DEATHWATCH (2002) Grim! If you like mud, this is your movie. The mud doesn't stop. It's like an extended "before" sequence for a Tide commercial that does not come to pass. It wasn't so long ago that I saw Below, another World War-set ghost story with cranky people in enemy territory. The films are pretty similar, though this deals less with guilt and has a less ambiguous resolution. It's the Western Front, trench warfare. Nobody wants to be there, and nobody would envy this squad of British troops who capture a series of German trenches, taking one prisoner in the process. Soon enough they wish they'd stayed in their own trench. The cast here are all samey-looking, especially when they get all that mud on them, and that's probably intentional. The only ones that really stand out are Hugo Speer as the grizzled sergeant with a real sense of responsibility, Laurence Fox as the soft, too-academic captain, and Andy Serkis as a whacko who wears a vest made of the scalps of everybody he kills. The real star here is the sets. After seeing this movie, I felt like I needed a shower. And a few vaccinations. The effects are kept to a minimum, and they look good without distracting from the doom and gloom (except for one silly scene where a soldier gets threaded with barbed wire, which then disappears). If you take away no other lesson from this movie, take this: be careful with barbed wire. Many are likely to find the setting and tone pretty monotonous, and I suppose it is. That's a whole lotta mud, the pacing is a little lumbering, and even at 94 minutes this is a long time to spend with characters we can't tell apart. They say all those Italian horror movies I'm not getting are more about tone and atmosphere than logic and storytelling kineticism. Then I'll say it about this one - it's more about tone and atmosphere than logic and storytelling kineticism. BACK TO THE D's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE