Source: The List (Issue 602)
Date: 8 May 2008
Written by: Paul Dale
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HORROR
Beefy mercenary DC (Ray Stevenson) has just made a bad decision. He’s taken a job from shadowy businessman Hunt (Julian Wadham). DC and his band of professional soldiers have to get Hunt into an abandoned bunker in an Eastern European war zone, let him look around, and then get him out again. The trouble is the Simon Wiesenthal Center hasn’t had much of an impact in the area, because there are brutal undead Nazi soldiers all over the place.
Filmed in Glasgow’s Film City Studios and on location in Dumfries, Outpost is an impressively pared down genre flick which borrows from the best, most notably John Carpenter (The Thing, The Fog). Debut feature director Steve Barker clearly knows what he is doing. After a slow and detailed build-up in the first half, he opens the door on some really merciless carnage as the soldiers are picked off one by one. It’s enough to make a degenerate schoolboy happy.
As with any low budget horror there are plot holes as open as a fresh wound, plus some fairly risible dialogue and performances, but Outpost looks great (it was shot on film, something of a rarity for modern day horror movies) and is the first of a roster of features to be produced by Glasgow-based company Black Camel. If this is the quality benchmark they are starting with, they are clearly on to a good thing. If this is your bag, you won’t be disappointed.
Selected release from Fri 16 May.
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