Movie: "Have noted 52 distinct uses of WHOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

That Piranha (Aja, 2010) features both a cameo by Academy Award winner Richard Dreyfuss and a close-up CGI monster-fish regurgitating a half-eaten penis says something about modern horror, but what it says, exactly, I don't know.

In fact, I'm at something of a loss when it comes to saying anything about Piranha as the film is basically discussion proof. This isn't because there's nothing to say about the film, but rather because the film is so self-aware in its embrace of every strength and flaw and so meticulously explicit and thorough in its construction that the movie is immune to any significant attempt at analysis. The cinematic equivalent of a cigarette, it's exhausted in the act of experiencing it. Which is, perhaps, the wittiest joke in a film that otherwise favors sub-frat grade chuckles: Aja made a 3D movie that is all flat surfaces.

The fun-horror crowd is fond of defending the endemic stupidity of so many horror flicks with the argument that the viewer fails to "get" these films because they can't shut off their brains and just enjoy them. It isn't that the films are crap; it's that you haven't performed the necessary infantilizing auto-lobotomy required to find their level. For what it's worth, that's not what's going on in Piranha. The flick isn't mindless. It's weirder than stupid: Aja approached the task of recreating a slice of retro schlock horror as if he'd been tasked with restoring Michelangelo's David, and the result is a relentless excavation of guilty pleasure cinema that seems more like an autopsy than a celebration. What the viewer feels isn't so much fun as an excess-induced abobamiento.

Typical of the surreal approach of the film is the joyless, anthropological approach it takes towards the Spring Breakers who will eventually become the titular beasties' main course. On the DVD making-of clips, there's a telling moment when Aja discusses his fascination with Spring Break. Growing up in France, he never experienced anything like Spring Break and confronted with this distinctly American bacchanalia, he says that he spent a lot of time researching it. One imagines him freezing framing episodes of MTV Spring Break and writing down things like "inverse relationship between height and number of breast flashes" and "have noted 52 distinct uses of WHOOOOOOOOOOOO!" The result curiously stagey for what's meant to be an orgy of young ids unleashed. For example, for all his study of Spring Break, Aja decided that the Breakers would be grouped into themed boats. You can tell the members of every krewe apart and reckon your position on the lake by costume-signal. (He didn't just adopt any anthropological eye, he specifically channeled Levi-Strauss.) It's Spring Break as as a structuralist study.

Another great example of Aja's curious stagey-ness is the famous "two girls underwater" scene. In what must honestly be ranked as 3D only genuinely interesting deployment, Aja films what is meant to be a underwater lesbo scene intended for inclusion in a Girls Gone Wild style porno. What ensues is a languorous synchronized swimming scene that simultaneously evokes the beauty and the beast pas de deux in Creature from the Black Lagoon and the elaborate bathing beauty scenes that used to appear in Busby Berkeley joints. What it doesn't look anything like is porn, especially porn that is essentially improvised on location by an intoxicated cast and crew.

Again and again, Aja pushes the flick into these weirdly inert abstractions, unable to hide the fact that his capabilities as a filmmaker can't really be contained in such a crappy project. In Piranha we get to witness the curious spectacle of a filmmaker trying to make a completely dumb film, in homage to other dumb films, and not being able to dumb himself down enough to do it convincingly.

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Music: "As a person who has always said that more pop music should sound like 'Handsome Western States' era Beulah . . ."

Poised to become the next big band that hipster media vultures decry as a pure product of Internet hype until such time as market saturation hits the point that it triggers the vultures' obsessive need to experience cultural products as a groupthink and they start busting out phrases like "As a person who has always said that more pop music should reference the charm of Oomalama Fire label original release era Eugenius . . ." to preface their sadly tired reviews, Yuck was recently described thusly by a profile in Guardian:

Any idea of Yuck as "saviours" is further tempered by the fact that the sound they are making in 2011 is pretty much the sound a band of indie-loving kids who weren't interested in dance music would have made 20 years ago: a cocktail of Dinosaur Jr noise, Lemonheads melody and Teenage Fanclub's wistfulness. But, by getting excited about music that hasn't been fashionable for years – and matching that enthusiasm with some truly terrific songs – they are making a road-weary sound fresh and exciting.

