The Burrowers

So, I just had the pleasure of seeing a film called The Burrowers, which is basically what would happen if Tremors wasn't funny and was set in the Dakota Territories in 1879. The story follows a group of hard-bitten cowboys who are trying to save some women and children who they believe were kidnapped by indians but who were actually taken by the eponymous Burrowers. Without giving away more of the film than was revealed in the trailer I can say that the Burrowers paralyze their victims and then bury them until the bodies have decomposed enough to make easy eating--a sort of combination of the habits of alligators and spider wasps.

I wasn't sure what to expect from an Old West horror film but as it turns out, this setting provides a couple nice bonuses. First, it saves the viewer from the usual Creature Feature pseudo-scientific bullshit exposition on the creature's origin. "That's right, Doctor. These creatures are actually prehistoric Aphids that have bred with modern Black Widow spiders and grown to enormous size after being exposed to the Alpha Wave weapon the Army was testing in the mountains." Second, I think it's really great that everyone starts with guns. If I had a nickle for everytime I've had to watch a hysterical college girl fumble around for an hour and a half before finding some sort of makeshift weapon I'd have, like, probably two bucks. Or at least enough for a soda. To me, seeing a bunch of well-armed, tough-as-nails hombres being slowly worn down and broken by fear, exhaustion and the overwhelming strangeness of the situation they've found themselves in is a much more visceral experience than seeing a bunch of unprepared and unarmed amateurs get ganked.

Another thing I loved about this movie was that they used puppetry and guys-in-suits for, I think, 90-100% of their creature effects. The upshot of which is that the creatures look about a billion times better than they would have had the director gone with CG.

Anyway, this film reminded me of the H.P. Lovecraft story The Lurking Fear and the much-less-scary but equally fun movie Tremors.