PLOT: Set during the end of World War II, a group of soldiers tasked with occupying a French mansion, start noticing things aren’t what they seem when ghosts start showing up and causing trouble. I guess that would present a problem, but maybe take a day or two and think it through. C’mon guys!
LOWDOWN: I’ll be honest and say that I’ve always been hit or miss when it comes to war films, but I love the idea of merging them with horror. Like rum and coke, they seem like a match made in heaven. The intensity, chaos, and emotional toll of combat combined with the violence and psychological damage prevalent in horror make these two genres almost cut from the same cloth.
GHOSTS OF WAR (WATCH IT HERE) tries to integrate the haunted house sub-genre with the casualties of war in one of the most kitchen-sink approaches I’ve seen in years. While watching this puppy, I got some serious Stephen King cocaine vibes. The author has mentioned his regret for certain stories that were fueled by his love for nose candy resulting in unwieldy and jumbled plot points. I’m not saying GHOSTS OF WAR is written like a coke-fueled King bender, but with the amount of twist and turns tossed in here, it ain’t far off folks.
I enjoyed GHOSTS OF WAR, yet fully admit it’s awkward at times and hilariously bizarre during others, but let’s talk positives first. Writer and director Eric Bress (THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT) handles the war setting like a pro. With a small-ish budget, making anything resembling a realistic WWII setting would be a minor miracle, yet things feel pretty damn authentic. Bress knows his limitations, yet works within these restrictions to ace a couple of impressive set pieces that sell the era well.
We follow a ragtag bunch of misfits whose job is to hold down a french mansion in the countryside until their replacements arrive. The characters are pretty stock in terms of purpose: the tough guy, the book nerd, the sensitive one, and so on, but they gel together surprisingly well. Brenton Thwaites plays our protagonist Chris, the noble patriot with enough heart to make his short-sighted decisions a bit charming. He feels real enough as the do-gooder from a simpler time. Usually, the selfless hero annoys me in stories, but I got behind his passion and ended up cheering him on.
Kyle Gallner’s Tappert is the MAN here. A dark suicidal, shell-shocked sniper who has run out of shits to give. This mumbly prick steals every scene with his emotionally drained attitude. I could have watched a whole movie on this dude fighting ghosts alone! We get a cameo from Billy Zane as a Nazi Major, and this magnificent bald bastard owns it here I don’t want to give much away, but he’s amazing in the few scenes he’s in. My only complaint is that he’s not in it enough. We need more Billy f*cking Zane in here, guys. Is there a Zane cut?
Let’s talk about the hauntings in this. Besides a few modernly violent scenes, this is quite the old-school approach. With creaky floorboards, suspicious sounds, an odd shape in the distance, I feel like this (purposely or not) harkens back to the simpler hauntings of times past. Shit, this haunted mansion is so retro in horror style, I half expected to see transparent ghosts ballroom dancing as I cooled off from the sweltering Orlando heat.
Around the hour mark, things shift, and we start getting some clarity on whats going on. I like when a film shakes things up and decides to buck the trend, but I’d compare this third act to a roof caving in instead of a clever, well-planned revel. Things aren’t exactly what they seem, and HOLY SHIT does this go off the rails with the twists and turns. Information is provided as essential for the mythology only for the movie to change it a few scenes later. A twist after a twist that is… you guessed it, a twist!
Around the hour mark, things shift, and we start getting some clarity on whats going on. I like when a film shakes things up and decides to buck the trend, but I’d compare this third act to a roof caving in instead of a clever, well-planned reveal. Things aren’t exactly what they seem, and HOLY SHIT does this go off the rails with the twists and turns. Information is provided as essential for the mythology only for the movie to change it a few scenes later. A twist after a twist that is a… surprise, you guessed it, a twist!
The amount of leg work to get to it’s designated ending point is impressive because of the mental gymnastics you’ll need to do. If you think you’ve guessed it, you’re probably wrong because there’s always one more reveal left. I got down with what the idea behind GHOSTS OF WAR wanted to be, but this is an excellent example of how staying the course with entertaining characters would have prevailed over a convoluted and confusing message.
GORE: The blood is mostly CGI and a bit tame throughout. We get a few headshots and some battle damaged corpses, but that’s about it.
BOTTOM LINE: Not perfect by any means, I enjoyed the first two-thirds of GHOSTS OF WAR. I’ll admit that it does nothing daring or unique, and uses the type of stock scares that you’d expect from a 90s mini-series, but this finds a way to work within its limitations to make something fun and exciting. The biggest issue is that it drops the ball, trips over its own feet, and smashes its face into a brick wall. Like a coked-out Stephen King, the third act throws everything in except the kitchen sink and ends up with little working. Eric Bress has a bright future and has the skills to prove it, but for his next movie, I hope he goes with the “less is more” approach. GHOSTS OF WAR has a lot going for it but sadly ends up collapsing under its own weight and ruins a lot of the goodwill that came before it.