Here's the video for the Yuck's "Holing Out." It features the band, visuals distortions that remind me of trying to watch scrambled cable, and a sometimes naked woman being chased by a monster. The basically recreated a coming of age moment - trying to glimpse boobies through video signal encryption - that now seems as archaic as hand fan codes or banyans.

WARNING or ENTICEMENT: Flashes of nudity, upstairs and down. Not safe for work or children; especially if you work with children, or employ children, somehow, at your workplace.

Yuck-"Holing Out" Music Video from VIDEOTHING.COM on Vimeo.

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Books: The Age of Tired Monsters?

In a recent interview about his new book, Kraken, China Miéville, Marxist economist and New Weird pioneer, discusses what he believes is the state of monster creation in the early 21st Century. Here's the relevant section of the interview:

BS: One of the things I wanted to ask you about is the talk you did at a Marxist conference called ‘Marxism and Monsters’?

CM: Oh yeah, God.

BS: Because I was obsessed with that talk for ages, and my comrades and stuff we always talk about it. So you talk about these origins of monsters, and the socioeconomic origins, and then I was thinking – nowadays we don’t really invent new monsters, we kinda riff off old monsters like vampires and zombies, we use them over and over again. I wanted to know whether you thought we’d exhausted our ability to create monsters or is there a reason today’s society doesn’t really invent monsters like we used to?

CM: I’m not sure I’d agree, I mean, I think there’s two different levels. On the one hand there’s this kind of endless degraded reiteration of the old tropes, so you get these endless endless endless zombie or vampire films or whatever, but at the same time there is also, I mean particularly within geek culture, that kind of fascination with the monster creation. So, with movies there’s always this thing with like, y’no, ‘did you get to the monster shot?’ ‘Did you see the monster?’ and it’s like ‘what’s it gonna be?’ You remember when Cloverfield came out and everyone was like: ‘what’s the monster going to be like?’ You know, there was all these debates about it. There is still an attempt to create, or self-consciously an attempt to create monsters that haven’t been seen before. Or you think about something like Doctor Who where they’re always trying to come up with the new, y’no – but for me, as you know if you’ve heard the talk, I think the early 20th Century was the high point of absolutely explosive creation in the monstrous. But I would say, at the moment – particularly at the level of vampires and zombies – it’s very tired.

I think probably the ’20s was the anomaly rather than now, I think it was more of a question of that being a particularly fecund time than this being a particularly degraded one. And I think there’s probably more teratological innovation going on now than there was in the 1880s for example. I think it’s very culturally specific and at various moments there’s a kind of upsurge of creativity and others there’s not, so I think at the moment things are roughly sort of in balance, you know - we have a lot of very very tired stuff, there’s still some things that are interesting, but most of the time monsters disappoint. Like Cloverfield when the monster is revealed you’re like, uh. *laughs* And that’s a separate issue. But as to the social reasons, why there is such an obsession with sparkly vampires, or whatever it might be, I mean that’s a whole other question – then you have to get into the specifics of each case. And these things are very fashion driven, so, angels are something they’re trying to do at the moment. Angels are very trendy. So overall I think this day and age is kind of middling, in terms of monster creation.

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Movies: Constantly intellectually ambushed by the obvious.

I kinda feel bad about this. Here I've not done a movie review in a million years, and now this is what I bring you: Razortooth, Patricia Harrington's 2007 straight-to-video creature feature about an outsized, man-eating freshwater eel.

I feel like a husband who has come home hours late, stinking of booze and cheap perfume, and my only excuse is, "Um, I was attacked. By a giant mutant eel. That stunk of booze and cheap perfume. I'm lucky to be alive and certainly happy to see you again, my dear. How was your day?"

But giant eel is what I've got. So here goes . . .

