Director – Adrian Langley, Screenplay – Michael Huntsman, Producers – James Huntsman & Patrick Rizzotti, Photography – Matthew Quinn, Music – Andrew Morgan Smith, Visual Effects Supervisor – Matthew Finley, Visual Effects – Sugar Studios LA, Special Effects Supervisor – Randy Krautsack, Makeup/Creature Effects – Symbolic Arts (Designer/Supervisor – Joey Orosco), Production Design – Amber Unkle. Production Company – Blue Fox Entertainment/Crossroad Productions.
Cast
Eddie Ramos (Private Segura), Patrick Moltane (Lieutenant Turner), Julian Feder (Private Baker), Luke Baines (Kurt), Quinn Moran (Private Lewis), Adrian Gatto (Lance Corporal Walker), Mike Mihm (Private Gray), Sean Cullen (Sergeant Hall)
Plot
The trenches of the Western Front during World War I. At one British outpost, it is reported that the nearby German bunker has been abandoned. Lieutenant Turner leads a party of six of his men to investigate. They indeed find that the bunker abandoned, all except for one German soldier, still alive, who has been crucified to the wall. The Germans then fire on the bunker, causing the entrance to collapse and trap them there. As the men start to dig a new tunnel out, something inside the bunker begins to prey on their paranoias and fears.
Bunker comes from Adrian Langley, an American director who started out making crime films with the likes of Donkey (2010), A Violent State (2011) and Crook (2013), before turning to the horror film with the cannibalism film Butchers (2020). In between these, Langley pays the bills by churning out formula Christmas tv movies with the likes of Candy Cane Christmas (2020), Homemade Christmas (2020) and Christmas in Washington (2021) – or romantic films for the Lifetime Channel with the likes of Love in Translation (2021) and Meet Me in New York (2022).
For a film that is set in the trenches of the First World War, it is a surprise that Bunker is an American production, shot in New Jersey, no less. This does mean that the bunker and all of the fields of Flanders are recreated on indoor sets. Moreover, it means that the cast, who are all Americans, are faking British accents, although the central character played by Eddie Ramos is an American soldier.
There is a tradition of haunted WWI and WWII stories going back to The Keep (1983). The Keep set down the trope of people entering into a fort or some type of bunker and stirring up a much greater evil lurking there. The same basic plot is used in other films such as Red Sands (2009), The Devil’s Rock (2011) and in particular Deathwatch (2002), which featured British soldiers facing something supernatural in a WWI German trench. There was also the previous The Bunker (2001) about German soldiers in WWII taking shelter in a haunted bunker. Another work of comparison could be the tv series The Terror (2018) about a British Arctic expedition in the 19th Century where we see the men psychologically fracturing where they cannot be sure if they are seeing monsters or is a result of their being poisoned.
Patrick Moltane as Lieutenant Turner
Despite a certain initial scepticism, Bunker works quite well. The British accents are okay – the sole exception is Patrick Moltan as the commanding officer who seems to be making maximum concerted effort to enunciate everything he says in a posh private school accent. The production design for the trench and bunker and the costuming generates quite a reasonable conviction. The only major complaint is that some of the dialogue tends to the soft-spoken and is hard to hear.
Adrian Langley does a worthwhile job on the build-up and entry into the bunker and the depiction of the fraying psychological states there. This becomes particularly effective during the latter half of the film as we see the men being affected by what is in the bunker. This does bring us to the question of what exactly is in the bunker – [PLOT SPOILERS] which varies between being a parasite, is called an angel that preys on fear by the German (Luke Baines), appears to have some fibrous plant-like constituency and also exist as a milky substance, while the ending has a full alien-like monster emerging. Quite what it is though, the film gives no clues at all.
