There are so many elements involved in making a film that,
when pulled together as a finished product, can mean the difference between success and tragedy,
sometimes just by a small margin. Films can have a great story with
uninteresting visuals, or be badly acted but great to look at, or filmed in
locations which almost but don’t quite compensate for the lack of depth or
emotion in the script. But when a film’s basis is three people trapped in a
small drab room quietly (and not so quietly) going bonkers for 91 minutes, all
the elements have to work very hard to compensate for such a thin premise.
Outpost 11 locates itself in alternative 1955 in the midst of
a new Hundred Years War, where a small team of soldiers occupies a remote
listening post intercepting military messages, and looking after a large
wheezing contraption called The Omega Machine. If I have made this sound in any
way interesting, then forgive me. The soldiers bicker and fuss in a strictly
Waiting for Godot manner, and gradually begin to lose their grip on reality
after possible exposure to a psychotropic drug released by the enemy,
hallucinating some joke shop rubber beasts and an astonishingly primitive stop
frame animated spider.
Rarely have I seen a film that gets everything so wrong. The
script is clichéd and leaden, the almost one room set depressing and totally
uninteresting, and the acting flat and completely uninvolving. Any desire of the
director to make something cinematically different is defeated by realising
that you’ve seen the various elements deployed more successfully in any number
of other films – the most obvious and consistent visual reference seemed to be
David Cronenberg’s film The Naked Lunch, a movie which is itself problematic
in terms of bizarre visuals coupled with impenetrable narrative. Outpost 11
drags itself agonisingly to the end of its hour and a half with no satisfying
resolution, or chin stroking final shot that would at least cause the viewer to
rethink what they’ve seen (a popular ploy when making movies whose meaning is
hard to fathom).
Outpost 11 is a truly hideous film. I detected no spark of
talent in Anthony Woodley’s direction that would make me seek out any of his
subsequent output. Please avoid this movie unless you are a steampunk completist
or thought that the animation of Morph in Tony Hart’s TV shows was brain
warping.