Razortooth opens with a scene of two on-the-run fugitives fresh from a jailbreak being chased by a small gang of cops through a swamp. You can tell the people chasing them are police officers because they all wear identical t-shirts: black tees with the word "Police" on them. They have no badges; no vests; no holsters and equipment belts; and apparently chased these dudes on foot, as they have no vehicles anywhere.

It's the first of and endless stream of goofy, amateur-hour moments throughout the film. But, honestly, they feel more playful than painful. Not in an ironic, self-conscious way; but rather in a "hey gang, let's make a movie" way. One almost wonders if sales of the video didn't go to save the youth center or pay off Granny's mortgage. A certain underdog-boosting goodwill goes a long way. To return to the police shirt example, it reminds one of the branded thug t-shirts villains in the original West Era Batman show used to wear. It cheesy, but also clearly a product of a production with so little money that most of the prop guns that appear in the flick are BB guns (in fact, one of the officers in the film even gives his gun a pump to build up some pressure - as if the fact that it was a BB gun was actually part of the in-film world). In contrast, Frank Miller pulls the same "uncostume" bit for his semi-disposable thugs in his abortion of a Spirit adaptation, only he thinks the joke is so worthwhile that he not only repeats it throughout the flick, but makes it part of an on-going CGI gag that must of cost him about 20 Razortooths. The former seems auto-Sweded, the latter seems like another sad example of that peculiar brand of Hollywoodland creativity that believes an idea is rejuvenated if one simply does it more expensively.

That said, Razortooth is still a God awful film. The kind of flick where somebody can follow the line "Somebody tore this place apart" with the line "Or something" and think they've really nailed a dramatic moment.

The plot of the flick involves a handful of excuses to fill a Florida swamp with folks who'd make fine grub for a giant, mutated eel. Somewhat awkwardly, the various plot threads need to happen in the same place (though, maybe not - the eel seems to be able to get wherever it is needed through a truly labyrinthian sewer system that forward thinking civil planners connected to every potential eel-victim kill site), but the are also dependent on happening in parallel dimensions of cluelessness. Violent escaped cons prowl the swamps; but, despite the fact that authorities believe these dudes slaughtered a handful of their Brothers in T-shirts, they do nothing to stop kids camp group from rowing into the swamp. In another instance of "and now you tell me" storytelling, an animal control agent is apparently aware of the fact that a mad science type in the swamp lost his position at a local university for mad sciencey violations of, um, the science code or whatever; but, again, he does nothing to indicate this to a handful of grad students who have shown up at his mad science base camp to help him with his mad studies.

This curious narrative dependence too-late exposition is somewhat explained by the fact that all the characters in the flick seem to be not stupid, really, but rather constantly intellectually ambushed by the obvious. For example, the mad scientist responsible for the beasty at the heart of the film explains a plan for killing the murderous monster. He gives a bit of backstory: An experiment caused the creature to experience amazing, unchecked growth. As it continued to grow, it broke lose from its tank, ate some researchers, and escaped to the swamp. The good doctor then explains that he plans to poison the beast. When the creature busted out, it was x feet long and, the confident scientist explains, he's done the calculations and has brought enough poison to bring even a creature that large down. At this point, one of the grad students wonders if the creature isn't bigger than that by now because, well, you know, the whole unchecked growth/continued growth thing. The scientist and the rest of the eel hunters seemed gobsmacked by this. You half expect the scientist to say, "Ye gods, the boy is right! Gettingbiggerosity, or the trait you non-scientists call 'growth,' does suggest the eel would have grown since then!"

Harrington's made the kind of flick that, prior to unlimited free access to porn over the Internet, used to passingly entertain young boys on bad weather Saturday afternoons. Now these flicks seem to exist mainly to garner snarky, self-satisfied horror blog reviews, and on those terms, Razortooth is a raging success.

As a postscript, imdb informs me that director Patty Harrington was once the casting director on a softcore crime actioner called Hot Ticket (a.k.a. Strip for Action, a.k.a. Hard Run). I don't know anything about this flick other than the fact that its tagline is the priceless "She stripped for a living. Now she must strip to live." Nice. If there's a sequel, I hope they used "You must strip to live on the Planet of the Hot Tickets!"

