10/17/14 (Part Two): The Scarecrow That Wasn’t

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31 Days of Halloween, abandoned plantation, Alex Turner, American Civil War, cinema, cornfields, curses, Dead Birds, extreme violence, favorite films, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, Henry Thomas, horror, horror film, horror films, horror movies, horror westerns, Isaiah Washington, Mark Boone Junior, Michael Shannon, Movies, Muse Watson, Nicki Aycox, North vs South, Patrick Fugit, racism, scarecrows, set in 1860s, Simon Barrett, slavery, Steve Yedlin, stolen gold, The Burrowers, voodoo curses

In the world of horror films, hyphenates and hybrids are king: horror-comedies, sci-fi horror, teen slasher flicks (as opposed to geriatric slasher flicks, one assumes), rom-zom-coms, found-footage films, military-based horror films…if two disparate styles/genres/things can be forcibly jammed together, the horror industry has probably already done it. Of all of these various amalgams, however, one of the most under-represented, but endlessly entertaining, variations must certainly be the horror-Western.

While horror-Westerns appeared to have a bit of a renaissance in the ’50s and ’60s (albeit one composed entirely of questionable fare like Billy the Kid vs Dracula (1966) and The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956)), you can count the number of “modern-day” horror-Westerns on a remarkably small number of fingers. Among exceptional films like The Burrowers (2008) and Ravenous (1999), there are also odious entries like the obnoxious Wesley Snipes-starring turkey Gallowwalkers (2012) and The Quick and the Undead (2006): while a Western setting can be glorious fodder for a horror film, it can also lead to any number of tired, stupid “zombie gunslinger” clichés, lazy ideas that are easily as tedious as cheap, cash-in found-footage films or dime-a-dozen zombie flicks.

Of the modern-day horror-Westerns that “get it right,” Alex Turner’s Dead Birds (2004) is easily one of the highlights, ranking right there with the aforementioned Ravenous and The Burrowers as some of my favorite modern horror films. There’s a quiet elegance to Dead Birds that’s almost hypnotizing, a notion of stepping off the beaten path and into a world that’s just slightly askew from ours. Thanks to an excellent script by genre mainstay Simon Barrett and some truly gorgeous cinematography courtesy of frequent Rian Johnson collaborator Steve Yedlin, Dead Birds is a subtle chiller that looks great and is smarter than the average bear. The resulting film is a slow-burner that still manages to incorporate jump scares (albeit fewer than the typical modern horror film) to good effect, while offering up an ending that should give audiences something to mull over for days to come.

The film begins in Alabama, in 1863, at the tail-end of the American Civil War. A group of gunmen – William (Henry Thomas), Sam (Patrick Fugit), Joseph (Mark Boone Junior), Clyde (Michael Shannon), Todd (Isaiah Washington) and Annabelle (Nicki Aycox) – have just made off with a large shipment of gold after a brazen, bloody bank robbery. After making it out of the town, the group decides to bunker down at an old homestead, the Hollister place. When they finally make it to the place, it ends up being a sprawling, abandoned plantation, the main house decrepit and unbelievably creepy at the end of a massive cornfield. Trudging through the wall of corn, the group makes two equally unsettling discoveries: a scarecrow that’s probably a human body stuck up on a pole and a bizarre, small, hairless creature, vaguely humanoid in shape, that Sam handily kills with a bullet to the head. As foreboding moments go, it doesn’t get much more foreboding than that.

Once the group makes it to the farmhouse, the usual tendencies to fight and form sub-groups take over: Clyde and Joseph hate that they’re getting paid as much as Todd, who’s black, and scheme to keep all the gold for themselves; William and Annabelle continue the courtship that appears to have begun in a military field hospital and Sam seems to be getting more fidgety and paranoid by the minute. When the group begins to see strange apparitions throughout the house, demonic things that look like children with hollow, empty eyes, they come to the realization that they might have stepped smack-dab into quite a bit of trouble. As the group try to make sense of what’s going, they’ll gradually come to learn the full story of the plantation’s former owner and the terrible steps he went through to get back his lost love. If they’re lucky, the group will make it out with their hides, if not their minds, intact. If not, however, they’ll find themselves as just another part of the plantation’s terrible past, trapped in the cornfield until the end of time.

