( 2008 / UK )Review By-Paul Cooke
Director: Steve Barker
Starring: Ray Stevenson, Julian Wadham, Richard Brake, Paul Blair, Brett Fancy, Enoch Frost, Julian Rivett & Michael Smiley

‘‘My advice, don’t go there’’

From the dankest region of Eastern Europe one of mankind’s darkest evils lays dormant, until a portal between parallel existences is unwittingly opened by an intrusive scientist and a team of hired mercenaries.

Services paid for by an unknown backer, ranking officer Ray Stevenson leads his handful of experienced soldiers into long uncharted territory. They are escorting a scientist who is seeking a machine, with purported capabilities of transgressing the physics of time and space, that is believed to have been created by the Nazi’s during the second world war. Germany’s equivalent of the American’s dabbling with the Philadelphia Experiment. The displacement of time to open up parallel pathways to enable living beings to transverse between time periods in real time.

What the scientist and his mercenary minders discover is an underground bunker with the engrained stamp of Hitler’s SS, and the vivid echoes of experimentation upon human life !. Uncovering documentation and film reels showing the SS pushing the boundaries of human resistance, upon their own soldiers physiology, is startling as the beleaguered recipients appear to become impervious to death itself !.

Deeper within the bunker a mass holding facility holds what appears to be lifeless naked bodies of males in a near emaciated, yet non decomposed state. To the shocking surprise of the investigating soldiers one of the bodies twitches into life. When pulled from the pile of otherwise unflinching bodies the sunken featured man is in a state of apparent disassociation from all that is around him, and is uncommunicative to the point of a catatonia. When a film from the forties shows an SS officer with an uncanny resemblance to this person the band of soldiers find it impossible to accept, that this still relatively middle aged man, could indeed be one in the same some sixty plus years later !. They have not just uncovered a scientific anomaly but have triggered an encapsulated event that is soon to play out, with them as the participants in an horrific enactment where there is no escape !.

As night falls the mercenaries are surrounded by apparitions of darkly clad SS soldiers, whom when fired upon, and even with direct hits, are merely momentarily phased. A legion of the undying are risen and perhaps only the uncovered machine sought out by the scientist, and his now completely unnerved bodyguards, provides the answers to halting them !?. A couple of the bunker defending mercenaries are picked off by the unerring entities and purposefully put to a painful demise in gorily unsettling detail. A bullet to the eye has new definition here as a battle fatigued SS soldier forces the casing into the unfortunates optical orb by pressing it directly in with his own hand, rather than shooting it from the barrel of a gun. The outcome is just as bloody but so much more wincingly difficult to watch !. This is one of many well conceived moments of brutality unleashed upon the soldiers of ‘misfortune’. The quotient of gore is just right for this high end low budget outing and is very well handled by the effects team, relying on realism in context with the movies structure rather than cheap thrills. A welcome film maker / audience symbiotic appreciation that works to everyone’s enjoyment in undertaking the experience that is the ‘Outpost’.

The claustrophobic environment of being pressed deep underground, as the advancing SS soldiers close in upon the surviving mercenaries, is old school close quarter horror at its most agreeable. Up against far greater numbers, and an unstoppable force the chances of survival are negligible at best. This tale of terror is well told, and uses a film technique that displays at times that slight burnt brown texture, reminiscent of those uncovered film stocks from yesteryear. Very in keeping with the second world war themes the foreboding setting in a mostly confined setting makes for compelling horror genre viewing. Reminiscent of the British Eighties home viewing scene this could then have been considered a Video ‘Nazi’.

Film: 3.5 Undying Bitch Slaps