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Over There: Horror films and the War in Afghanistan - Part 1: Sand Serpents.

American horror cinema is nimble. Surprisingly so given its dependence on genre formulas and the genre fans' insatiable appetite for re-heated leftovers. Despite the antiquity of many of the genre's most beloved tropes - the specters that haunt modern day-traders and their spiritually besieged girlfriends are fundamentally the same beasties that spooked our preliterate ancestors thousands of years ago - horror cinema is quick to assimilate our latest fears and anxieties. From genuine threats, like nuclear weaponry, to passing fancies, like the 2012 "prophecy," anything that makes us antsy is just waiting for an enterprising low-budget filmmaker to give it the fright flick treatment. The ambulance chaser of our psychic landscape, horror's often the first on the scene of any disaster, ready to help us frame up our latest fears and happy to make a buck or two doing so.

Wars would seem to be an exception to this. During the Second World War, Hollywood kept the homefront eager for slaughter by filling theaters with hundreds of patriotic flicks featuring our fighting men and women in action. Yet surprisingly few horror films made in that period - 1941 to 1945 - overtly mention the war and none are set on the frontlines or featured characters directly involved in fighting. Certainly there were exceptions to this rule: King of the Zombies and Revenge of the Zombies (1941 and 1943) feature Nazi zombie makers, 1942's Black Dragons has surgically altered Japanese saboteurs as the baddies, Dark Waters (1944) includes a torpedoed passenger ship as a backstory plot point, and Return of the Vampire (1944) is set in London and features regular blackouts and bombing raids (and the vamp baddie, in a remarkable example of good taste, poses as a Jewish refugee from Eastern Europe). But none of the era's classics - The Wolf Man, Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Uninvited, The Body Snatcher, and Isle of the Dead, not to mention the sub-classic, but still beloved, late entries into Universal's Dracula and Frankenstein franchises - seriously engage with what must have unquestionably been the single greatest source of anxiety for American film-goers.

The same can be said of Vietnam. Though the "crazy vet" character quickly became a stock character (courtesy of Bob Clark's Dead of Night and other films), Vietnam War era horror flicks that are linked with the war in the critical imagination are usually thought of as metaphorical commentaries on the war era or as products of the cultural wreckage the war caused. For example, many cite the grim, relentless tone and naturalistic visual style of Last House on the Left as a product of Vietnam, but its source material is older and the film is not objectively about the conflict. Even after the war, references to the conflict were usually oblique: Piranha and CHUD (1978 and 1984) feature bio-weapons intended for use against Charlie turning against Americans, House and Jacob's Ladder (1986 and 1990) feature 'Nam vets who are literally haunted by their past, and one could make the case that the unidentified sliver of South American jungle in Predator (1987) is really just a stand-in for the jungles of Vietnam. There must be, in the vast spread of horror flicks, some flick that features soldiers in the Vietnam War coming up against monsters and spooks, but to date America has yet produce a horror film set in the Vietnam War that has the equivalent status of R-Point (2004), South Korea's box office hit spookshow about Korean soldiers battling for their lives inside a haunted abandoned Vietnamese hospital.

Perhaps the magnitude of war simply dwarfs he ability of horror filmmaker to contain it meaningfully in tried and true horror frameworks. Compared with the brutal acts of warfare, their own quiver of spookshow tricks just don't measure up. The savagery of, say, My Lai starkly reminds of how silly and harmless most of cherished horror tropes are. More cynically, perhaps the filmmakers know that their monsters and madmen slashers are the stars of the show and putting their commodity in a setting where their killing prowess would suddenly look bush league is bad for protecting brand identity.

