The Burrowers

The horror genre is not often combined with a period piece like it is in The Burrowers, a horror-western set in 1879. One may think that this is both due to the often somewhat lower budget of horror films, and in the scare genre the backdrop of the modern connects with the audience better and this familiarity makes it easier to scare the viewer. Due to those reasons films of this ilk can probably be counted on one hand, while successful ones are even less common.

As late last decade, 1999's Ravenous admirably set a cannibalism/vampire tale to the Spanish-American war era and created a film that was one of the best and purest horror films amiss a time of Scream-like teeny-bopper horror. While the civil war-horror Dead Birds followed a few years later, and if this critic remembers correctly it was more concerned with false scares and padding its runtime. In the present, we now have The Burrowers, a film that is fits right between those aforementioned films in terms of quality.

The Burrowers is a film that concerns a posse`s search for a group of townspeople who went missing from what many believe to be from a war party of Indians. However, something far more sinister awaits this unsuspecting and vengeance-seeking band of alleged heroes.

This film despite its novel premise, fine backdrop, and alot of other good qualities, just sadly is not that effective, being at best mildly interesting. It should be said that if the film fails it is mostly due to a feeling of indifference. Oddly enough, this is not due to the most common reasons of passiveness.

In terms of the acting, the film is quite good: the characterizations are adequate enough that even if you may not necessarily "care" about the characters in the buddy-buddy way--as many of the "heroes" are more on the stubborn, roughneck side--you do know a distinctive trait or two about them. The Burrowers often seems to be realistic in most of its depictions of the characters traits. This was a time of hatred, personal justice, and racism to Indians, African Americans, and even fellow Europeans, like the Irish, even more so than it is today. The hardened characters feel genuine in that sense that they feel methodical and strongly opinionated in those points.

Problems arise with The Burrowers from the onset: the opening scene does little to really terrify and seems like the usual status quo to show the audience that all will not be right in wonderland as the time ticks by. Sometimes in movies this sense of impending doom works adamantly, creating a sense of terror at the beginning, to cool things down a bit to let characters evolve, then turns on the jets. In this movie, the opening scene just is not that effective possibly due to its lack of suspense, its shortness, and just the knowledge of being an educated fan of the genre and thus knowing how a film of this ilk often starts. The film would have seemed more effective if this scene were jettisoned out or (again) if it was longer.

On the back of the DVD, the package says the film is a little over two hours long. Instead, it is a smidgen over an hour and a half. Sadly, the film feels like it drags on past its bedtime anyway by a good 10 minutes. Much of the film consists of nothing more than a set pattern: travel-talk-fight-travel-talk-fight. The plot just can not sustain that much redundancy which drowns out much of the interest of the viewer. The rest of The Burrowers never really turns on the jets: the suspense is not there, while instead, there is a feeling of apathy breaking through the horizon.

The scare scenes are either too long or two short, and never a good balance is attained between a fun action aspect and the tension-building horror feel. The actual Burrowers themselves are very, very scary in conception, but not in creature design. It may be true that the visual F/X looks real enough, and although one might admit it's rather absurd to point this out, as actual monsters do not exist, but these monsters look like a cross between a turtle and a turd in a toilet, no joke. They are just odd looking. It would have been more effective if they looked more like a spider: much like their eating/killing/hunting ritual resembles.

In the end, The Burrowers is a film that is much better on paper or in summary than it actually is. While it did so many things right, anything having to do with true horror is not one of them. Instead, as an action-western the film is marginally entertaining even if its novel aspects is often buried in grunge, dirt, and murk.