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Weird war

American soldiers get up close and personal with some mutant Nazi soldiers in Overlord, one of the weirder films to make it to the big screen in 2018.

J.J. Abrams and his Bad Robot company have come up with a peculiar one this time. While initial reports had this one as a Cloverfield movie, it is not. This is a standalone—A weird, bizarre and freaky standalone.

U.S. World War II paratroopers, led by Kurt Russell’s look-and-sound-alike son Wyatt as demolition expert Ford, land in a Nazi-occupied French town intent upon destroying a Nazi communication tower. It’s the eve of D-Day, and the beginning of director Julius Avery’s flick is an effective war movie as those paratroopers, including Jovan Adepo as Boyce and John Magaro as Tibbet, must escape a crashing plane and then evade Nazis on the ground.

Soon after linking up with local resident Chloe (Mathilde Ollivier), the soldiers find themselves in a safehouse. It’s your typical small French town house, excepting for the fact that Chloe’s aunt down the hall is ill, and we aren’t talking whooping cough. Wyatt remains focused on the tower mission, but Boyce inadvertently stumbles upon the root cause of that aunt’s bumpy condition.

Nazi doctors are seriously screwing with dead people’s biochemistry in an effort to create a thousand-year army. This results in some messed up experiments like Chloe’s aunt, but also brings about superhuman Nazi soldier zombies with direct orders to tear people apart. Yikes!

The whole Nazi zombie thing has been done before (various movies, Call of Duty video games) but never with such authentic style and gory aplomb. Credit Avery for a nice slowburn as his movie goes from army mission adventure to Sam Raimi-style crazed horror when Boyce discovers strange cocoons inside an old church.

The first legitimate appearance of a full blown, roid-raging dead Nazi is a genuinely good and super scary time. There’s also an unfortunate incident with another guy that involves collar bones shooting out of his skin due to massive contortions, and I must give high marks to the makeup effects team on that one. Avery made a concerted effort to actually use practical special effects rather than CGI, so much of the film’s gore and gross stuff is made from scratch—a good thing, because when the film does use CGI, it isn’t great.

Pilou Asbæk makes for a memorable villain as a Nazi officer who winds up mutated without ever dying. He’s the ultimate Nazi/Zombie/Superhuman/ Dickweed, with a face that reminds me a bit of Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight. He apparently went through five hours of makeup for these scenes, and I must say that it was time well spent. He totally sucks in a good way.

There’s talk of remaking Escape From New York. Please don’t do that, but if you should, quit screwing around with casting the likes of Gerard Butler as Snake Plissken and go ahead and give Wyatt Russell the job. He’s the son of Kurt and Goldie Hawn, and he’s got dad’s superior jawline and an identical speech cadence. His determined demolition expert is a nice balance of hero and total asshole, something his pop also does well.

Adepo is actually the one with the most screen time, and he makes for a good, slightly unreliable and nervous central character. Ollivier has a nice moment with a flame thrower that reminds me of Ripley in Aliens. Magaro is so authentic as a New York native World War II soldier, you’d think he arrived on set every day via time machine.

At a time when studios are starting to release their Oscar favorites, it’s interesting to see something like Overlord post-Halloween. The movie doesn’t score major points for originality, but it’s a good time nonetheless for those of us who enjoy seeing bad things done to Nazi types. Ω

“The heating bill in here is outrageous.”

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1Bohemian Rhapsody Rami Malek gives it his all as Freddie Mercury, the late lead singer of Queen, in the new biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. That, and a competent recreation of Queen’s Live Aid domination, are just about the only good things you can say about this mostly embarrassing effort to memorialize an incredible person and his sadly short life. The movie basically takes Mercury’s legacy, completely screws with his life’s timeline and makes up a bunch of unnecessary events to pad its 135-minute running time. So much of this film isn’t true, and the fact that they took this hard-living rock star’s life and homogenized it for a PG-13 film doesn’t help make it feel anything close to authentic. Mercury died from pneumonia while battling AIDS in 1991. He wasn’t diagnosed with the illness until 1987. This film, partially directed by Bryan Singer and then finished by Dexter Fletcher, has Mercury learning of his diagnosis before his incredible 1985 Live Aid performance, even telling the band of his illness shortly before they went on stage. This is complete bullshit and a total injustice to Mercury and his band’s legacy. Malek, acting through a big set of fake teeth made to capture the look of Mercury’s four extra incisors, is decent in the role. He actually sang on set, his voice blended with a Mercury soundalike to keep the movie from being a completely lip-synched affair. The musical sequences, including the Live Aid gig, are fun to watch. But, hey, if I want good Queen music, I can just watch the videos of Queen. There’s a movie happening between those musical sequences, and that movie is terrible, a messed-up bit of fakery that prompts a lot of unintentional laughter. There’s a great, truthful movie to be made about the life of Freddie Mercury. Bohemian Rhapsody doesn’t even come close to being that movie.