Regardless of the reason, American horror cinema, which is otherwise quick to exploit timely preoccupations, has long avoided setting movies in a on-going conflict. It is noteworthy, then, that the War in Afghanistan is the setting of no fewer than three horror films in the past two years. The Iraq War, true to American horror tradition, remains predominantly an influence and allusion. While drama and action filmmakers have had little compunction (and, notably, little success) about tackling the war head-on, horror filmmakers have mostly kept their distance. Where it has been the direct subject of a horror flick - Joe Dante's truly execrable Homecoming - the film has focused on the homefront impact of the war and the machinations of the administration who lied their way into the conflict. But, for some reason, filmmakers have decided that the on-going conflict in Afghanistan is ripe for horror genre exploitation. In 2008, Daniel Myrick, of Blair Witch fame, helmed The Objective, a supernatural thriller involving a squad of soldiers on the hunt for Bin Laden. The next year, Red Sands and Sand Serpents streeted, each featuring U.S. troops battling monstrous threats in the Afghanistan hinterlands.

We'll start this tour of this unique subgenre of modern horror with the Syfy fodder Sand Serpents for no other reason than that happened to be the first flick that came in the mail from Netflix. In what might be one of the strangest business strategies ever, Syfy has apparently decided that it is going to corner the market on "it's a lazy Saturday afternoon and finding the remote would be harder than sitting through this movie" films. Sand Serpents is a slightly above average component of Syfy's vast plan to conquer that crucial 18 through 35 lazy-and-can't-find-remote demographic. Directed by Jeff Renfroe (who apparently knows that his involvement as the editor of Anvil! The Story of Anvil means he need not produce anything else of last quality to secure his place in film history), Sand Serpents follows the misadventures of a small squad of Marines who are sent to recon an unused sapphire mine. To save time, screenwriter Raul Inglis (best known for his cartoon scripts and the narrative interludes in the video game Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects) rolled out his characters from a NPC random encounter generator in the Twilight 2000 rulebook. We've got all the classics here: There's the bespectacled intellectual (the Sassoon), the rough-edged soldier who's in Marines because of a "hometown jam" (the Springsteen), the green recruit leader who must earn the respect of his men (the Tori Montroc), the tough as nails sergeant (the Rock), the racist lughead (the Vig), the guy whose always got a bad feeling about this mission (the Lemchek), and the outsider specialist (the Ripley). There's also some cannon fodder (the Fodder). Despite his apparent comfort with cliché, Inglis forgets to include the loyal native (the Benny Fish), the dude who loses his shit (the Hudson), or the guy from Brooklyn (the Brooklyn). Whether this is because Inglis is tired of these particular types or due to the fickle nature of Twilight 2000 NPC generator, I don't profess to know.

After some efficient backstory setting up their mission parameters, our troops march almost immediately into an ambush. They are overwhelmed by Taliban forces and those that survive the initial attack, about five out of the initial seven, are prepped for videotapped beheadings. This scene gives us a hint of why many filmmakers hesitate to set their monster pics in a live-fire war: Nothing that follows in the movie has quite the tension of watching seven bound and blindfolded soldiers beg for fruitlessly beg for their lives. Ultimately, the soldiers are spared. As it turns out, the ambush above the mine sent tremors deep through the mine structure, awakening massive three, maybe four gigantic sand worms - several stories tall, with a mouth roughly the size of the Holland Tunnel - from their slumber. The sand worms breach the surface with the force of a small earthquake, sending the Taliban soldiers out to see what the heck is up. They are, to say the least, unprepared to deal with the sand serpents and quickly become serpent chow.

Spared the serpent's immediate onslaught, the Marines slip their bonds and regroup. Their movement arouses the ever-peckish titular monstrosities and, after the beasties whittle the number of Marines down slightly, the Marines ponder just how to make it back to base when any movement on their part brings serpentish attention.

The Marines eventually break for a nearby refugee camp. Built on the remains of what appears to be a bombed out brace of block houses, the concrete rubble foundation of the refugee camp serves as a deterrent to serpenty predations. There the team meets Amal and his daughter Asala, two refugees who are willing to to help the Marines if the Marines agree to take them out of the Taliban controlled region. The Marines and the refugees hatch a plan that involves a mad endgame return to the serpent infested mine and call for evac. It's not a utterly crap plan, but you could count the numbers who survive it on a single hand. And not even your single hand, but the hand of a dude who had one of those horrible woodshop accidents they warned you about in high school.

