#637: Bunker (2022)
Schlocky wartime horror fun where the smarts are deep underground
Initial release: October 8, 2022
Director: Adrian Langley
Sometimes you just want something stupid.
Longtime readers of this blog will know that I love movies. I love them when they’re good. I love them when they’re bad. I love them when they’re stupid. As long as the movie accomplishes at least part of what it sets out to do, I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. And I tend to prefer the naked honesty of low-budget, poorly-written trash horror flicks over the beautiful artifice of high-concept “elevated” horror films. If you’re wondering which one of these describes Adrian Langley’s 2022 war horror flick Bunker, I promise you: it’s definitely the first one.
There are a surprising amount of World War I horror flicks, by which I mean there’s a non-zero amount of them. We can probably trace the genre back to Abel Gance’s 1919 melodrama J’Accuse!, which aside from using real footage of the war recorded by Gance (who rejoined the French military’s film service for the purpose) also starred hundreds of wounded and disfigured veterans playing the animated corpses of war dead, returning home to find out if their deaths had any meaning. But like the broader theme of World War I itself, Great War horror was typically just not a thing, except for M. J. Basset’s underrated psychological flick Deathwatch in 2002. With the centennial of the war having come and gone, we’ve begun seeing World War I more often in popular media, with 1917 being perhaps the pinnacle of the modern revisitation in film and titles like Battlefield 1 proving that you can in fact make a World War I game fun; and with that comes an upswing in horror flicks. So we get Leo Scherman’s deliciously Cronenbergian Trench 11 and now we get Bunker — and I hardly know which one is stupider!
Actually, Bunker is probably stupider. But that doesn’t mean it’s not great fun. The premise is simple: when it’s discovered that a nearby German outpost during the war’s final summer has suddenly been abandoned, a small squad of British soldiers and some visiting Americans sneak over to the German lines to check it out, discovering that it has indeed been abandoned, and the bunker has been sealed shut from outside. Clearing the doorway, they enter, and other than a German soldier crucified on the wall, it’s otherwise empty… but when a round of shelling seals them in it becomes clear that something else is down there with them.
After the initial round of deaths — including a fantastic moment where a character, increasingly preoccupied with lice, begins slicing himself, and his fellow soldiers, up good before ralphing up some mysterious goop and expiring — the core cast is reduced to five: a Hispanic American medic looking to make good for his community back home, a young greenhorn from New York who lied about his age to sign up, a religious young Brit, an increasingly deranged British lieutenant, and their mysterious German prisoner.
Like a lot of stupid horror movies, Bunker has a lot going for it, especially early on. The set design is pretty good; the costume design is passable, but if the weird comment on IMDB is anything to go by, not terribly authentic. The score is, quite deliberately, modeled after mid-century horror flicks, very dramatic and over-the-top (the opening titles are also straight out of a Universal or Hammer flick, too — which I took immense delight in.) The acting is as always a mixed bag of too little or too much. The practical special effects are actually pretty decent too. The CGI… not so much.
Of course these kinds of movies always fall down in the last half. Sure, there’s plenty of scenery chewing, but the ultimate source of the evil is… poorly explained in a way that isn’t satisfying. But you know what? Who cares. It was a fun time, sometimes gross, sometimes funny, sometimes just a deliberate throwback to a bygone era of film. And it was always stupid.
And that’s just what I wanted.
