Cowboys and Monsters
by James Roland
John Wayne could have used a few good monsters.
And by monsters I mean 8-foot-long mutant bug people that steal women and children, poison them into comas, and eat their innards.
Maybe John Ford and Sergio Leone never explored that option in their Westerns, but writer/director J.T. Petty handles this added genre element with sheer storytelling talent, weaving it so completely into a realistic period piece that it would be easy to forget that these monsters didn’t actually exist.
Petty’s film, The Burrowers, takes place in 1879 in the Dakota Territory. One night “burrowers” attack a small ranch, and most of the inhabitants die. A few women go missing, though, and three local men team with a small band of army soldiers to track the survivors, thinking it an attack by Native Americans. A strange marriage of The Searchers and Jaws follows as the burrowers pick apart and divide the party, in the wilderness.
Despite the gruesome centerpiece, a restrained tone permeates The Burrowers. No catchy one-liners, no scenery-eating performances — even from Doug Hutchison (The Green Mile, The X-Files), who plays a stereotypical, Native-hating army leader. These tough, no-nonsense cowboys handle everything, from setting camp to fighting monsters, with a firm, practical approach. To them, the burrowers represent just one more danger on the American frontier.
The cinematography in this piece achieved a level far beyond most indie fodder. Likewise, the filmmakers have fashioned fresh dialogue, true characters, and time-period detail without succumbing to stodgy, history-spouting caricatures. J.T. Petty wrote a daring plot, opting for a series of late-night suspense sequences rather than the normal sweeping flow of most Westerns. This keeps the audience lost in the dark, placing them inside the exhausted heads of the main characters as they fight a losing battle, night after night.
On the whole, this film may be too bleak for its own good. When a Native American reveals that the burrowers eat human flesh because the settlers depleted their normal supply of buffalo, the film turns into a not-so-subtle metaphor for Manifest Destiny, and I found it hard not to squirm with physical and philosophical discomfort as the burrowers crept through the tall grass to claim their victims.
With modern audiences moving away from darker fare, and the constant battle for ticket sales that Westerns have fought since the 1970s, it’s no wonder The Burrowers dug itself deep to the bottom of the DVD clearance pile at Wal-Mart.
But it’s a shame. When great underground films stay below the surface, we’re left with the hollow reboots and remakes that live in the neon lights of sprawling, corporate megaplexes.