There’s an awful lot working in Dead Birds’ favor (great cast, good effects, fantastically creepy setting, authentic period detail) but the feather in the cap definitely ends up being Simon Barrett’s exceptionally sharp, intelligent script. Rather than traffic in tired horror movie clichés (other than the nearly ubiquitous “scary-faced” people, of course), the film comes up with a fresh, nicely realized mythology of its own, one that manages to incorporate voodoo curses, demons and no small amount of irony. In a genre where story often feels like something you trip over on your way to the next gore shot, Dead Birds is definitely a breath of fresh air.

As a horror film, Turner’s movie hits all of its marks: the violence can be sudden and intense, the atmosphere is thick with tension and the scares are genuine and frequent. While the film doesn’t really traffic in setpieces, ala something like Suspiria (1977), there are still plenty of memorable scenes, such as the moment in the final third where we get a good look at the scarecrow and some really spooky bits involving the demonic children. Unlike more “cookie-cutter” films, we get to know and like (for the most part) the characters in Dead Birds, making their inevitable fates all that much more impactful.

In particular, Henry Thomas (yeah, Elliott from E.T. (1982)) is a great square-jawed protagonist, while genre vet Michael Shannon and Sons of Anarchy’s Mark Boone Junior make a great pair as the evil-leaning Clyde and Joseph. Most importantly, the ensemble works really well together, bringing a sense of cohesion to the production that’s likewise missing in more slap-dash films. None of these characters exist as mere cannon fodder, which makes the overall film that much more meaningful.

Despite positively adoring Alex Turner’s debut feature, I ended up being massively let-down by his follow-up, the Iraq-set Red Sands (2009), a sloppy affair which was full of great ideas and ramshackle execution. Here, Turner gets everything just perfect, turning out an absolute modern classic, in the process. Here’s to hoping that Turner has another Dead Birds up his sleeve for the future: films like this don’t come along every day but you can’t fault me for being greedy and wanting a few more.

10/17/14 (Part One): And To Dirt You Shall Return

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31 Days of Halloween, auteur theory, cinema, Clancy Brown, Doug Hutchison, favorite films, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, Galen Hutchison, horror, horror movies, horror westerns, J.T. Petty, Jocelin Donahue, Karl Geary, Laura Leighton, Movies, Native Americans, Sean Patrick Thomas, set in the 1870s, The Burrowers, the Dakota Territories, the Old West, U.S. military vs Native Americans, William Mapother, writer-director

There’s something inherently mournful and haunted about the American West: those wide open spaces…the harsh, unforgiving environment…the long history of bloodshed and genocide, land wars and gold rushes…the West may have been subsumed by the inevitable march of time and progress but there’s a dark, untamed and feral power that’s always laid just below the soil, just waiting for folks to dig deep enough to find it. Despite generations of “white hats vs black hats” in Saturday morning Western matinees, the true legacy of the West is as grim as that of the Arctic void: it’s Death, plain and simple, stretching out before the eye like so many miles of sun-baked nothingness, like the burned-out villages that signaled a new way of life for the natives who were already here or the hollowed-out stomachs of the settlers who would make it theirs, if they could only survive the winter.

Writer-director J.T. Petty’s outstanding Western-horror film, The Burrowers (2008), is a film as sad and mournful as the Old West. Nominally a “monster movie,” The Burrowers is more about the ways in which the inhabitants of the American West fell short of the promise of a “new way of life,” falling back into the same patterns of violence, racism and fear that dogged the industrialized metropolises of the East. It’s a sad film because it offers no glossy aphorisms or false hopes: the downfall of humanity will always be humanity…we are our own worst monsters.

