Outpost (18)

True to its title, Steve Barker's horror is certainly out there.

A little bit The Fog, a lot The Thing, and shot on a tiny budget in Scotland, it's a curious beast.

A band of mercenaries have been sent to an unidentified location in Eastern Europe. Their target is a disused bunker where a mysterious piece of machinery, hailing from WW2, waits to be boosted into life.

Barker and his writer Rae Brunton perform near miracles given what they had to work with, even if much of what is on offer has been done before. Only fun if B-movies are your bag.

This movie must have sounded great at the idea stage; no wonder the Glasgow-based producers put their house on it.

How can you go wrong with a movie about unkillable zombie Nazis? Surprisingly easily as it turns out.

As a horror movie Outpost ticks a lot of boxes in an unenthusiastic, formalistic way and ends up completely bereft of shocks, suspense, horror, or – for that matter – interest. It’s one of those films where all the characters speak and behave exactly as people do in movies and there’s not a shred of imagination about any of them.

We have the tough soldier DC (Ray Stevenson) who has put together a ragtag bunch of mercenaries to guard a businessman in Eastern Europe. The businessman is looking for ‘mineral deposits’.

Very quickly the mineral deposits turn out to be an abandoned bunker which is full of dead bodies. The bunker was the site of bizarre World War Two experiments which have created the aforementioned zombie Nazis.

Being unkillable they are still around and they don’t take kindly to intruders. Outpost is completely generic, from the plot right down to the characters. The members of DC’s unit are completely interchangeable and the only fun to be had is guessing the order they are going to die.

In terms of his handling of the material director Steve Barker is efficient rather than inspired. The Nazis themselves are a bit of an issue. Are they ghosts? Are they zombies? Are they merely, as they are described at one point, undead?

Unless you know what they can do, you never really know how scary they are. Generally speaking the film shirks away from gore in favour of creating mood which makes it painfully slow at times.

Its one strength is the casting of Stevenson in the lead role. He’s a very watchable actor and brings an integrity and conviction that the plodding script doesn’t really deserve. None of this really matters because Outpost has made its money back on a direct-to-DVD release in the States and to be honest, given its lack of visual flair, the small screen is its natural home.