Outpost: Going Loud

The hope that I’m going to go into something that looks pretty stock and predictable and end up discovering a hidden gem springs eternal. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. But I feel like I’ve been on a real “maybe it’s better than it looks” kick lately - there’s something about chasing that feeling of discovery than I’m really into right now. I’m sure at some point I’ll get back to my usual mix of artsy horror and classics, but lately the urge to pick something I’d usually overlook and run with it has been strong, even if it does tend to result in disappointment.

I hate to say it, but Outpost is another one of those instances that ends up more disappointing than not. It’s frustrating, because there’s stuff here that I like, but for every cliche it ducks, it runs right into another one, and on top of that, it doesn’t really stick the landing.

The film opens in a bar in an unnamed part of Eastern Europe. There’s an Englishman named Hunt (nobody in this film has more than one name), clearly out of place, talking to a mercenary named DC. Hunt is an engineer, who represents a very large company. They’ve purchased some land in the area and want Hunt to survey it for mineral value. Hunt needs DC to put together a team for security, to escort him through an especially dangerous, war-torn area to get to the site. A lot of terse negotiation happens, men talking in manly fashion to other men. It’s that kind of movie. It’s not as cartoonish as it could be, but it’s not not cartoonish either. So DC assembles a team of six soldiers of fortune, men used to killing the people they’re being paid to kill. It’s a 48-hour op - get in, survey the land, get out.

And off they go, into the forest, where it turns out this company has purchased land containing am old bunker. A very old bunker. A Nazi bunker from World War II.

This isn’t about mineral rights.

So yeah, what we’re talking about is weird old Nazi research and the dangerous secrets it left behind. This is practically a subgenre unto itself. And on top of that, a group of mercenaries escorting a businessman through dangerous territory is its own set of cliches, and it pretty much nails most of those. There’s very little to distinguish the mercenaries from each other except their nationalities - you’ve got Prior, the shitkicker ex-Marine, Taktarov, the Russian, Voyteche, the generic Eastern European, Cotter, the former African child soldier, McKay, the Irishman who was most likely an IRA volunteer back in the day. and Jordan, the English medic. Jordan is the only one to exhibit any signs of compassion, which, along with his role as medic and his religious faith sets him apart from the others and makes him the target of the obligatory gendered insults. Dialogue is absolutely stock-standard tough-guy talk throughout and the businessman is your standard condescending technical whiz. There are absolutely no surprises on that front, and though none of it is played as melodramatically as it could be, it’s also absolutely nothing new.

Where there were some surprises, for me, is in how things play out for at least the first two acts. A bunch of soldiers of fortune in an old Nazi bunker, who discover that they aren’t alone…well, Nazi zombies is by no means a new idea, and it’s apparent very quickly (if you haven’t already figured it out from the cover art) that that’s what we’re dealing with. For that matter, Nazis as literal monsters is absolutely not a new idea, and at its worst trivializes the real horrors committed by real Nazis, so I’m not a huge fan of that. So it would have been very easy for this film to jump right into a gory action-heavy splatter-fest, to have snarling corpses in Nazi uniforms, resurrected by foul occult rituals, eating brains left and right. But…very much to its credit…it doesn’t do that, The majority of the film is actually a slow burn, punctuated by small clues that something isn’t right, clues which gradually escalate into actual threats as it becomes harder and harder to deny that something very wrong happened here a long time ago. And the nature of what happened is pretty novel, for that matter. There’s some lip service paid to the Nazi interest in the occult, but it doesn’t really figure into the story - this threat is born from technology, and it’s just a different enough take that it kept my interest. So even though it runs headlong into all of the mercenary cliches you can think of, it ducks a lot of the cliches about Nazi experiments run amok, and I think that’s noteworthy.

Also, surprisingly, it’s not an especially tense film. There’s an odd deliberateness to it that keeps it from really building a sense of momentum, but what it loses in tension it gains back in mood and atmosphere. There’s very little music, and the color palette is desaturated almost to the point of being monochromatic, with just a few pops of color during the daytime. Nighttime exteriors are dark with dramatic backlighting that spills through the trees, silhouetting the hulking figures that lurk there. The bunker is dark, rusty, full of dust and rust and cobwebs and deep shadows, and the things that still live down there emerge from the shadows silently, as massive silhouettes, quiet, monochromatic, and monolithic. Away from the macho bluster, it’s mostly a subdued film, and its violent moments are closely observed but not especially lurid. It’s awful, but quietly awful. If it reminds me of any other movie playing in this particular sandbox, it’d be The Keep, which is not one lots of filmmakers working in the Nazi monster field generally emulate. So that came as a pleasant surprise too.

If that’s how it’d been all the way through, it’d be easy to call it a little better than average, but then it takes all of it strengths and throws them away in a climax that goes completely in the other direction, as the protagonists go full-on gung-ho mode and it turns into something like a slightly crap war film, all gunfire and shouting and joking-in-the-face-of-death camaraderie to very little end. It sacrifices the grim, understated mood that had been working for it for cliched pyrotechnics. It makes the climax feel even more pointless than it would have already, given how little reason the film gave us to care about the protagonists, not to mention dragging out the ending just enough to establish the setup for a sequel (of which, yes, there have been two), instead of giving it a note of finality that would have at least had some kind of impact. It was never going to be great, but it at least provided enough interesting choices to keep me watching, before squandering it all on an end that was exactly the obvious, unsubtle, unsurprising ruckus I assumed it was going to be from the start. It had some interesting ideas, and I wish it had the courage to commit to those ideas all the way through. It would have helped.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon