WarHunt (2022)

The tail end of World War II. A US plane crashes in the German Schwarzwald thanks to what looks a lot like supernatural intervention to me.

Sergeant Brewster (Robert Knepper) and his squad of tired veterans are tasked to wander into the forest, find the plane wreck and rescue possible survivors. For mysterious reasons, one Major Johnson (Mickey Rourke), probably of the BPRD, orders Brewster to take one of his own men, Walsh (Jackson Rathbone) with him as some kind of vaguely defined specialist for something or other.

Brewster is not amused, but it’s the military, so he doesn’t have much of a choice. Walsh will turn out to be a definite asset, what with him being the only one who actually knows what’s going on in the forest. Which is rather useful once the squad is slowly whittled down in numbers, driven crazy or changed by a coven of witches with a bit of a raven fetish.

As regular readers (hi, Mom!) will know, I have a bit of a weakness for pulpy movies about soldiers versus the supernatural, so Mauro Borrelli’s shot in Latvia WarHunt does push some of my favourite buttons.

As it turns out not just because it knows its genre and the tropes and beats it really needs to hit to function in it pretty well, but because it is simply a genuinely entertaining bit of low budget horror that tends to use its minor budget with quite a bit of creativity, perhaps even enthusiasm. At the very least, Borelli (who also co-wrote with Reggie Keyohara III and Scott Svatos) has some good ideas for using bits and pieces of witch folklore in a creative manner, so that the mix of a bit of body horror, some psychological stuff and the action elements that belong to this particular sub-genre go down pretty satisfyingly and feels consistent.

Borrelli’s always at least a competent director here, regularly hitting on a clever piece of framing or presentation, properly spooky lighting or a neat bit of production design to make some scenes rather more than they would be in less invested hands. I’m particularly fond of a genuinely creepy sequence concerning some roasted pig; the set for the climactic fight below a windmill (which is a pretty perfect place for a witches’ lair going by folklore about millers in Europe) is surprisingly wonderful, too.

The films also adds some Hellboy-esque lore to up the stakes the protagonists are fighting for that make decent sense for its kind of pulp universe, and keeps the film away from the problem of having some random soldiers just randomly stumbling on the witches.

Really, the only thing to criticize realistically – this is a low budget pulp horror/action film, so it not being an A24 joint is not actually a point against the film – about WarHunt is the artistically pointless inclusion of Mickey Rourke, whose scenes mostly seem to be in the film to make the most of the couple of shooting days he was available for them, and have little use beyond slowing things down. Though, to be fair, Borrelli does keep the “star”-induced drag I’ve come to detect and loathe through oh so many direct to whatever action movies to a minimum by keeping the Rourke show scenes relatively short and adding them in places where they do not get too annoying. And Knepper, Rathbone and the rest of the film’s actual cast are not only actually in the movie we are watching, but do give perfectly good performances for the kind of film this is.