The Burrowers (USA. 2008)

WATCH THE TRAILER HERE

Inspired lightly by John Ford’s “The Searchers”, "The Burrowers" takes the same setting (The Old West) and craft it's own spin on the narrative: A group of men set off to find a woman that they believe has been captured by Indians. The wizened seen-it-all cowboy (William Mapother) leads the pack and is accompanied by a hard edged lawmen (Clancy Brown) and the kidnapped girl’s Irish lover (Karl Geary). None of them think she’s still alive, but they can’t let themselves give up hope. Boasting the same epic visuals, long in the tooth characters and a deliberate horse-drawn pace of its John Wayne starring inspiration, the difference here is that the perpetrators aren’t Indians at all. Once dark falls, the real monsters come out to play. It’s Horror Western time!

You don’t geta successful horror film by cutting someone’s head off with a merry-go-round and splattering blood across a happy family. That gives you a fun splatter film, but nothing else. To get a good horror yarn the audience needs to actually care for the guy about to get his head ripped off by a mutated grizzly bear. Check a sucess in "The Burrowers" favour: I never wanted any of the characters to die. All of the b-list actors spit out A-performances that allows you to easily buy into the setting. The unpardonable sin of a character seeming out of time and place is never broached. When the monster-mash does hit the fan after a slow paced beginning, I was completely caught in the filmmaker’s claws. No one in “The Burrowers” gets an easy pass, or a second chance. or really ANY chance for that matter. It got to the point that I felt that the director outright hated everyone that walked across screen ***SPOILER*** He even extends the story an extra five minutes just to make sure EVERYONE ends up broken and miserable**** END SPOILER The earlier quiet pace, punctured by quick flashes of violence, is pulled off with so much skill that I’d go as far to say that the over the top gory climax almost feels like it was ripped from another film. It’s not a complaint, because it’s done so well, but it’s still an odd disconnect. The creatures themselves look suitably creepy and never come off as derivative. Their method of killing will make even the most hard-edged gore junkies raise an eyebrow.

Along the length of the film we’re subjected to a few big ideas (Held off from “The Searchers) like “Racism is bad” and “The Real Monster is Man”, but they never smother the film enough to elicit groans. It’s evident, to be sure, but not the entire point. It’s a side-note to the bigger story of a bunch of guys trying to avoid being ripped apart by a bald albino weasel things. All the elements come together so smoothly that the end product can be nothing less then a solid little genre effort.