'Outpost'
Reviewed by Martin McGrath

Outpost has almost every element necessary to make a successful low budget horror movie. It has a strong cast but it’s made up of actors whose faces you’ll recognise but whose names will mostly escape you. It has a confined and atmospheric location – an underground bunker supposedly in Eastern Europe abandoned by the SS at the end of World War II. And it has a tense, and smartly directed, opening forty-five minutes as the supposedly easy mission starts to go disastrously wrong.

DC (Ray Stevenson) leads a team of mercenaries into an Eastern European forest. Their job is to find a bunker, secure the mysterious technology it contains and to hold it until back-up arrives. DC’s team is made up of a rag-bag of foreign soldiers – the brash American, the tough Brit, the silent Eastern European – but there’s a genuine chemistry in the combinations and a well-worked sense of a team of professionals coming together to get a job done.

However, things in the bunker suddenly start to go badly wrong. There’s a pile of bodies, one of which appears to be alive. A sniper attack turns the occupation of the bunker into a siege. Then the lights start to flicker and mercenaries start to die.

At this point Outpost had the opportunity to deliver a truly memorable and effective horror film – but either the director (Steve Barker) or the writer (Rae Brunton) made a serious mistake and threw away a lot of their good work.

As the film unfolds it becomes clear that the Nazis who had occupied this bunker had developed some extraordinary technology but that its effects had been terrifying. Turning the guards into undead monsters, trapped by the machinery and unable to leave the vicinity of the bunker, but implacably evil.

“You cannot kill what is already dead” – the poster for Outpost proclaims, and this gives us an insight to the film’s greatest weakness. These bad guys are unstoppable – they have extraordinary powers (apparently able to teleport into sealed rooms) and strength that suggest that they could wipe out the mercenaries in seconds. That they choose not to is only reasonably explained by the needs of the writer and director to stretch the story over 90 minutes. And once we realise these monsters are unstoppable the tension drains from the film as it becomes obvious there’s no possible escape for DC and his team and the only question is how they’ll all die.

Outpost is a missed opportunity, but it has moments of genuine strength, a good cast and it is certainly worth viewing as a too rare example of a straight British horror that devotes an unusual amount of time to character and performance.