Warhunt gets off to a promising start. As the actors’ name are displayed, a smoky portrait of the character they are playing appears on screen. When Mickey Rourke’s name appears, the eye patch wearing Major Johnson materializes. It is unintentionally funny but succeeds at drawing in the audience. The movie is set in 1945. A United States military cargo plane crashes into a forest. Major Johnson sends a group of men in to retrieve the plane’s top secret contents. They are soon fighting for their lives against a supernatural force.
Nazis and the occult is a sub-genre of horror that constantly springs up. A number of films have taken stories of the Third Reich’s fascination with the occult and added elements of horror. The results have been mixed. Warhunt is a fine horror movie that is sometimes hurt by its World War II setting. The plot is a basic haunted woods story. This leads to an atmospheric setting. The story relies more on this tension than traditional jump scares.
Aside from being stereotypes of 1940s masculinity, there is not much personality to the men. Warhunt is one of the most unashamedly macho movies in years. It is filled with crude sex jokes while a private is repeatedly mocked for being a virgin. Obviously, it hurts making the soldiers so one dimensional. Still, it is almost refreshing to see a group of men be so unironically shallow. It is like seeing a herd of wild animals in their natural environment.
The third act sees too many moving parts introduced and the fact the supernatural evil is scared of normal bullets takes away from some of the fun. This leads to an inevitable twist ending that has no impact on the movie. Still, Warhunt is an entertaining watch.
Warhunt comes to theaters, VOD, and Digital January 21
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