I watched the Outpost trilogy today. I had seen the first one but I see it was back in 2011. I hardly remember anything about it, corridors and snarling Nazi zombies mostly. Since I haven't seen the rest I decided to watch all three in one go. They're mostly horror but there's SF at their core, in that they deal with the outcome of scientific experiments by the Nazis to make super soldiers, AKA zombies. There a small number of films in that genre. All three films are made in Scotland but set in some unnamed Eastern Block country.
Outpost 2008 Directed by Steve Barker, screenplay by Rae Brunton, story by Rae Brunton, Kieran Parker and Steve Barker. They turned in a decent script, wrote some interesting enough characters and a good villain.
Ray Stevenson is an old mercenary who gets hired by Julian Wadham to guard him on a trip into a bad area. They make it to the entrance of an underground bunker without any trouble but once they get there things go bad pretty much right away. One guy gets shot by someone in the woods. Inside the bunker they get the generator working and turn on the lights. It turns out that the bunker was home to Nazi experiments during WW2. Julian is looking for a device the Nazis left behind. Sadly, their presence has activated the dead Nazis. One by one the men get cut down as they battle the snarlin' Nazi zombies. Their relief is too far out to save them.
I think it's the best of the trio. I give it high marks for the cast lead by Ray Stevenson. He often gets these tough guy roles and he does really well in them. In Outpost he's backed up by a good cast of people that I don't really know. Michael Smiley had been in a couple of movies that I had seen but I didn't remember him in either. No matter, they all do a good job on their characters.
Most of the movie is set in the underground bunker that the Nazis built. It's a all concrete, corridors and rust. And Nazi zombies. They did well making those sets and all the props. The make up is pretty darn good. I like that the story moves along at a nice pace, there's good action scenes and plenty of other stuff going on. Now I've seen this twice and I'd still watch it again. I gave it a 6 on the IMDb, it's not quite a 7 for me.
Outpost: Black Sun 2012 Steve Barker directed and co-wrote the script with Rae Brunton. The movie starts soon after the first.
Catherine Steadman plays a Nazi hunter like her dead father. She's on the search for a scientist named Klausener. She finds one of his old Nazi pals and after interrogating him to a heart attack she gets a clue and a ring with wings. In an area near the bunker she runs into Richard Coyle, they get intercepted by a small group of soldiers. The couple prove to be somewhat useful to them and they all wind up at the bunker. As you might guess, those Nazis are still there. They're still dead and they're even more active than before.
I didn't find this quite as entertaining as the last. It's still entertaining enough, there's plenty of running about, yelling and Nazi zombie killing. I wasn't quite as impressed by the super fast cutting of the shaky cam footage shot for the fight scenes. That got tiring pretty fast for me. Some of the CGI additions to the scenes aren't quite as good as you might hope. I only gave it a 5 in the end but I'd still watch it again.
Outpost: Rise Of The Spetsnaz 2013 Kieran Parker takes the director's chair for the third film and Rae Brunton is the script writer. This film is a prequel, set in 1945, to the first two films. It pits the Russian Spetsnaz forces against the Nazis.
A team of Spetsnaz soldiers cross paths with the German's from the bunker in the first movie. The German's pick up soldiers and peasants from the area to experiment on. We finally get to see more of the facility and how the experiments are going. Not so good, most of the test cases explode from the injection of serum and the rays of the machine from the first two movies.
I enjoyed it and I thought it was about as good as the second movie. I gave it a 5 on the IMDb. I thought Kieran did a pretty good job for his first movie. He hasn't directed any more but he continues to produce movies. I liked the characters and the script was good. The story moved along OK. I'll watch it again someday.
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