The film takes place in the Dakota Territories, at the tail-end of summer, in 1879. Our protagonist, Fergus Coffey (Karl Geary), a hard-working Irish immigrant, has just got up the nerve to propose to his beloved, Maryanne (Jocelin Donahue). When he travels to her family’s homestead, however, he comes upon a terrible scene: Maryanne’s farm and the surrounding farms have all been attacked and burned to the ground, with survivors nowhere to be found. Fergus gets together with Will Parcher (William Mapother), who appears to be the Old West version of William Peterson’s Gil Grissom from CSI. Fergus and Will, along with Dobie (Galen Hutchison), the young son of Will’s girlfriend, head out to look for the missing families. Their little group is complete when they connect with a take-no-nonsense preacher, Clay (Clancy Brown) and Walnut Callaghan (Sean Patrick Thomas), a black soldier who becomes fast friends with Fergus.

Despite the presence of strange wounds on the bodies and large holes in the surrounding ground, the prevailing belief seems to be that “the Indians did it.” This gets driven home when the odious Captain Henry Victor (Doug Hutchison) and his U.S. cavalry unit show up: Victor, a belligerent, boorish and detestable racist, just wants to know what natives to kill…he seems to have previous little interest in recovering anyone, as long as he gets a pound of flesh. To that end, he believes that the captives are being held at the nearby reservation, although Clay and Will both know that’s a completely stupid assumption. With Captain Victor in charge, however, there’s no time for rational thought, only heated action.

The plot thickens, as it were, when the cavalry manages to capture one of the dreaded “Indians”: Victor promptly gets to torturing him, figuring that he’ll spill the beans when he’s in enough pain. Will isn’t so sure, however, especially once he starts to talk about the mysterious “Burrowers”: everyone assumes they’re just some heretofore unknown tribe but Will points out that “Men mine, animals burrow.” He’ll be proven right, of course, as the group begins to get more and more clues that something much different from kidnapping has occurred. When the group comes upon a still-living young woman buried in the ground, however, the full truth of their situation becomes evident. Fergus, Will, Clay and the others have stumbled into the hunting grounds of something older than mankind, something which lived on the buffalo until we hunted them to extinction. It will be the fight of their lives as they battle the creatures, each other and the evil, merciless Captain Victor, their humanity blowing away with each new atrocity, like so many tumbleweeds on the plain.

Quite simply, The Burrowers is one of my all-time favorite films: it’s beautifully made, intelligent, thrilling, has great effects, real emotional depth, fully developed characters and a knockout central idea. The mythology behind the creatures is strong and rather unique (I dearly love the idea of an ancient predator running out of its food source and opting to upgrade to people) and the film never panders to its audience. Indeed, The Burrowers often seems just as much a straight-up dramatic Western as it does a horror film, even though the horror elements are strong and up-front for the entire film. This has a lot to do with Petty’s script, which is excellent: he tackles some big ideas but never allows the material to get away from him or lets the whole thing get bogged down into didactics. It’s made explicitly clear from the get-go how villainous Victor and his men are, yet Petty lets much of this arise organically, via Victor’s awful personality, rather than as merely an accepted point regarding the U.S. military’s patently awful history with Native Americans.

One of the most interesting elements of the film ends up being the balanced depiction of Native Americans: rather than existing simply as “noble savages” or defacto bad guys, as has been the norm for Westerns for some time, the Native characters are just as varied and fully formed as the white settlers, even if they don’t get quite the same amount of screen time. The scene where Fergus panics and fires on the friendly Sioux scouts is a bracing one, precisely because it upends our usual expectations in such situations (from a traditional Hollywood viewpoint, at least): the Native Americans were friendly and eager to help, until they got unceremoniously attacked. Despite all of Victor’s vitriol, here’s proof positive that the dreaded “other” is just like “us”…and then we go ahead and take a fucking shot at them, just to add a cherry to the sundae. It kind of belies the whole idea of “savages”: anybody would get “savage” if some asshole was shooting at them for no reason.

By contrast, the scene with the Ute warriors upends expectations in the other direction: after the conflict with the once-friendly Sioux, the Utes offer of assistance seems like a no-brainer. When they end up being just as treacherous as Captain Victor, however, it makes the obvious connection pretty plain: just like the white settlers, there were good and bad Native Americans. The difference, of course, ends up being the position of power and authority assumed by troglodytes like Captain Victor: when evil wears the crown, evil things tend to happen, regardless of the best efforts of good people.

