Mark Reviews Movies: WARHUNT

Warhunt, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 20, 2022

The Nazis were on the hunt for some supernatural means to maintain their evil regime, and that's enough of an excuse for the story of Warhunt. It imagines such a search being proven correct—and then going horrifically wrong for everyone involved. It's admirably simple and, at times, equally devious.

The latter part, at least, goes a surprisingly long way once our heroes, a group of American soldiers tasked to find some top-secret information behind enemy lines, end up on the wrong side of this supernatural threat. It doesn't care who's fighting whom, what the politics and aims of either side might be, or what generic and clichéd back story someone might possess. The thing or, well, things in the woods want blood, and their tactics to obtain it are often straightforward but sometimes diabolically convoluted. Whether or not one accepts the convoluted part will be very much determined by how much one appreciates the diabolical angle.

That's the kind of movie director Mauro Borrelli's war-time horror tale is—one that doesn't care if it makes much sense or possesses engaging characters or can find a satisfactory way to bring its game to an end, as long as it offers enough nightmarish ideas and images to carry the bulk of the weight. That Borrelli almost pulls it off, despite all of those obvious shortcomings, is rather surprising.

It's 1945, and the war in Europe is drawing to a close. A military plane, carrying some soldiers and a single item of classified cargo, comes across some severe turbulence—or maybe something else (Obviously, it's the latter, since the opening credits give us images of crows and a shadowy mist appearing and disappearing in the woods below)—over the Black Forest region of Germany.

Enter Major Johnson (Mickey Rourke), a name that might be a bit of a joke about the specific kind of energy the character conveys, with his metallic eyepatch and gruff attitude. He wants the package that was aboard the plane, so Johnson enlists Sergeant Brewer (Robert Knepper), a man whom Johnson saved and who hasn't forgiven his superior for not letting him die with the soldiers under his command, and a mostly disposable team to retrieve it. Accompanying the team and keeping tabs on the outsiders to Johnson's cryptic specialty unit is his right-hand man Walsh (Jackson Rathbone), who speaks softly but doesn't mess around in a crisis.

Anyway, none of these characters really matters, except that some of them move closer to the central mystery than others and most of them end up dead on account of the supernatural force in the forest. In terms of importance, we have Brewer, who is determined to keep his men alive or die trying, and Walsh, who has his own secret orders to fulfill from Johnson—who spends most of his time sitting behind a desk at a base somewhere else, filling in details of what the team and the Nazis in the woods are looking for as they're slaughtered one by one.

Others include Rucker (Frederik Wagner), a virgin who can't believe his luck when an ethereal redhead (played by Anna Paliga) seduces him in the forest, and another—maybe Morgan (Terence Maynard) or Korsky (Matt Mella) or Gardner (Lorenzo de Moor)—who has a wife and child waiting for him at home. Most of these characters are as interchangeable as they are disposable, so the amount of limited time the screenplay by Borrelli, Reggie Keyohara III, and Scott Svatos spends on even providing such minimal development feels like a waste.

In case the ethereal woman in the forest isn't a giveaway, the threat here is a coven of witches, who don't take kindly to the influx of men in their neck of the woods—but do take advantage of having an increased supply of warrior blood available to them, for some unholy ritual they need to perform. Rourke and some other actors get to explain most of this in some dull and routine scene back at the base, but most of the story sees all of these soldiers be tempted, fooled, and lured by the witches. Playing with the soldiers' senses, the witches convince one that the pin of a grenade is actually his wife's wedding ring and the whole squad that they're feasting on wild boar, while wondering to where one of their comrades has disappeared.

Yes, a good amount of this is gruesome and eerie, with the witches' twisted games somewhat compensating for the movie's unconvincingly serious tone. Meanwhile Borrelli and cinematographer Eric Gustavo Petersen gradually shift the palette from lush greens to diversely rich earth tones, giving the backgrounds a stark and tactile sense of real decay and unnatural corruption. If the movie's underwhelming climax—set in the dim and grim lair where the witches prepare for their final sacrifices—is any indication, the filmmakers could have cut corners on the visuals here, but the fact that much of this possesses a naturalistic sense of the unworldly is a distinct positive.

The negatives of Warhunt—its early meandering, its thin characters, its awkward unloading of exposition, its anticlimactically formulaic third act—are impossible to ignore, of course. For what it's worth, there's a lengthy stretch of this movie that knows exactly what it wants to do and does it fairly well.

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