Scott Poole argues in his remarkable volume Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror that all of the elements of modern horror, and especially cinematic horror can be traced back to the First World War. It stands to reason that films set during WWI might be particularly inclined to terrify and capture the stark dreadfulness of trench warfare and bodies being blown to pieces with all the latest technologies. Sadly, Bunker falls short of delivering on what promised to be an interesting romp.

18 year old Private Segura (Eddie Ramos) is assigned to the eleventh battalion of a British unit in a trench somewhere on the front near the end of the war. Lt. Turner (Patrick Moltane), the by-the-book commander of the unit, learns the Germans have pulled back and abandoned a nearby bunker and decides that his men will take and hold the bunker.  As predicted, weird, inexplicable things start happening.  Walker (Adriano Gatto) goes crazy, shaves his head, cuts himself with the straight razor, dons a gas mask, and attacks the other soldiers.  Strange, semen-like fluid drips from the ceiling, paranoia runs through the troops, and people vanish, all to music that is doing its damnedest to sound like The Thing soundtrack, evoking the spooky mystery in this equally claustrophobic and inaccessible place.

The film is effective in conveying the claustrophobia but far less effective in establishing and maintaining tension. The soundtrack and the opening credits are meant to evoke classic horror and classic war cinema.  The names play out over old time maps.  The film offers up the usual stuff: the door has been sealed…from the outside!, the German who was left behind and warns the British, the paranoid leader who no longer trusts anyone in the unit, and so forth.  But sadly the accumulation of the tropes never melds into effective horror. The film has an interesting moment when the soldiers first discover a German soldier (Luke Baines) left behind and crucified with swords through his hands in the bunker, but the loud brass swelling overwhelmingly from the soundtrack reminding the audience to be scared undercuts the rather effective visual.  At its best moments, the film offers an effective sense of dread and impressive visuals for a low budget film.  Those moments are too rare, I’m afraid.

The acting is uneven at best, and some performers seem like they are in a different film.  A dialect coach would have also benefited the production.  Ultimately Bunker disappoints because one can see the really interesting movie that could have been made from this material. I wanted to like it; and I wanted it to be a better film. Instead of All Quiet on the Western Front or 1917 with monsters, the film feels much more like a community theatre hired a solid cinematographer and special effects crew to recreate Grand Guignol melodramas about the war. Even then, it feels more lethargic than it needed to.  The film follows the same path as such films as Dog Soldiers, Event Horizon, Overlord, and Southern Comfort – a team of professionals entering a situation they assume they understand and uncovering horrors for which they are unprepared, but unlike those films, fails to establish a protagonist or group of protagonists worth rooting for, creating a source of horror that is truly disturbing, and playing out an obvious narrative in a manner that seems unique, if not entirely original.