3Bad Times at the El Royale Writer-Director Drew Goddard, in hiding as far as feature directing goes since his 2012 The Cabin in the Woods, assembles an all-star cast for one nutty, and sometimes a little too cute for its own good, movie. The star of this movie is the El Royale, a fictional hotel based on the actual Cal Neva Lodge, once owned by Frank Sinatra, in Lake Tahoe. It’s a solid piece of art direction, for sure, from its aged lobby straddling two states, to its creepy tunnels behind the rooms set up for criminal voyeurs. Jeff Bridges plays a mysterious priest who checks into the resort along with a singer (Cynthia Erivo), a vacuum salesman (Jon Hamm) and a hippie (Dakota Johnson). After the messed-up manager (Lewis Pullman) checks them in, each visitor has their own story in their own rooms. Goddard has flourishes of brilliance here, mixing thrills, mystery, humor and lots of blood into the intertwined plots, giving the film a Tarantinolike feel. (I know that’s a cliché these days, but it’s true.) The film is set in 1969, paying homage to the time through its soundtrack, set design and subplot involving a Mansonlike cult leader (Chris Hemsworth).

4First Man Space exploration movies and TV events based upon real missions, not surprisingly, have often made “the mission” the thrust of the plot. First Man goes a different route. It dares to focus on Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling in top form), the man at the center of the Apollo 11 mission, and what made him tick. It shows the familial struggles the man dealt with leading up to the mission and, most strikingly, his viewpoint, through his visor, as a bunch of workers clad in white packed him into a sardine can and blasted him off into space. It’s an amazingly intimate movie, considering the subject matter. Director Damien Chazelle (La La Land) doesn’t ignore the details of NASA’s build up to eventually planting Armstrong’s feet on the lunar surface. In fact, the film is one of the most scientifically intriguing I’ve seen when it comes to what astronauts go through and the mechanics of a space launch. What it also manages to be is a moving, often haunting, study of the sacrifices and enormous pain Armstrong went through to beat the Russians to the moon landing punch.This film is about Armstrong’s sacrifices, hardships and the enormous psychological and physiological tortures he went through in that decade leading up to Apollo 11.

4Mid90s Jonah Hill makes his feature directing debut from his own script with Mid90s, the best movie ever made about skater culture and a powerful movie about familial dysfunction and the need for friendships. Sunny Suljic (The House with a Clock in Its Walls) gives a breakout performance as Stevie, a kid living in a single parent household with a headcase older brother, Ian (Lucas Hedges). Stevie suffers massive beatings at the hands of Ian and goes to a messed-up place where he causes himself further pain with self-inflicted strangulation, skin burns and simply pressing on the bruises Ian created. In short, the kid has some major issues. In search of some kind of identity, Stevie grabs himself a skateboard and starts hanging around some older kids at the skate shop. As Stevie’s social life takes off, his home life further withers, including increasing violence from Ian and some communication problems with his mother, Dabney (Katherine Waterston of Alien: Covenant). The director doesn’t shy away from the bad influence some of them provide—influences present in just about every high schooler’s life. Suljic, a solid young actor, proves to be the perfect pick for Stevie.

5A Star is Born It’s movie magic at its most beautiful when Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga share the screen in A Star is Born. It’s a rousing remake of the old warhorse riseto-fame story, and it’s easily the best movie with that title ever made. Cooper makes his feature directorial debut and stars as Jackson Maine, a Southern rocker barely getting through his gigs thanks to too much alcohol, too many pills and a nasty case of tinnitus. The film opens with Cooper live on stage belting out “Black Eyes,” a song that clearly states this movie means business on the musical front. He brings a lot of legitimate musical soul to the role. And he damned well better, because his counterpart in this story is played by none other than Lady Gaga in her fierce feature lead debut. (She had bit parts in Sin City and Muppet movies.) As Ally, a waitress who sings occasionally at the local drag bar, Gaga delivers so well beyond expectations it seems impossible. She’s so good it hurts, especially in the film’s dramatic moments, of which there are many.

2Venom This is a sometimes entertaining mess, but it’s still a mess. Let’s get the obvious out of the way: you shouldn’t have a Venom movie without Spider-Man playing into the comic villain’s backstory, somehow. This film has no Spidey. Tom Hardy labors hard at playing Eddie Brock, an investigative reporter who’s infected by the symbiote and starts biting off people’s heads in PG-13 fashion. Brock winds up with Venom’s voice in his head and an ability to make Venom sort of a good/bad guy. It’s all kind of stupid, playing things mostly for laughs and squandering a chance for a real horror show. Hardy gives it his all, but the film feels like a botch job pretty much from the start. Michelle Williams gets what might be the worst role of her career as Brock’s girlfriend, and Riz Ahmed plays the stereotypical villain. There are hints of something cool, but they are buried under a pile of muck.

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