Review: 'Bunker' is a technically smart but narratively confused horror thriller, trapped inside a World War I trench

Sometimes, I end up watching a movie with my brain running on parallel tracks — admiring the technical achievement, but perplexed at the narrative flow — and that’s what happened watching “Bunker,” a micro-budget horror movie that’s expertly crafted but doesn’t make a lick of sense.

The movie starts in a trench somewhere near the front during World War I, amid a mix of British and American soldiers waiting for the next artillery bursts to drop on them from the Germans. Enter an officious British officer, Lt. Turner (Patrick Moltane), with orders that his men should make a push toward the front — so, as they say in “Blackadder Goes Forth,” they can “move Field Marshall Haig’s drinks trolley six inches closer to Berlin.”

The surprise comes when they get out of the trench, and nobody is trying to kill them. There’s all silence from the German side, and as Turner’s men get closer to the German trench, there’s no sign of anyone alive defending it. They find a door to a bunker, blocked off from the outside. Undeterred, Lt. Turner orders some men to open it.

Inside, they find a mass grave of dead German soldiers, and one German apparently being crucified — with bayonets nailing his hands to a roof beam, and his torso spooled with barbed wire. Turner orders his men to take the German down, and tells the American medic, Pvt. Segura (Eddie Ramos), to treat his wounds.

Soon, though, the men feel something dark and foreboding in the bunker. Some of the men seem to go mad — like the mustachioed Lance Cpl. Walker (Adriano Gatto), who starts to remove his own skin with a straight razor. Others notice that the dead Germans in the mass grave may not be so dead.

After some harrowing scenes, an artillery shell seals the bunker shut, and there are only five people left inside: Lt. Turner, Pvt. Segura, American soldier Baker (Julian Feder), English soldier Lewis (Quinn Moran), and the formerly strung-up German, Kurt (Luke Baines). Turner seems to be losing his mind, but that’s not the least of their problems, because something is causing the men to spit up white goo with something alive in it.

Director Adrian Langley, a veteran of both low-budget horror and Christmas romances, handles the technical side of this claustrophobic horror movie expertly. He provides a good sense of space within the tight quarters, and the brain-corroding effects of the soldiers’ captivity and whatever supernatural thing is eating away at them. 

Langley and screenwriter Michael Huntsman employ echoes of “Alien,” “The Exorcist” and David Cronenberg-style body horror, but it never feels like plagiarism or a showily ironic “homage.” It’s more like a compendium of everything that makes humans terrified, all distilled into one movie.

(Full disclosure: Michael Huntsman and one of the film’s producers, James Huntsman, are part of the Huntsman family familiar to people in Utah. James Huntsman’s brother Jon Jr. used to be the governor of Utah, and U.S. ambassador to Russia and China. Their brother Paul is chairman of the board of The Salt Lake Tribune, where I have my day job.)

Alas, the technical prowess shown early in “Bunker” can’t quite sustain enough tension or chills as the movie proceeds to its grimly predictable conclusion. War is hell, so who’s going to notice another demon?

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‘Bunker’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 24, in theaters. Rated R for violence, gore and some language. Running time: 108 minutes.