Metacritic reviews

Overlord may not be the Call of Duty: Zombies movie you were expecting, but it is a damn entertaining film about the horror of war, and the thrills of a zombie invasion.

A subliminal commentary on the science of human behavior through a supernatural lens, “Overlord” manages to satisfy expectations of pure escapism even as it digs deeper, and it’s a welcome alternative to so many movies that don’t even try.

There’s little camp or gimmickry to be found, which is refreshing for a sub-genre whose films so often resort to bad jokes and kitsch violence.

Pairing some of the spirit of schlocky Nazisploitation fare with a top-flight young cast and better-than-solid filmmaking, the movie is more mainstream that the midnight fare it sounds like on paper, if only by a bit. Horror fans should cheer.

What it lacks in novelty, subtlety or character, it partially makes up in sheer abandon. This is a big, loud, violent, gleefully gory sledgehammer of a film with, crucially, a careful tongue in cheek.

Overlord injects a healthy dose of schlock into familiar war-movie tropes to create an entertainingly grungy hybrid, but it never quite kicks into overdrive.

Even at its most suspenseful, when Jed Kurzel’s cello score stabs at the eardrums, Overlord feels familiar, a collage of cinematic nightmares checking off its influences.

As a piece of moral commentary cloaked in a sci-fi gimmick, Overlord is uninspired. As an action thriller, it’s just aggressively boring. Maybe because it exhaustively recycles imagery from any number of genre films that came before it...or because the action sequences are bizarrely monotonous, save for the occasional bit of gory VFX.

Remove the horror aspects, and Overlord is ham-fisted and oddly unimpressive.

There is something deeply crass about this facetious nonsense, and everyone involved in this film might want to reflect that Nazi medical experimentation during the second world war did in fact happen, under circumstances other than these. It was a very real thing, not just a death-metal horror movie gag.