OVERLORD
Nazi Zombies!!!! WOOOT!!!!
Okay, that’s the silly fanboy
horror geek in me. Two of the most “guilt-free” monsters ever created
are the zombies and the Nazis. Bring them together and you have a
guilt-free experience of blood, guts, and full bore adrenaline body
horror and nasty nasty NASTY blood and guts GORE!!!! BRING IT ON!!!!
Testosterone pumping, the movie
starts and I’m all in…. We’re on a plane, we’re headed into Nazi
territory, they’re shooting the plane, they’re jumping, and it’s chaos
and madness and war war WAR!!!! And as they make their way through a
night-enshrouded wilderness, hunted by Nazis, desperate to aid to
mission that will secure Allied victory… my wife leans over to me and
whispers “This is boring.”
*blink*
Boring?!?!!! I shake my head in
wonder and point to a screen where a landmine is blowing apart a poor
American soldier, where there are hanging corpses in the trees, and
where the German Nazi Forces are stalking the dark wilderness outside a
small town in France. The mission depends on taking out that
communications tower hidden in the bowels of the church where a
scientist is performing experiments that will revive dead flesh.
Led by a demolitions expert (Wyatt
Russell – Son of Kurt and Goldie), the rag tag soldiers are few in
number and ill-trained to boot. French translator Ed Boyce (Jovan
Adepo), sniper Tibbet (John Magaro) and photographer Morton Chase (Iain
De Caestecker) must trust a village woman (Mathilde Ollivier) to lead
them through the forest, to the village, and then plan their strategy
while hiding in her home near the church. But it isn’t long before they
learn about the mysterious experiments taking place and are left
battling something far more insidious than just the Third Reich.
Boring?
No, friends… this movie is NOT
boring, despite the eye-rolling protestations of my wife. And even she
perked up when the soldiers finally learn what the experiments really
mean and what dangers it represents.
A solid 8 out of 10.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
This Coen Brothers oddity hit
Netflix, skipping a theatrical run and leaving me to feel a little
cheated as a result. But, at the same time, I can’t say that this would
have necessarily been one of their usual hits with fans. With a series
of six Western Vignettes, the Coen’s spin a bit of an awkward film with
strange characters that is consistently entertaining but not precisely
on the mainstream. They draw some amazing performances from a number of
well-known character actors; including John Lithgow, Liam Neeson, James
Franco, and others.
The film is often very dark, very
bleak, and also very funny. It hits several comedic points, especially
in the opening vignette about a traveling balladeer turned gunslinger.
He’s an open, congenial, happy and cold hearted killer of men.
Punctuated with acts of terrible violence, the light-hearted nature of
the first vignette sets the tone for the rest of the series as we go
from one unfortunate character to the next. Every moment was exquisitely
planned to bring a depth of emotion and builds to the final vignette
featuring five strangers traveling by stage-coach, a ride filled with
dread and uncertainty.
Artfully shot with some amazing
cinematography, I feel that the film would have looked amazing on the
large screen and the sweeping landscapes felt far too small for the
television. And this is probably the largest critique I can make
regarding this feature- it’s too small for Netflix. Like a few other
releases in recent months, the direct to streaming platform may be fine
for convenience but ultimately harms the movie-going experience on the
whole. I don’t just want to be entertained with a story, I want to sit
in a theater and be amazed and transported. I want to have an
experience. But this isn’t the fault of the film itself, but rather it’s
distribution.
9.5 out of 10.
The Endless
After escaping from a cult nearly a
decade prior, two brothers return after receiving a strange video. They
come to find the cult is still living in a barren stretch of mountain
desert inhabited by meth-farms, drug dealers, and other strange
inhabitants. The brothers are welcomed warmly by the cult, fed, and they
experience a kind of homecoming and acceptance that they never saw in
the outside world. As one of the brothers begins to feel tempted for a
permanent return, the other brother continues to distrust and question
the strange atmosphere and behavior that he’s seeing.
That’s it. That’s the movie-
that’s the absolute MOST you should know before seeing the film. What
happens next is a strange story inspired by the madness of Lovecraft and
the weirdness of Kafka. The world is not what we think, things are
certainly not as they seem, and every trope one would expect is
abandoned for a story designed to ask questions and never force an easy
answer. This movie is just so fucking WEIRD, man! And the characters
react perfectly to their increasingly bizarre situation, driving the
narrative to an exciting conclusion.
10 out of 10.
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