Review – Deathwatch

Boy was I ever set up to love this movie. I guess they probably had me at the premise: something evil lurks in an abandoned trench during World War One, and a squad of British soldiers stumbles into it. That’s enough like the “Weird War” comics I thrived on as a child to get my attention here. One by one the soldiers are driven mad and/or killed by the dark force that never really takes physical form anywhere in the movie (though it does do some cool stuff with barbed wire in a couple of places). Thus we get the subtlety of a non-effects-intensive horror flick but still retain enough of the visceral to keep things interesting. It also shares an advantage with The Thing: an all-male cast limits the misogyny endemic to the genre. My only gripe – and it’s a comparatively minor one – is that the story seems to run out of tricks somewhere in the middle and then start to do variations on a theme to keep the movie going until the players are whittled away. Oh, and with trench mud all over everyone half the time, the actors were sometimes a little hard to tell apart. Otherwise this one was a keeper. Worth seeing