What makes someone think they can craft a Jacob's Ladder-esque horror film out of World War I? Very little of great interest happened in World War I except for people dying in trenches at a fairly regular basis, often of gangrene. I know, I'm sure that thrills you to the bone with desire for foggy WWI horror films, but some might see this as a big shrug.
So, what we have here is a fairly inept British independant horror film about a gang of unready or unstable British soldiers roaming the wasteland and trying to keep hold on some lost foxhole behind enemy lines, where they are picked off one by one in the few interesting bits of invention in the movie, usually involving barbed wire and strange muddy figures. Mainly the men go mad and try to kill each other, ramping up their brutality until virtually no one is left and they fight to save their souls.
There's a few bits of decent acting in the film, but mainly I'm left to wonder how a 94-minute movie can be so goddamned long and dull. What probably should have seemed farily tight and fast-paced was, instead, an arduous trek through a grim ditch where there's nothing but Billy Elliot star Jamie Bell's whining to keep us amused.
The movie was not an absolutely terrible failure, but the payoff was so slim, the length so long to get to it, and the plot so unimpressive that it seems like a complete disaster.
There's a minor amount of style to the preceedings, but the whole thing just makes me feel like I've been left in a trench to die.
