The Burrowers

I have only seen one of writer/director JT Petty's features before: his 2001 debut, Soft For Digging. Let's just say it was a 'lude awakening… and his signature somnolent style continues with his latest big screen horror western, The Burrowers. At his most placid, Petty can make Terrence Malick look like Guy Ritchie. But when he's not going full-bore, his quiet, creepy brand of terror works on several levels.

A story relayed sans suspense, this dramatic parable is something along the lines of The Searchers meets Mimic in The Mist while Awake… but The Burrowers has buffaloes, injuns, cowboys, and creatures all in one: it's a horse opera / monster mash!

The time is the late 1800s, the place is the West, and the situation is dire. Returning from a trip, kindhearted Irish immigrant Coffey (Karl Geary) finds his bride to be, the lovely Maryanne (Jocelin Donahue), missing. Since some of Marianne's family are found strewn around dead in and around the cabin, and other homesteaders are missing, Coffey assumes it's a Sioux-style massacre. He rounds up a posse, Coffey vows to find his girlfriend and hunt down the bad guys.

Genre faves Doug Hutchison ("The X-Files", "Lost"), Clancy Brown ("Carnivale", "Lost"), and William Mapother (The Grudge 2, "Lost") stand out admirably among the ensemble cast, but relative unknowns like Sean Patrick Thomas and David Midthunder add layers of pathos to the disparate band of men about to step into a squishy landmine of horror.

As the story slowly unfolds, cowboys, Indians and local soldiers converge, conflict, and learn about "the burrowers". These are wicked creatures of the night who steal people away from their homes and, using a paralytic venom, bury them until they're ripe, soft, and ready for easy chewing. Many beasts — from the red fox, to the thread-waisted wasp, to the human being (whole-roasted pit pig, anyone?) — actually use this method to produce mouth-watering meals, which makes the whole premise that earth is a restaurant for aliens, and we're on the menu, so much the creepier.

But it's nothing new. While The Burrowers is hardly surprising or as remarkable as even the old Twilight Episode "How To Serve Man", it dresses the old leftovers up with a side of Old West style gravy and no cheese. It raises the question of whether these "aliens" are actually the pioneers of our planet, but it doesn't quite get to the point quickly enough, leaving the audience stranded in long, thirsty stretches of barren desert.

Perhaps one of Petty's most egregious pacing sins is the fact that he leaves Hutchison — playing a yummy love-to-hate character — out of the proceedings for far too long, then just drops him back in for little apparent reason. Petty also kills one of the leads off, but fails to exploit the shock for all it's worth.

Fortunately, there're just enough eerie moments to keep the wagon from draggin' (still, The Burrowers could lose a good 15 minutes and tell the same story more succinctly). I don't want to give any of these specific, unfortunately sporadic, shockers away, but they're good.

The central voracious villains are a cobble of CGI and actors in costume. While they're cool for the most part (to me, they seemed to flow with the graceful muscular movement of a panther, augmented with the twitchy, angular endoskeleton of the praying mantis, and just enough human-shape to make you think maybe we evolved from them), far too much is shown and the CGI brings a regrettable awkwardness to what otherwise would have been a unique and chilling monster (kudos to Robert Hall for his creature design).

Nods of ascent must also be given to cinematographer Phil Parmet (whom I'm a big fan of, from his work with director Rob Zombie) and composer Joseph LoDuca (he did a great job on another Plains fright flick, The Messengers). They bring density and atmosphere to what's otherwise a largely talky tale with only occasional bursts of horror and violence.

There's no doubt Petty's a gifted screenwriter (there are some excellent lines in the film, and each actor clearly relishes delivering them), but as a director he needs a little more giddy-up.

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