou Asbæk, who had fun chewing the scenery as Euron Grejoy in the later seasons of Game of Thrones, here plays another villain reveling in being a villain. Bokeem Woodbine has fun as a leader tossing off war movie tropes. Iain De Caestecker gets to use the tools from his Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. toolbox, being outwardly weak until a big moment when he isn't.

The reason I keep harping on expectations here is because I believe there is a particular type of horror movie fan that would probably really like Overlord. Generally, I like not to be spoiled about anything before watching a movie, but I have to concede that in this case, I might have liked this one better had I known a bit better what tone to expect. But as I came to it, I found it a pretty average C. It felt to me like two separate movies that didn't quite go together -- either of which might have been built out to something stronger on its own.