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COD: Zombies – The Movie
Overlord American soldiers take on Nazi undead in the closest thing we’ll get to a COD: Zombies The Movie.
Once rumoured to be the next chapter in producer JJ Abrams’ Cloverfield series, WW2 horror Overlord has more in common with Wolfenstein and COD: Zombies than that beloved anthology series. Like those two titans of gaming, it offers ample B-movie thrills, but isn’t necessarily the sharpest blade on the weapons bench.
After a tense opening in which a plane carrying American troops Boyce (Jovan Adepo) and Ford (Wyatt Russell) is shot down behind enemy lines, the pair forge ahead with a critical mission to disable a Nazi communications tower. So far, so Private Ryan. But the mission changes when Boyce discovers a research facility where a near-invincible undead army is being created for Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich.
WW2/horror movie mashups are nothing new – the very real horrors of war sit neatly alongside the imagined nightmares of the horror genre – and Overlord is instantly familiar stuff. But director Julius Avery knows how to stage a satisfying, spectacularly gory set-piece, making impressive use of unbroken single takes, including a staggering escape from an exploding network of tunnels.
The cast of characters are an archetypal bunch, particularly Pilou Asbæk’s Nazi git Wafner, and it slows to a crawl in the middle as the troops hole up in the house of a French local to regroup. But the gradual transition from played-straight war movie to OTT occult horror is highly effective, and if it doesn’t put you in the mood for shooting Nazi zombies nothing will. Jordan Farley