Terror in the tunnel
War is scary as hell and worse when it goes underground
There’s a reason not many horror movies are set during wartime; real war is already hellish enough without adding mythical monsters to the mix.
Then again, that hasn’t stopped J.J. Abrams from producing Overlord, which hits theatres Nov. 9, telling the story of American soldiers fighting both Nazis and zombies after the D-Day landings.
But Abrams has been beaten to the punch by Trench 11, a slick Canadian production that won the audience award at the Toronto After Dark film festival last October, and now gets a wide release. Not only did it hit screens a year before Overlord; it takes place a full 27 years earlier, in the closing days of the First World War.
Rossif Sutherland stars as Lieut. Berton, a Canadian soldier and tunnelling expert who has survived an unexpected underground collapse and now just wants to spend time with his French girlfriend and a bottle of booze.
No luck. The Brits have discovered a vast underground bunker abandoned by the retreating Germans, and need help in finding out what’s down there. They suspect they’ll find a chemical weapons factory.
Berton joins an international force of three American soldiers and a British doctor, all under the command of Major Jennings (Winnipeg-born Ted Atherton giving it his best stiff upper lip).
Leo Scherman directs and co-wrote the screenplay, though I would argue he put too much into the latter. There’s far too much exposition on this expedition, some of it flirting with 21st-century speech patterns. No one wants a war of words.
But things improve cinematically when the party moves underground. As far as the characters are concerned, everything just got much worse, with danger lurking in every shadowy corner, of which there are many.
Trench 11 is a slightly uneven outing, never quite sure if it wants to jumpscare us, creep us out, or just science us into fear.
There are some inventive head wounds in the service of the story, which includes a German brigade that shows up with its own plan for the bunker.
The result is a decent thriller, and more than enough scary moments and twists to satisfy until the next great war/horror comes along.