Outpost (Steve Barker 2008 UK)

I watched this low-budget British horror film last night on DVD and rather enjoyed it, despite the occasional plot lapses and inexplicable logic. Set in the depths of an Eastern European war zone the film pits a group of mercenaries, led by DC (Ray Stevenson) and questing 'company' scientist Hunt (Julian Wadham), against a platoon of re-animated (or rather dimension-shifting) Nazi soldiers. The object of Hunt's quest is a device, hidden deep in an SS bunker, that supposedly allows for the merging of the four dimensions of matter (Einstein is checklisted in Hunt's exposition); once the antiquated machine is discovered he duly reports back to his financial masters who prepare to send in a team to recover it. As the mercenaries become aware of the presence of the Nazi soldiers they are slowly picked off until only DC, Hunt, Jordan (Paul Blair) and Prior (Richard Brake) remain. In a sequence reminiscent of David Fincher's Alien 3 (1992), Jordan, Prior and DC lure the Nazi 'zombies' into the range of the machine just as Hunt manages to re-start it. Firing a pulse that works to 'contain' the Nazis within their original dimension they appear to have an opportunity to escape; however, power to the machine fails and with it, apparently, their chance of survival... The strength of this film lies in the atmosphere created in the subterranean space of the bunker, which benefits from the sparing use of digital special effects. The Nazi soldiers are particularly effective given their visual simplicity, the filmmakers relying on showing less rather than more. The performances are all pretty decent although the accents have a tendency to wander somewhat with DC covering a broad range of nationalities. The actors convey the sense of threat and fear effectively with the 'Breather' (Johnny Meres) suitably eerie and chilling. This isn't the most original claustrophobic horror and the debt to movies like Alien (Ridley Scott 1979), The Fog (John Carpenter 1980) and The Keep (Michael Mann 1983) is clear, as is the potential comparison with a film like Neil Marshall's Dog Soldiers (2002) or his more recent The Descent (2005); nonetheless it works. If it is true that horror films have a tendency to reflect the concerns and anxieties of the period in which they are produced, what do these 'threat' films say about the contemporary moment? Certainly, the 'other' appears, as ever in horror, as the more or less invisible and un-knowable, the omnipresent source of danger and terror but are these films, as has been suggested, reflections of a post 9/11 world (as viewed from a Western perspective)? The fear of the dark, the hidden, the unknown, remains, whatever the political context; ultimately, these primordial fears long precede the current 'war on terrror'...