Director – Kieran Parker, Screenplay – Rae Brunton, Story – Rae Brunton & Kieran Parker, Producers – Arabella Page Croft & Kieran Parker, Photography – Carlos De Carvalho, Music – Al Hardiman & Patrick Jonsson, Visual Effects – Lexhag Ltd, Special Effects Supervisor – Mike Kelt, Makeup Effects – Paul Boyce, Prosthetics Design – Tom Lauten, Production Design – James Lapsley. Production Company – Black Camel Pictures.
Cast
Bryan Larkin (Dolokhov), Michael McKell (Colonel Strasser), Ivan Karamis (Fyodor), Velibor Topic (Arkadi), Alec Utgoff (Kostya), Laurentiu Possa (Osakin), Ben Lambert (Rogers), Dom Watters (Voronin), Gareth Morrison (Portrovsky), Vince Docherty (Colonel Klotz), Leo Horsfield (The Surgeon), Michael Poole (Older Dolokhov)
Plot
During World War II, a group of Russian freedom fighters battle the German advance using guerrilla tactics. After a skirmish, the men are captured and taken to a bunker where Colonel Strasser is overseeing scientists who are conducting experiments in trying to create zombies and super-soldiers.
Outpost III: Rise of the Spetsnaz was the third of the Outpost films. The series had begun with Outpost (2007), a modest Nazi zombie film from director Steve Barker. It was clearly enough of a success that Barker made a sequel with the desultory Outpost: Black Sun (2012). This was followed by a third film here. By this point, Steve Barker has departed and the directorial reins are inherited by Kieran Parker, who was producer on the other two Outpost films.
For Rise of the Spetsnaz, Kieran Parker takes the series back to tell an origin story. Thus the action is set behind lines, presumably somewhere during Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union (1941-2), and focuses around Soviet freedom fighters who enter the bunker back when the Nazis were conducting their original experiments. There is not as much focus on Nazi zombies, although there are a number of these, as there is on the experiments and other mutations being produced.
Nazi zombies
Kieran Parker directs a solid film. In fact, I would say that I preferred Rise of the Spetsnaz to Outpost: Black Sun, even if it is never much more than an average film on the whole. The criticism one would make is that it is a film that has been made solely because its predecessors were successful and as such just does more of the same as before but adds nothing new and original to the series.
On the plus side, Kieran Parker directs almost the whole film as a furious action piece without let-up. The lighting level has been reduced or the colour tone washed out so that the whole film looks as though it is shot in sepia tone. (Rather than Eastern Europe where the film is set, all of the film was shot in Scotland and Gloucestershire). Amid, this, Parker directs some furious and often blood-drenched action. Bryan Larkin goes through the whole film giving an incredibly physical performance – he is almost like a bear who delivers everything in an inchoate roar.
The downside of this is that there is almost no connecting plot. The film is almost like a videogame in that it involves the characters running from one room of the bunker to another and shooting up what they encounter there before taking the weaponry and continuing on.
