Daily Halloween: Night 3

I am a fan of British filmmaker Ben Wheatley's movies. Down Terrace is a very black black comedy with a kitchen sink aesthetic and Sightseers is, somewhat, in the same vein; Kill List starts with the kitchen sink and keeps the realistic style even as it ramps up the occult trappings on the way to its surreal ending; A Field In England is a psychedelic nonlinear historical (17^th century) drama awash in English folklore and references to alchemy. I watched the latter only a few weeks ago and, as imperfect as it might be (and I’m not sure it is – I need at least one more viewing), I love his fearlessness and creativity of both form and content. He really is one of the most interesting directors working today.

Michael Smiley is in three of Wheatley’s four films and is terrific in all of them. I came across the film Outpost while looking though a list of Smiley's films. It sounded like it might have undead Nazis, so I added it to the queue and watched it last night. Smiley has a secondary part behind Ray Stevenson, who I also like. (And by the way, the more British TV and film I watch the more I notice that they have maybe 20 actors over there, and it’s fortunate that they’re good actors because you see one or two of them in every production.) It is the only film directed so far by Steve Barker and it was only released on DVD in the States. The DVD only thing isn’t always such a bad sign, I find, with lower budget films like this – maybe because distribution and marketing costs are so high? I’m speculating, but I’ve seen much worse films in the theaters.

In Outpost, a businessman named Hunt hires a team of mercenaries, led by Stevenson, to guide him to an old Nazi bunker in an Eastern Europe forest. These Nazis, it turns out, were exploring the dark arts and melding it with twisted steampunk technology. There’s an endless roster of films and comic books where Nazis are associated with the mystical or the occult, including Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, of course, as well as The Keep and Hellboy. I particularly like the charming Norwegian comic horror Nazi zombie film Dead Snow. Outpost has the Nazis experimenting with unified field theory (it references the apocryphal Philadelphia Experiment) and the bad guys, when they show up, are pretty bad. Director Barker uses some interesting animation and the setting is effectively creepy. He makes good use of his budget and the seams don’t show much. The acting’s good except for Richard Brake’s mysterious outback Appalachian cockney accent. Overall, forgettable but a fun and atmospheric 90 minutes.

A maybe better Nazi horror film

So far, I’m 0/2 on new horror films this month. Neither has been terrible but neither is a great discovery, either. I hope things look up.