From a strictly horror-fan perspective, Sand Serpents may just squeeze into the the middling territory. With none of the aw-shucks wit and charm of Tremors or raw power of Aliens, its two nearest cinematic predecessors, it comes off as a unoffensive, by the numbers run-and-gun. Relatively speaking, the effects are top notch for a Syfy production. But that's relatively speaking. While this film puts The Snakehead Horror to shame, it's a stain on the shorts of Cloverfield. That said, there is an odd charm in watching the lengths the filmmakers will go to in order to avoid showing the sand serpents. In fact, the film depends on the fact that we most often register their presence solely by the panic reactions of our protags: We've see that the serpents are big enough and fast enough to snatch Blackhawk choppers (or the Syfy-budget equivalents thereof) out of the air, so seeing them on screen in most scenes would just make us wonder why they don't snatch our unlucky heroes up.

As an artifact of the Afghan War era, there are two major points of interest. First, there's the characters of Amal and Asala. During an extend sequence in which the Marines use the mines to escape - apparently the rock the mines cut through to to thick for the meddlesome beasties - the up-to-then trustworthy father and daughter duo have a weird exchange. The father starts to head down a mine and then, after some consideration, changes his mind and directs the Marines down a different shaft. His daughter then intervenes and says that they are headed in the wrong direction. Amal ignores her and maintains his stance. Now, eventually, the Marines pop out of the mines and there are Taliban crawling all over the area. But, before they surface, there's a whole scene in which a sand serpent chases them around the mines, pretty much messing up any chance we'd have to know if the Marines ended up where they were being directed. Was Amal leading them into a trap? Did he start to, change his mind, and then get pressured by his child to carry out the plan? Honestly, I'm a bit hesitant to not put this all down as a product of sloppy writing. To believe that Amal or Asala was leading the Marines into a trap would require we believe that the Taliban plant two people in a refugee camp they had no reason to believe the Marines would go to. They would then assume that the Marine would agree to travel through the mines, though they didn't know about the serpents (which had eaten every last one of the first Taliban squad) which was the only reason the Marines had to travel by mine shaft. Still, the impression you get while watching it is one of potential betrayal, never fully resolved. Where we betrayed? Do we even understand enough to know if we have or haven't been betrayed? While far from the overt racism of Pvt. Jackass, the squads resident spokesman for ethnic hatred, it speaks to a more subtle unease about whether we truly have allies, even when our best interest coincide.

Even more interesting than than the nuanced unease about our Afghan allies is the bizarre final scene of the flick. In the last moment, the remaining two Marines and Asala, the potentially traitorous Afghan girl, lift off in a chopper. Suddenly, a sand serpent rears out of the surface and lunges toward the helicopter. One of the Marines, wearing a confiscated suicide bomber belt of explosives, leaps into the maw of the beast. He detonates, saving the last Marine and the little girl. Watching this, I couldn't help but be reminded of a truly odd essay by Sunny Singh called In Praise of the Delinquent Hero, or How Hollywood Creates Terrorists. It's long been a curiosity among anti-terrorism experts that terrorist seem fascinated by American genre cinema. Terrorists often select their nom de guerres from American action cinema lore. When NYPD anti-terror agents unravelled a plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, they found that they terrorists referred to the famous landmark as "the Godzilla bridge," an allusion to the '98 Emmerich flick (not only do they want us dead, their taste in films is horrific). Indian essayist Singh suggests that the connection runs deeper than average pop fandom. She suggest that genre cinema has given terrorists the mental justification they need in the form of the "delinquent hero." Think a War on Terror update of the Kracauer thesis. This figure, in Singh's words, embodies "distrust of sociopolitical institutions and individuals, the privileging of individual judgment over the status quo, and, finally, the utility of violent force in achieving goals, even if it means going beyond the pale of law." (The complete essay is available in How They See Us, edited by James Atlas - buy indie and remember: more of the dollars spent at your independent retailers are circulated back into the local economy.) Though too wrapped up in the military command structure to truly be delinquent heroes, the film does show our Marines clashing and outsmarting an incompetent and avaricious command structure, ignoring their orders because they decided their is a higher set of values they must follow, and using force to solve their problems. Though I find Singh overreaches in her essay, the irony of the fact that hero Marine becomes a suicide bomber would not be lost on him.

