As I have said before, I'm pretty picky with my horror movies, and this one certainly passes the bar. It's an obviously low budget affair, but manages to do a very good job of it and has some pretty good actors in it to boot. The most famous ones in it to me are: Ray Stevenson, Richard Brake, and Michael Smiley. It's also a fun blend of horror, alternate history, action, and sci-fi, which is a pretty good blend in my book and it's also has some pretty obvious and subtle references to some classic video games.
The plot is pretty simple, but with details that were pretty unique for the time. A hodge-podge group of mercenaries are hired by a businessman to retrieve a piece of lost tech from an old WWII Nazi bunker in the middle of a modern active war zone (presumably in the Balkans). As the film goes on, and as they conduct their mission they start to experience odd occurrences, and find a man hiding in the bunker that may be more than he appears. It's not too heavy on developing most of the characters, and there isn't much more to the story than that, but it really does a great job of ramping up the tension and intrigue as the film goes on, and has a delightfully twilight zone inspired ending.
Another interesting bit of trivia is that the film was something of a passion project for the creator, with he and his wife mortgaging their home to make about $200,000 of the $300k budget for the movie. The film was fairly successful, raking in over $460,000 in in it's release, despite having a very limited one. It also managed to gain a pretty big cult following and had made enough on rental/streaming sales to spawn a couple of sequels as well, but the less said about them the better.
Anyways, despite the reviews being pretty consistently middle of the road for this film, I would give this one a big thumbs up and would encourage you to watch it. Anyways, since when have pro reviewers been right in recent history anyway, eh?
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