94 min.
Release Date: July 17, 2020 (Digital & On Demand)
World War II-set supernatural horror film “Ghosts of War” is more than competently crafted and satisfyingly bloody, but 2018’s WWII zombie-horror surprise “Overlord” did this better without banking on a “this-is-what-was-really-happening” resolution. Writer-director Eric Bress (who should had been given more opportunities after 2004’s sorely undervalued “The Butterfly Effect”) serves up a brand of fleeting haunted-house scares, half-heartedly reminiscent of the “Insidious” films but markedly inferior. Tense and spooky in a few spots, but never exactly frightening, “Ghosts of War” is too much of a generic spookshow before sputtering to a “Jacob’s Ladder”-like trick ending that rings more hollow than profound.
It is 1944, near the end of World War II in Nazi-occupied France. A ragtag group of American soldiers—noble hero Chris (Brenton Thwaites), straight-arrow Kirk (Theo Rossi), scholarly exposition-dumper Eugene (Skylar Astin), macho-man Butchie (Alan Ritchson), and the shell-shocked Tappert (Kyle Gallner)—is ordered to hold down a French chateau in the countryside and hide out from the Nazis. As their first night turns out to be a restless one, the soldiers discover the house to have some seriously “bad juju,” from the voices and footsteps they hear to the original residents’ journal and the pentagram they find painted on the floor. When these men try to leave, the spirits shackled to the house won’t let them.
A frying-pan-into-the-fire horror story, “Ghosts of War” excels in atmosphere and not much else. Every character is a stock type, defined by their names and differentiated mostly by who from the notable roster of recognizable actors gets to play them. The performances are earnest and serviceable, only Kyle Gallner really getting the chance to stand out and make something interesting out of the troubled Tappert with a chilling monologue. Director Eric Bress mostly relies on the tropiest of horror tropes and cheapest of jump scares found so often in studio-backed pictures. Exactly two set-pieces come close to registering a level of hair-raising creepiness; in one, footsteps approach the soldiers after they have covered a room in salt, and in another, a ghost keeps appearing and disappearing as a character looks into his scope. Unfortunately, these moments build and then unimpressively peter out with the sight of open-mouthed actors in corpsy make-up lunging at the camera, accompanied by shrieky, bombastic musical stingers.
"Ghosts of War" pretends to make the horror elements intentionally hokey and threadbare as if to make a statement on the psychological toll of war. When a surprising truth is revealed to make one reconsider everything that came before, it isn’t dramatically successful, instead sucking the air out of the story. Too clever for its own good by opting for a gimmick that recalls “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” the film takes a giant swing to simultaneously be a mind-bender and say something important about post-traumatic stress disorder and redemption for one’s sins but fails to achieve either goal. What “Ghosts of War” ends up doing in the final act leaves a sour aftertaste, not a haunting impact as probably was intended.
Grade: C
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