The Burrowers

If you’ve been wasting part of your life reading this blog, you know I have a weakness for “weird westerns”, the blending of traditional western themes with horror. Therefore, I was really looking forward to The Burrowers, and I’m happy to say, was generally not disappointed.

In the American West of 1879, a family is surprised at night to hear shots and screams from outside. The women and children are told to go down in the cellar and wait until it’s all clear. The next day, Fergus Coffey (Karl Geary) shows up to resume his courtship of one of the women in the cellar to find most of the people have disappeared, with only a couple of bodies left behind. Logically, he believes an Indian raiding party musty have attacked and stolen the women. He rounds up some men from the area to go in pursuit, including John Clay (Clancy Brown) and William Parcher (Tom Cruise’s cousin William Mapother, very good in his role). They join with an ineffectual and incompetently-led Army unit for part of the way.

The only strange thing about the scene of the attack is a number of holes in the ground, with the grass around them pressed down in a counter-clockwise motion. This (as well as the title) is a foreshadowing of things to come, for it was not Indians who raided the farm, but a race of underground creatures. According to the Indians, the creatures emerge from the ground every third generation to feed, paralyzing their victims with venom, then burying them alive until they get soft and juicy. Supposedly, the Burrowers used to eat buffalo, but since the white man ravaged the bison population, they’ve developed more of a taste for human meat.

(On a side note, in order to show a social conscience, it seems every western has an Indian griping about the loss of the buffalo. I understand the use of metaphor, but it seems they’d use the complaining time to mention the arrival of the white man meant the death of about 95 percent of the Indians themselves. I mean, I feel for the buffalo, but genocide seems bad, too.)

I enjoyed the movie a great deal, but a lot of viewers seem turned off by the relatively slow pacing of the first half of the film, judging by imdb.com reviews. I thought it worked well to develop characters before killing them, but some modern viewers may disagree. It may also get to some that while in most cases a western/horror hybrid is a horror movie first and a western second, here the western elements dominate. So if you don’t like westerns, you might want to skip this one.

I thought it was a well-written, well-acted movie with a nice visual touch. I like the way the sense of dread slowly builds, and the matter-of-fact way the culture of violence in the Old West (particularly the attitude of the Army toward Indians) is presented. If any of this sounds appealing to you, I think it’s definitely worth a look.
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Undead Or Alive

Another zombedy (zombie comedy), this time set in the old west. Given my affection for Weird Westerns, it’s amazing it took me this long to get to this one. The explanation for this is one of the movie’s stars, and the only recognizable actor in the cast, is Chris Kattan, the former Saturday Night Live cast member, who annoys me immensely.

An Army deserter (James Denton, who is actually pretty good in his role) gets in a fight with a faux cowboy (Kattan) over a hooker. They get thrown into jail, and bond when they break out and flee the corrupt sheriff. But the corrupt pair have more to worry about, since the Curse of Geronimo is sweeping the area. Apparently before he died (in the movie, they repeatedly state Geronimo was forced off a cliff and died, although the real Geronimo died of pneumonia at Fort Sill), Geronimo cursed white men, causing them to turn into zombies. Although zombification here is the result of a curse, it works just like a virus, being transmitted by bites. Soon the duo are fighting for their lives against the outbreak of the undead, aided by the granddaughter of Geronimo (Navi Rawat, who is very hot), who is waging her own war against the army.

The effects are decent, and from a technical point of view, the movie is competently made, but the recurring jokes around Kattan’s character being unsuited for western life got very old. This is a movie for hard-core zombie fans, and few others.

Razored Saddles

Razored Saddles was one of the seminal anthologies of the 80s (first published in 1989) and one of the few I missed on the first go-around, so I was understandably stoked when I finally obtained a rather expensive copy of the original hardback. I was also excited that the anthology was edited by a favorite author, Joe R. Lansdale (with Pat LoBrutto). And finally, there was the subject matter.

When I was a kid and comic books were the center of my reading universe, one of my favorites was a book called Weird Western Tales. This was a blend of horror material and the western genre, with cowboys fighting ghosts, zombies, and the like. The best known continuing feature in this vein was Jonah Hex, about a hideously disfigured gunfighter (Lansdale himself wrote two great story arcs for Jonah Hex in the late 90s). Razored Saddles was ostensibly in this milieu, so I had looked forward to it. Lansdale hisownself referred to it as the first “cowpunk” anthology.

All anthologies are somewhat up and down, with a variety of different authors with differing takes on the theme, and I was prepared for this to hold true here, but I expected it to be generally good, with great writers like Lansdale, Lewis Shiner, Howard Waldrop, and others. The book started off well, with a Robert McCammon story, “Black Boots” about a gunman fleeing an unkillable foe. But the pleasant vibe dissolved in a haze of New Wave SF blandness. The majority of the stories ignored the weird western idea in favor of flat uncompelling narratives. It did pick up near the end, with “Yore Skin’s Jes’s Soft ‘n Purty” by Chet Williamson, but most of the stories were a major letdown. Lansdale himself has written a number of outstanding western/horror hybrids, so if that's what you're looking for, I'd suggest seeking one of his collections. To me, Razored Saddles was a missed opportunity.