Last night, I watched the first such film this month: The Devil's Rock.
warning: the trailer might be a little on the gory side for some viewers (not any worse than Saving Private Ryan's beach landing. Well maybe a little, but that's the ball park).
The setup: On the eve of D-Day, two New Zealand commandos arrive on the shore of a small island near Guernsey to cause some havoc and distract the Germans from the Normandy invasion.What they find ,besides the big gun they are to blow up, is tortured screams and mutilated bodies. The cause of this carnage? Why, the end results of Nazi occultism of course!
I'll leave it there. Between my warning about the trailer, the trailer, and the setup you probably know already if this movie is for you.
I tend to prefer my horror movies to be vintage - not later than 1970 something, primarily because modern horror seems to love blood and gore and I do not. This movie was released in 2011, so vintage it is not. Still, this isn't that gorey a movie and I could stomach what there was and no nightmares resulted (always a plus). Why watch it if it's not the kind of movie I normally watch?
The main reason is that WWII movies with a supernatural element seem to involve zombies. With the exceptions of Shawn of the Dead and Zombieland, I don't generally like zombie movies (I find them too disturbing), so for that reason alone this movie made my list to watch. Also it's free if you have Amazon Prime (it's amazing how often that factors into my decisions).
It helped too that on Amazon, it has fairly decent reviews. Certainly it rated better than a lot of war movies from the 50s and 60s and I have suffered through those 1/2 star debacles so why not this?
Indeed, it was entertaining - even if at times I was distracted by what felt like anachronistic language (and hairstyle for the female lead). I felt they did an excellent job conveying just how diabolical a demon might be, not just physically powerful as they are often depicted, but capable of powerful deceptions. There is also some interesting manipulation of the audience (had we been deceived too?) that I don't want to detail so as not to spoil it for the one or two of you who do watch it. The resolution was clever, but I felt its impact was undermined by the very last shot, where we see the D-Day invasion getting underway. Rather than any kind of import, it felt underwhelming and unnecessary.
As a war game scenario, it would be pretty hard to pull off, unless you're using a small skirmish pulp set like .45 Adventure, or maybe Achtung! Cthulhu Skirmish. You'd probably want to take some license with it and expand the forces - as I understand it, this was a fairly low budget movie and the general lack of cast members confirms that. You only need two commandos, a German solider, a German officer, and something from Hell to field the characters from the movie as written. Dungeon tiles could work for the interior of the fortification.
Almost certainly, however, the setup/plot is ripe for use with RPGs based around cosmic horror / supernatural / occult horror (Achtung! Cthulhu comes to mind, this time the RPG not the wargame)- assuming the player characters are able to shoot and brawl, and don't have a ton invested in skills like anthropology or art collecting.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say, for my average reader, this movie is probably of little interest. But if you're looking for something to watch for Halloween, and you prefer sten guns over chainsaws, ritual magic over science labs, and demons over the animated dead, then it it's not the worst way to spend 86 minutes.
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