WARHUNT (2022)

Studio:     Saban Films
Director:    Mauro Borrelli
Writer:     Reggie Keyohara III, Scott Svatos, Mauro Borrelli
Producer:  Igor Pronin, Yulia Zayceva, Max Pavlov, Svetlana Punte, Adel Nur, Yu-Fai Suen, Mauro Borrelli
Stars:     Robert Knepper, Jackson Rathbone, Mickey Rourke, Aglaya Tarasova, Anna Paliga

Review Score:

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Summary:

On a mission to find a plane downed behind enemy lines in WWII, American soldiers stumble into an occult plot to make witches immortal.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Crows cause a USAF plane carrying several soldiers and top-secret intelligence to crash in Germany in 1945. Sergeant Brewer leads a 12-man unit that includes Private Rucker, medic Morgan, Private Taft, and Freeman on a mission to find the missing men and recover the wreckage from the Black Forest.

Major Johnson forces Brewer to take along his pupil Walsh, whom Brewer immediately dislikes. Johnson then sets up an intelligence team inside a tent where he later reveals he and Walsh are secretly searching for the second tome in a set of occult grimoires connected to the Tree of Life, which witches have used to achieve immortality for centuries.

Brewer’s men find four dead German soldiers strangely strung up in a clearing. A sudden Nazi ambush results in one of Brewer’s men dying, but the squad captures a German officer.

Rucker and another soldier spy two women bathing inside a windmill, but Brewer presumes them to be innocuous civilians. Shortly afterward, Rucker encounters the women alongside the airplane wreckage. The women turn out to be witches who mesmerize Rucker. Rucker shakes off his trance long enough to shoot one of the witches and escape.

Brewer’s men discover they inexplicably walked in a circle back to the spot where they buried their fallen comrade. Although he refuses to reveal what really happened when he fired his weapon, Rucker leads everyone to the downed aircraft where he shot the witch. Walsh recovers a film canister from the plane, yet no bodies are discovered.

Captain Rice from the USAF crew suddenly attacks the soldiers. Despite being gunned down, Rice reanimates and continues attacking until Walsh definitively kills him with a knife. Upon examining his body, Walsh and the others discover Rice had his organs replaced with bird feathers and was sewn back together with ancient magical symbols adorning his skin. The German prisoner warns that witches were responsible.

Walsh finds an image of the windmill on the filmstrip, but Rucker refuses to talk about it. Rucker then vomits black blood and turns on his teammates before falling unconscious. The men find growing rot eating away at Rucker’s flesh.

The German prisoner tries to flee. One man momentarily recaptures him, but birds suddenly form into a witch who slits the American soldier’s throat. Brewer’s crew finds the man completely drained of blood, although they recapture the German.

Walsh convinces Brewer to question Rucker. Rucker finally tells Brewer about the women who seduced him.

Walsh radios Johnson to tell him that the filmstrip confirms their intelligence about the Tree of Life. Johnson leaves his tent to meet Walsh at the windmill.

Everyone’s rations transform into worms. One soldier claims Rucker cursed them when he became a witch’s familiar.

Hearing taunting voices over the radio, Brewer begins losing his mind. Brewer fires his gun at Taft after the private questions his orders. Taft runs into the woods where a witch attacks him.

Brewer kills a wild pig that gets cooked on a spit to feed his starving soldiers. In the midst of feasting however, the men suddenly see they are actually eating a human being.

During an ambush by the witches, an arrow kills the German prisoner. Rucker escapes. With the men losing confidence in Brewer’s deteriorating mental state, Walsh takes over the team. Brewer shoots Morgan in a subsequent confrontation, causing the remaining men to scatter. Witches kill several of the soldiers.

Walsh and Brewer engage in hand-to-hand combat. Freeman rescues Walsh by shooting Brewer.

Walsh and Freeman relocate the windmill, which had been hidden by a concealment spell. Inside, Walsh finds a complete copy of the occult archive he and Johnson were searching for. Walsh explains to Freeman that the witches kill soldiers to feed their immortality, and his true mission was to find the Tree of Life. Angry over the deception, Freeman attacks Walsh.

Walsh and Freeman fall through the floor into a cavern containing skeletons of warriors that had been harvested over hundreds of years. A connecting cavern leads to the Tree of Life. Now fully enslaved, Rucker captures Walsh and Freeman when they try to kill the main witch sleeping under the tree.

