 A FilmExposed Film Review |
 Dir: Steve Barker, 2008, UK, 90mins
Cast: Ray Stephens, Julian Wadham, Richard Brake
In a sleazy bar in a bombed out town, in a nameless, war-torn Eastern European country, a mysterious businessman, Hunt (Wadham) hires DC (Stephens) to assemble a team of mercenaries to escort him to an abandoned World War II bunker in the heart of no man’s land. He tells them he’s looking for ‘minerals’, which they assume to be Nazi gold. In fact, the McGuffin turns out to be a ‘unified field machine’, developed by Nazi scientists, that can alter the fabric of space and time and create invincible soldiers that can come back to life and make themselves invisible at will.
Outpost is, then, pure hokum. But it’s enjoyable hokum: once disbelief has been suspended one can enjoy the build of suspense, the horrid little shocks, the odd splash of cartoonish gore, the ludicrous plot and its visual elan.
The film’s palette is dark, murky and muddy all the way through, and much of the film’s first half - before HC’s men begin to be picked off one by one by the malevolent Nazi Zombies - consist of HC’s ‘crack team’ scoping the bunker with light sticks. This makes the flashes of colour and light in the film all the more striking. Blood, obviously; the light-flares that dramatically illuminate the first appearance of the superhuman army against the horizon; and the sickly whitish pallor of the grotesque tangle of naked corpses one of the men stumbles upon, that provides the film’s first jolt. One survivor is plucked from amongst these, who proves to be not quite what he seems – though in retrospect the deep vertical scar down one of his cheeks ought to have given the game away.
Outpost is a novel variation of the zombie genre. The performances are a little hammy, and it has fun with clichés, with its crew of standard maverick badasses, double-crossing scientist and mad Nazi doctors - but is all the more engaging for it. The film is reminiscent of the old DC Commando comics and will appeal of fans of these, as well as armchair conspiracy theorists. Outpost is a military horror in the same mould as Dog Soldiers (2002) and The Bunker (2001). It can just about hold its own with these and will no doubt enjoy a healthy afterlife on DVD. |
