The Burrowers
(Lions Gate; $27.98)
By: Henry Cabot Beck 05/01/2009
Westerns that feature vampires, zombies, monsters, werewolves and ghosts are starting to make up a happening subdivision of the market, and some of them are great fun. I guess the first Tremors counts as a Western hybrid; it was shot in Lone Pine, California, one of the holy points on the grand tour of best-loved Western movie locations. Imagine Randolph Scott being chased around those sandy rocks by giant earthworms.
In a way, that’s the plot of Burrowers; An undetermined number of vile, hairless, nocturnal critters live under the surface of the Dakota plains, and they are expanding their menu choices to include humans since we started killing off all the buffalo.
At first, people blame the killings on the local Lakota Sioux, yet the cavalry is more interested in torturing the Indians than figuring out what’s actually happening.
I felt an extra measure of chill when the people realized these human-sized monsters paralyzed their prey with venom and then covered them with a light layer of dirt, leaving them partially conscious as they rot, eventually ripening into a delicious consistency not unlike a wheel of brie after many hours at room temperature. I’m just guessing, of course.
The riders face off the monsters during a nighttime battle, but I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by adding that the creatures are damned hard to kill.
In a making-of featurette on the DVD, director J.T. Petty acknowledges The Burrowers as his way of making a Western. “Putting a monster in it seemed the most practical way to do it,” he says. That Petty has some substantial critical cred as a Horror filmmaker accounts for how he managed to land a cast of well-known professional actors, including Doug Hutchison (Lost) and Clancy Brown (The Shawshank Redemption, Carnivale). It also explains how he could fund both the monster effects and the historical verisimilitude.
Some of the Horror movie fan sites that have reviewed the picture are exactly on the money in pointing out that The Burrowers deserves better than a drop kick into the DVD heaps. This is a creepy, well-made picture that works as a Western, and as a commentary on Westerns, while dispensing some serious chills with an environmentalist undertow.
The extras on the disc, a couple of featurettes and a commentary track with Petty and actor Karl Geary are okay at best.
The best extras are actually found online, such as a 20-minute prequel called Blood Red Earth (found at Fearnet.com). The story takes place some 50 years earlier, and it tells of the initial connection between the Sioux and the creatures.
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