I remember seeing a trailer for The Burrowers a few years back and thinking that it looked an awful lot like a ripoff of Tremors. What's worse, given the chosen time period, I was afraid it would be even more closely comparable to Tremors 4. Thankfully this isn't the case. The blending of the western and horror genres is a little seen thing, but for its infrequency it does happen, and The Burrowers seems as though it could easily have been written by the late Manly Wade Wellman whose stories so often dropped supernatural creatures into the wild west.
The story opens when two neighboring farms are attacked in the night by unseen enemies, though they are presumed to be Indians. When the bodies are discovered and the women and children are found to be missing, a party sets out to track the suspected Indians, which they come to believe to be a tribe called the Burrowers, and to reclaim the kidnapped victims. After a few mysterious disappearances and one extremely unsettling discovery, our gang of would-be heroes soon finds out that a few run ins with the natives is probably the least of their worries, and that the Burrowers is not the name of a tribe, but something far more frightening.
Despite my initial worries about the originality of The Burrowers, after the very first scene I found myself getting excited by the prospect that this film would overcome my expectations., and for the first half of the movie my excitement grew steadily with each new incident. From that point however, everything sort of went down hill for me. There are a handful of positive and negative attributes to this movie which seem to balance out, making it just a so-so film. On the one hand it does do a good job blending a horror story into this western, cowboys and Indians setting, as well as the fact that, from a certain mindset, this film could be seen as a new take on vampires; admittedly though this is a bit of a stretch. Also, there are a few truly eerie and horrific scenes with regard to what happens to the Burrowers' victims. And here is where the film departs for me. It's shortly after some of the best moments of this movie that things go off the tracks. For one, after introducing this most frightening fact about how the Burrowers deal with their victims, that aspect of the movie, which could have been used brilliantly, is simply glossed over and mostly forgotten. Another issue for me were the creatures themselves, which I found neither scary nor believable. This might have been solved through the use of practical fx rather than CGI, but harping on that note has clearly become a losing battle. Something else I had mixed feelings on was the ending, but I won't give that away.
For whatever faults it may have The Burrowers is not a bad movie, merely a bit mediocre. It feels like I've said this a number of times already, but, the fewer expectations you have entering this movie, the better it'll be.
Tomorrow I will be reviewing The Innocents (1961).
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