Mixing the horrors of war with the horrors of… well, horror… can often throw up a genre-bending cult classic, with Julius Avery’s Overlord one of the most recent examples. On the other side of the coin, the results can often be polarizing, something 2008’s Outpost discovered firsthand.
It certainly wasn’t short on ambition, that’s for sure, with producers Arabella Croft and Kieran Parker remortgaging their home in order to fund the thrifty £200,000 production, which paid off when the end result recouped those costs twice over and then some at the box office before performing admirably on home video.
The story finds Ray Stevenson leading a hardy band of soldiers-turned-mercenaries deep into no man’s land after a scientist-cum-businessman opts to hire the group for what’s supposed to be a straightforward (if admittedly dangerous) trip into a war torn conflict zone. Once they uncover a World War II bunker long since thought lost, all hell breaks loose in more ways than one.
Reviews from critics were decidedly mixed, while even the target audience couldn’t seem to make its mind up on whether Outpost was trash or treasure based on a Rotten Tomatoes user average of 34 percent. It did spawn two sequels as any low budget gore-fest tends to do, though, while the opener’s resurgent performance on streaming highlights that it’s still capable of drawing in a crowd.
Per FlixPatrol, Outpost has shaken off its opinion-splitting nature to end up as one of the Top 10 most-watched titles on ad-supported platform Freevee, not bad at all for a 15 year-old hybrid of war story and supernatural nightmare.
Published: May 3, 2023 01:54 am