Ghosts of War

 OK, let me pull up a chair for this one, it's a lively one.

 Five airborne troopers are tasked to guard a French chateau at the very tail end of world war 2. The group consists of a bunch of walking war movie clichés: The intellectual (Skylar Astin), the all-American brash idiot (Alan Ritchson), the idealistic leader (Brenton Thwaites) and another one (Theo Rossi). The most interesting one is Kyle Gallner as a sort of sadistic space cadet; He's a lot of fun.

 The war movie aspects are mostly well done for a B-movie like this - a pulpy encounter with a nazi jeep on the way to the chateau is a good one, and later there's a defense of the house where the gang gets some unexpected assistance from... gh-gh-gh-ghosts.

 Ghosts of War is firmly on the tacky, gleefully cheesy side of horror. Think the shittier Blumhouse stuff - or even the production logo they put before their movies: Lots of jump scares, with the spirits basically lining up to pose all spooky-like for the camera.
 Here's an example: One of the soldiers is sweeping the manor grounds with his sniper scope, looking for nazis. He passes by a few statues on plinths quickly, except that last one was a creepy zombie statue? When he turns the scope back to double-check, the plinth is empty - And then the creepy zombie statue puts his zombie face right in front of the scope to growl at the soldier. Tell me that doesn't sound like something out of Scooby-Doo or Looney Tunes.

What's up, doc?

 I'm not saying I'm against it- this sort of thing can be enjoyable, and it's well made enough to be entertaining. Just... don't expect it to actually be good.
 So spooky stuff starts happening almost immediately as the soldiers are haunted by the family that previously occupied the manor, all of whom, Brainy GI quickly determines, were killed in some sort of nazi ritual (obligatory reference to the nazi higher-ups being a bunch of occult nutjobs).

 Things come to a head when the nazis mount an attack to retake the chateau, and, as mentioned earlier, the ghosts step in to get a piece of fascist-killing action. In the aftermath the sense that things are truly off mounts, and not just because of the haunting - Incident at Owl Bridge gets brought up preemptively, characters behave erratically, someone screams "THINGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM!" repeatedly.
 It turns out things are indeed not what they seem, leading to a late-movie twist that's incredibly dumb, poorly handled, and batshit fucking insane.

 Writer/director Eric Bress, bless him, seems truly proud of his Shyamalan-esque turn, and commits to it with a passion. There's a very, very poorly written and poorly staged scene showing the why the of the ghosts, Billy Zane (who also has a producer credit) pops up to drop a ream or two of exposition, and the script then proceeds to gleefully point out all the ways that it had foreshadowed the twist throughout the movie. It's all so bad it's inspired, and I couldn't stop laughing.

 It could have worked... maybe, but the heightened spookablast, B-movie tone was never going to carry it.  I guess it's one of those things where they had to try it but it didn't gel. The end result is a pretty bad (but entertainingly so) haunted house yarn going off the deep end in a howlingly funny fashion; I loved it for all the wrong reasons.

 Obligatory apparition of a haunted toy: A piece of string, I guess: it's a game of cat's cradle. Honestly, it's the best part of the movie - part of a tale that's revisited and it keeps getting creepier every time it's told, the one horror element that is truly effective in the movie. It even gets an appropriately over-the-top origin story in the film's ridiculous twist.