DVD Review: Outpost

“I never really trusted science.”

A group of soldiers for hire are paid to escort an engineer to an abandoned outpost in a war torn section of Europe. When they arrive they find that it was a bunker used by the Nazis for some occult experiments and though nothing alive is in the bunker the dead still stir and are out for blood.

DC (Ray Stevenson) is a soldier of fortune that is hired by an engineer named Mr. Hunt (Julian Wadham) to take him into a war zone. Mr. Hunt has some mysterious clients that he’s hunting for an even more mysterious object for. This object is located in the equally mysterious bunker. When the team arrives they find a room full of bodies and one of them is still breathing. In the room below they find the object in question – it appears to be an engine of some kind. The man they pull out of the room above is seemingly in a coma and is not saying a word about how he came to be in the bunker in a pile of bodies. One of the other soldiers raises a projector screen and finds a swastika beneath it. Mr. Hunt has led them to a Nazi bunker and when they watch the film on the projector they see that the Nazis were up to some strange stuff in the bunker involving the engine, the room above, and the occult. Before you can say “Der Fuhrer’s Face” some Nazi soldiers appear out of nowhere and begin to slaughter our soldiers, who now don’t seem so fortunate after all. You just have to love the Nazis. Well, not really but when you need a good villain or characters that seemed to have sunk to the lower depths of humanity you can’t go wrong making them Nazis.

In the final days of the war they appeared to be trying just about anything to guarantee a victory for the Fuhrer and delving into the occult or using their own soldiers for twisted experiments is not something that we’d put past them. Our soldier of fortune friends discover this the hard way. The Outpost continues a tradition of supernatural “bunker” films (The Bunker (2001) and Deathwatch (2002)) but ups the ante with adding the monstrous, invincible Nazi soldiers that reminded me of Golems (I bet the Nazis would be pissed at that reference since they’re a Jewish fairytale figure). The Outpost has a high quotient of creepiness and it pays off magnificently. The acting is pretty good too and I hear that Ray Stevenson is going to be playing Frank Castle in the Punisher sequel. It looks like it might be a good fit. The box art made me think that this was going to be a cheap horror flick, but I found a pretty good film inside (maybe that was the plan by the PR folks since this is the second Sony disc that had crappy box art and a good film inside – Sony’s Black Water). The ending leaves a bit of unanswered questions but I still thought it was a good film. The Outpost is presented in anamorphic widescreen (2.40:1) and is enhanced for 16x9 televisions. Special features include 10 minutes of deleted scenes and a collection of previews for other Sony DVDs. The Outpost is one you’ll want to visit on DVD, just don’t go there in real life because the undead, indestructible Nazis of doom will get you. A decent little thriller.