[UPDATE: See Singh's comment below; not only because she calls me out on an embarrassing assumption on my part, but because she directs you, dear readers of all genders, to an online version of the essay mentioned above.]

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Movies: Something burrowed, something blue.

A satisfyingly slow-burn and low-key historical horror, J.T. Petty's Western period horror flick The Borrowers eschews tired and familiar Western tropes to create a eco-horror that casts the human impact of Western expansion as an especially grisly form of species-wide suicide. This twisting of the dust-covered but still somehow sacred legends of the West – both the Whig history notions of manifest destiny (with its corresponding "gritty and grim" deconstructionists mirror image) and the more PC contemporary fantasy of pre-white America as agrarian utopia – is all the more clever in that Petty rope-a-dopes nostalgic viewers who basically want fanservice. He repeated feints towards these themes, only to subsume them into the quiet and in doomed vision of the West he envisions: a dispassionate, Darwinian vision that has more in common with the ahumanism of American poet Robinson Jeffers than the heroic Westerns of yore, their wigged out foreign counterparts, or the postmodern navel gazing of most contemporary Westerns.

The Burrowers opens in familiar territory. A frontier family been has vanished with signs of struggle. The assumption is that Indians got them. A posse is formed – combining well-meaning, good-hearted types with hard-bitten, cynical, and potentially unhinged types – to go rescue them. The obvious reference is to Ford's classic The Searchers and its epic plot to reclaim a kidnapped girl from Apaches. But, as will happen throughout the film, Petty picks up the allusion, holds it up the viewers, and then sets it down without further development. He seems to be saying, "We all see this is here, right. Now come on, that's not where we're going." It's a weird sort of un-allusion, one that viewers comfortable with horror's insular in-joke Pavlovian fan reward system may find awkwardly stand-offish. What's the point in alluding to all these great Westerns if you're not going to work within their tropes and explore their space? There's almost a sense of presumptuous disavowal in his approach. In the genre's parlance, Petty strays from the reservation.

As the posse gets to their grim work, similar shopworn tropes of the Western genre appear and fade away. We get the homesteaders versus the military, whites versus the Indians, the idealists versus the "realists." But always, Petty undermines these and then tosses them away. For example, Indians appear on both sides of the U.S. versus native conflict, and these quisling Native American don't actually turn out to be the most cynical First Peoples in the story.

Eventually, the posse realizes that they are not on a trail of a war party. Instead, they're marching deeper and deeper into the hunting ground of a species of humanoid/insectile predators that Native Americans have dubbed "the burrowers" for their unsettling habit of paralyzing their prey, burying it in a shallow grave, and coming back for dinner when their victims have rotted and softened just a bit. This revelation comes a bit too late, however, and the posse members who are still alive when the full puzzle has been assembled are forced to seek aid from a tribe rumored to have perfected a method of defeating the beasts. What they don't know is that the tribe's method is about as palatable as the feeding habits of the burrowers.

We're told by one of the Indian characters that the burrowers were not a problem until the whites killed all the buffalo, allegedly the preferred food source of the burrowers. Now forced to find other sources of sustenance, the burrowers have turned to humans. This is, I think, another of Petty's curious un-nods to convention. Burrowers may have been less of a problem in the days before the extinction of the bison. But I think Petty strongly implies that this, at best, a half-true "just so story." Here's how I reckon. First, the burrowers' method of attack is clearly adapted to humans. The burrowers are nocturnal and show profound patience. Like good pack predators, they follow their prey for long periods of time, waiting until they see a weak, separated, or otherwise tastily inviting target. This is pretty much SOP for pack predators. What's weird about the burrowers is that their preferred method of dealing with prey really only makes sense if you’re a stationary predator (like a spider) or if you're dealing with a species of animal they would search for and then attempt to care for paralyzed members of the herd (an example of which I cannot call to mind because humans are really the only animals that regularly try this). Think of it this way. Burrowers are crappily adapted to hunt bison herds. Every time they strike, they'd send a herd running and be faced with the choice of staying with their paralyzed prey or chasing after the herd. By contrast, every time they hit a group of humans, the humans bunch up and start searching for the missing humans. The behavior of the burrowers suggests that they hunt humans.

