SYNOPSIS:
It is 1879 in the Dakota Territories. A handful of brave pioneers maintain isolated settlements in the badlands beyond civilization. Irish Immigrant Fergus Coffey (Karl Geary) is near to winning the hand of his beloved Maryanne (Jocelin Donahue) when she is suddenly taken from him, her family brutally abducted in a nighttime attack on their homestead. Suspicion falls immediately on hostile Indians, Will Parcher (William Mapother) and John Clay (Clancy Brown). The latter, form a posse and set out to rescue the kidnapped settlers, taking along a naive teenager, an ex-slave and their ranch-hand, Coffey. But as men vanish in the night and horrific evidence accumulates with the dead and dying, the group discovers that their prey is far more terrifying than anything human, and their prospects are far more terrible than death!
MOVIE REVIEW:
J.T. Petty’s “The Burrowers” may sound like an interesting genre-subverting exercise in marrying creature horror with the aesthetics of a Western, but the result is much less so. It starts off intriguingly enough with the murder of one White family and the disappearance of another. The time is the 1870s in the Dakota Territories and suspicion immediately falls on the local Native Americans.
So a search party is sent out for the missing- comprising most significantly of a heartbroken fiancé, Fergus (Karl Geary), engaged to one of the women taken away; two hunters John (Clancy Brown) and Will (William Mapother), both with experience dealing with the Natives; and Will’s stepson, Dobie (Galen Hutchinson). All this while, “The Burrowers” sets itself up as one of those Whites-versus-Indians Western.
But of course, it isn’t. The Indians aren’t the enemy; no, the enemy is really something more primitive, more powerful and also more frightening. Like the movie’s title suggests, they burrow through the ground and emerge to attack and devour their prey. But just when things appear to be getting more exciting, “The Burrowers” loses much of the excitement it built up at the start.
Rather than build on its promising setup, “The Burrowers” seems more content spending its second half showing us scenes of Fergus, John, Will and Dobie riding on their horses in the daytime, sitting around a fire at night, and getting petrified by some strange rustling and movement in the bushes. All that repetition erodes what tension the movie had built up in its first half, and not even its full-blown creature attack finale can save it from being a disappointment.
Indeed, J.T. Petty, who also wrote the movie, doesn’t quite know what he wants to do with his movie once he has revealed that it is some nasty creatures that are behind the attacks. Low-budget though this effort may be, it is no excuse for the lazy scriptwriting that is really the reason why the movie ends up short. Yes, without much of a plot, and a mostly forgettable cast, “The Burrowers” spends most of its time digging its own grave.
SPECIAL FEATURES :
This Code 3 DVD contains no extra features.
AUDIO/VISUAL:
Audio’s presented only in Dolby Digital 2.0 which makes for a less than involving horror experience. Visuals look a bit grainy especially during the scenes set at night.
MOVIE RATING:
DVD
RATING :
Review
by Gabriel Chong
Posted on 20 August 2009
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