Freeman is sacrificed as part of the witches’ ritual. The witches prepare to harvest Walsh next, but Johnson arrives in time to fire his weapon. The witches transform into birds to escape. Johnson and Walsh collect flowers containing the tree’s magical properties before setting fire to the tree’s roots.

The witches return for another attack. Johnson and Walsh fight back with mustard gas. Johnson dies. After setting fire to the grimoire and the windmill, Walsh stumbles outside and collapses.

German soldiers find Walsh on the forest floor the next day. However, when they remove his gas mask, they discover that a witch exchanged bodies with Walsh.

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Review:

“Good” and “bad” are probably the two most common terms used by anyone offering an opinion on just about anything. Just as commonly, they’re often relative words too. Like, what would “good” even mean in the context of “Warhunt,” a bargain B-movie where WWII soldiers battle a trio of seductive witches who occasionally transform into birds? No normal person looks at cover art featuring Mickey Rourke in an eyepatch hovering above airplane wreckage with a Nazi flag and thinks, “Oh, this ought to be an epic war story on par with Spielberg’s ‘Saving Private Ryan’.” So even after someone accounts for a certain amount of gripes, grumbles, and goofiness, what would qualify as “good” when treading in throwaway thriller territory?

“Warhunt” stars Robert Knepper, an actor born in 1959. That year seems relevant because, depending on whether you go by when the movie was likely shot or its release year of 2022, that puts Knepper either at or past the US military’s mandatory retirement age of 62. Actually, it’s 62 now. It was likely much younger in 1945, especially for active duty soldiers. Nevertheless, Knepper plays a sergeant leading airborne infantry grunts on a mission to recover a USAF plane that went down behind enemy lines. You know, just like, uh, older military men routinely did during WWII.

If Knepper shouldn’t be out in a forest full of German enemies as well as witches, then the seven-years-older Mickey Rourke definitely shouldn’t be out there either. He doesn’t stay there long though. After dropping off his protégé Jackson Rathbone, Rourke takes a page from current day Bruce Willis’s playbook and retreats to a tent where he can be comfortable for most of the movie. As one would expect of a former award-winner now taking quick dips for quick dough in DTV streams, Rourke only appears for a few minutes. Those minutes are then chopped into segments as short as 10 seconds and sprinkled throughout a runtime where we are treated to stagnantly static shots of Rourke sitting in a Jeep, sipping coffee at a desk, smoking a cigar, or engaging in some other ordinary activity requiring minimal exertion.

Rourke’s character finally plays a bigger role in the fight-filled climax, although the filmmakers resort to another old scheme by having him don a gas mask so his stuntman can do the dirty work instead. Rourke still puts in modestly more effort than Bruce Willis ever devotes to his relegated-to-Redbox efforts. If nothing else, Rourke is at least willing to wear an actual costume rather than the sweatpants and plain t-shirt Willis rolls out of bed and onto the set in. But it’s hard not to think of Rourke’s flair for humorous hamminess and wish he had exchanged mundane mumbling for something flashier and funnier. If everyone else stayed serious while Rourke went big on camp, “Warhunt” might have a less pedestrian personality.

While we’re on the topic of personality, the rest of the soldiers are in dire need of some too. I’m not sure if all of them even have their names spoken out loud. Not that it matters. Other than the stock soldier who got married before deployment and pulls out a picture of his wife whenever times get tough, the men are mostly an interchangeable mass of meat sacks whose imaginary mothers couldn’t tell one from another.

But I ask again, how “good” does this movie need to be, really? With names like Knepper and Rathbone above the title, we know we’re on the other side of the planet from wherever major players with massive drawing power typically reside. Funded by international money and fueled by 35 people bearing some sort of producer credit, we also suspect we could be in a corner of low-budget film production sometimes colored with creative taxation trickery. So is it okay to simply set the expectation bar no higher than “mildly entertaining in intermittent instances” and then say we’re satisfied when “Warhunt” hits that meager mark?

Whatever constitutes the opposite of good’s particular definition in this case, “Warhunt” doesn’t qualify as “bad” either. My initial interest in the movie was more like cautious curiosity than hot anticipation anyway, as it should be when we’re talking about unknown performers playing with prop guns in forest-set firefights and the sporadic spookiness of black magic witchcraft created by mid-tier FX software. “Warhunt” meets the minimum criteria for mediocrity, so I suppose that makes the movie as good as “good” can possibly get here, which in this case equates to “average.”

Review Score: 50

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