Z-Day

All we knew going in was, Overlord (2018) was a WWII movie with zombies or maybe vampires. Close enough. If that sounds good to you, you should enjoy this.

It has a great intro: a squad of American paratroopers on a mission into Nazi-occupied France to take out a radio jamming station in a church. They need to do this by a certain time on D-Day. Jovan Adepo is among them, looking very nervous about the situation, though Sgt. Bokeem Woodbine is taking it in stride. Along on the mission is explosive expert Wyatt Russell - the team will get him to the church and he’ll do the rest. But before they get to the drop zone, they starts taking lots of fire - planes all around them blowing up. Finally, just before they jump, their plane is destroyed, and they hit the silk.

The few who survive meet a French woman, Mathilde Ollivier, and get her to hide them. While they are there, the head Nazi, Pilo Aesbeck, shows up to demand sex. Adepo isn’t hardened to war, and he comes out of hiding to defend her. They hold him prisoner while continuing the recon.

Adepo accidentally gets into the church, and finds there’s a whole underground lab where they seem to be resurrecting the dead. He grabs a couple of syringes as evidence. Back at Ollivier’s place, they try to get Aesbeck to tell them what is going on, but he kills one of the Americans and takes off - getting shot in the face in the process.

Adepo uses the syringe to revive their dead comrade, which works. But he is super-strong and violently insane, and they have to kill him again. In fact, they club his head to pudding. Now they have a pretty good idea what is up - the Nazis are working on a super-soldier serum, that can raise the dead, but turns the people who get it insane. So now they know they have to destroy the lab as well as the tower.

By the way, the serum works on the living, and now Aesbeck is running around with half his face blown off, which doesn’t improve his mood.

On the whole, this was a fun movie, but maybe not as totally cool as we’d hoped. It was a nice mix of war and horror, but I don’t think it did much to move the genre forward. Still, it was definitely entertaining, and that’s enough for us.