Further evidence to the fact that Native Americans and burrowers have been at one another for a long time derives from the Native American response to the burrowers. Late in the flick, it is revealed that a single tribe, the Ute, has developed a method of fighting the burrowers. All the other tribes know this fact, but none have either bothered to develop their own method or copy the way of the Ute. This is because the Ute basically flip the script on pack predator strategy and booby-trap the weakest link in the "herd" (in this case, herd means group of humans). The method works like this. The bait-human is doped. The burrowers attack and are doped as well. With the burrowers now weakened, the Ute use long spears to pin the burrowers to the ground. The pinned and tranquilized burrows are stuck until sunrise, when direct exposure to sunlight does them in. The brilliance of the method is that, done right, it involves almost no direct fighting, minimizing the chances that humans would get injured. Except, of course, for the poor man or woman you've sacrificed as bait. Why do I feel this is evidence that Native Americans and burrowers have been at one another for some time? When burrowers take on humans, it tends to be a pretty one-sided battle. They are the lions and we're the zebras. In order for a David to beat a Goliath, they have to game the salient details of what system they're in while figuring out what details are non-salient to winning the game. In this case, winning equals not getting eaten. The Ute's method works and the posse fails because they make the socially unacceptable choice automatically give up a human life every time they get into a conflict with the burrowers. This is why the other tribes know the Ute can beat the burrowers, but refuse to adopt their system. I think the tribe wide adoption of this sacrifice system would probably take some time. No Ute wants to die any more than a member of the posse or member of another tribe does. Furthermore, fine detail of the system and its standardization suggest regular use, which requires time. Lastly, the dissemination of this information across dispersed tribes would require some time as well. In Petty's flick, the whites might be new to the fight, but the implication is that the fight's been going on for some time.

This discussion of people and monsters as lions and zebras might seem odd, but I think it I embedded in the flicks tone and characterization. In keeping with a sort of ecological mindset, the main characters in this flick aren't individual cowboys and Indians. Rather, the film follows groups: the posse, the tribe, the Army, and so on. This is another clever subversion of the classical Western paradigm and its discontents. If the classic Western is about the Great Man – be it the noble sheriff or the restless anti-hero – and the various spaghetti and pomo Westerns are about what violent jerks Great Men can be, then Petty's evodevo-Western deemphasizes the role of individual altogether. As in the Ute's sacrificial counter-attack move, the lives of individuals account for little. The bloody process of adapting is the star of the movie. If Ford's great Western vista's suggested a monumental stage appropriate to the passions of his titanic characters, Petty's wide-angle landscapes shrink his characters. The landscape suggests their insignificance. They become a near mirror image of the burrowers: marching lines of ants to match the locust-like swarms of monsters. Its perhaps the sweetest irony of the film that Petty dresses this extremely foreign conceptual approach to horror in the sheep's clothing of America's more familiar genre.

I suspect most fans of the Western will treat this with the same befuddled disdain that greets films like Dead Man and Walker. Though, in many ways, The Burrowers will be even worse for them because, unlike those two flicks, there are few visual cues to tip viewers off to the weirdness at the films core. To steal the words of C. S. Lewis, trying to sell this flick to the nostalgist will be trying "to sell him something he has no use for at a price he does not wish to pay." Because, at its base, it isn't a Western. It is a thoughtful, surprising quiet, and pleasantly unsettling horror flick that happens to take place in the old West.

Plus, it contains one of the funniest add-ons I've ever seen. The DVD comes with a little featurette containing an interview with a woman who plays one of the burrowers. This monster actor's praise for Petty's direction is brilliant and suggests how different the art of being monstrous is from any other sort of acting. Be sure to check it out.

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