Steve Barker

(In French, On Cable TV, October 2022) With something like fifteen years’ worth of examples to go on, it’s amazing how such a can’t-miss concept as “Nazi Zombies” can, most of the time, actually miss. Videogames seem to do OK by presenting antagonists that are doubly worth shooting dead, but movies (with rare exceptions such as Dead Snow 2 and Overlord) generally don’t do much with the concept. It probably doesn’t help that most movies that do run with undead fascists tend to be on the lower end of the budget scale—you’ll notice that the exceptions I mention had decent budgets for genre films. Anyway—my point being that Outpost, even if it dates from the beginning of the Nazi zombie craze (even predating the first Dead Snow), is another one of those films that fumbles the ball it picked for itself. Here, a team of mercenaries is sent to investigate an isolated bunker in Eastern Europe, where they discover strange Nazi scientific experiments and a mysterious murderous force. You know where this is going and indeed this is where Outpost goes (and it’s where Overlord would also go, generally speaking). Its lack of originality is probably worse now than it was back then, considering fifteen years’ worth of iterations of the “zany Nazi super-science bunker” premise. It doesn’t really lead anywhere either—the nihilistic ending is only good for shrugs. There are occasional moments where you can imagine a much-better film out of the ideas, the atmosphere and suspenseful moments. But director Steve Barker’s Outpost is bland once it all wraps up—and its refusal to play this for any kind of comedic value is both deliberate and counterproductive. Fans of the genre may enjoy an early take on the subgenre, but that’s it.