There’s a lot to chew on in The Burrowers but the film never feels overly complex or convoluted: it’s fast-paced from the jump, although the film still takes care to spin out and establish its atmosphere at every opportunity. The droning, atonal score helps with this immensely: when combined with the desolate, wide-open imagery, there’s a peculiar sense of paranoia and claustrophobia that settles on the viewer. It’s a feeling as if one is trapped beneath a boundless sky that is, nonetheless, slowly pressing down and crushing you, millimeter by millimeter.

Acting-wise, The Burrowers is similarly top-notch. Karl Geary cuts a very sympathetic character as the anguished Fergus, even when he’s doing something fundamentally stupid like firing on the friendly Sioux. William Mapother is fantastic as Will, his likable character put to the screws once he starts making some very terrible decisions and it’s always great to see character-actor Clancy Brown in anything: his Clay is another neat character in a pretty impressive career. Special mention, of course, must go to Doug Hutchison as the hateful Captain Victor: sporting a foppish mustache and looking (and sounding) suspiciously like a twin to DiCaprio’s equally terrible Calvin Candie, Hutchison is an unrepressed, unbound mess of primal, undiluted racism, the poster-child for every hateful act that humanity can commit against itself. There’s no point where Victor is ever anything less than a complete and utter monster and it’s to Hutchison’s great credit that he still manages to make the character seem three-dimensional.

From beginning to end, I can find very little about The Burrowers that doesn’t hold me enthralled: from the filmmaking to the acting to the script, everything is in complete balance, contributing to one of the most well-rounded features I’ve ever seen. While I must admit to really disliking Petty’s debut feature, Soft For Digging (2001), I enjoyed his follow-up, S&Man (2006) and loved the follow-up to The Burrowers, Hellbenders (2012), making him one of the new crop of horror writer-directors that I watch like a hawk. While there might not be a whole slew of horror-Westerns, numbers-wise, The Burrowers is easily at the head of the class. It’s a film that really gets under your skin: I still find myself thinking about the finale, from time to time, even when I haven’t seen the film for a while. It’s a sad, elegiac film without easy answers or fairy-tale conclusions…it’s a hard film, as hard as the unforgiving landscape that it depicts and the haunted specters of humanity that reside there.

The 31 Days of Halloween (Week 3)

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31 Days of Halloween, Arachnophobia, Big Ass Spider!, Dead Birds, Dead Silence, Dog Soldiers, Halloween, Halloween traditions, House of 1000 Corpses, I'm Not Scared, Infestation, Mama, Neil Marshall, October, Post Tenebras Lux, Rob Zombie, Thale, The Burrowers, The Descent, The Devil's Rejects, The Haunting, The Stepfather

With Week Two officially under our collective belts, it’s time to look forward to Week Three. Due to availability issues, there may need to be a little shuffling around. As of right now, however, this is what the week is shaping up to look like:

Oct 13 — The Descent (2005) / Dog Soldiers (2002)

Oct 14 — The Haunting (1963) / Dead Silence (2007)

Oct 15 — Mama (2013) / The Stepfather (1986)

Oct 16 — House of 1000 Corpses (2003) / The Devil’s Rejects (2005)

Oct 17 — Dead Birds (2005) / The Burrowers (2008)

Oct 18 — Infestation (2009) / Arachnophobia (1990) / Big Ass Spider! (2013)

Oct 19 — Thale (2012) / Post Tenebras Lux (2012) / I’m Not Scared (2003)

At this point, there may be some issues with the October 17th and 18th screenings: if so, I’ll slot something else in with The Burrowers and will bump the Natali weekend up to this week. If so, I’ll be screening Splice (2009), Haunter (2013) and Cube (1997) on October 17th instead of the currently listed “spider mania” films.

Stay tuned for backlogged reviews from October 8th-yesterday: it’s been a busy month, already, and there’s still lots more to come!

10/4/14 (Part One): They Sin So You Don’t Have To

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31 Days of Halloween, Andre Royo, bad priests, based on a graphic novel, Catholic church, cinema, Clancy Brown, Clifton Collins Jr., Dan Fogler, dutiful heroes, elder gods, exorcists, Fallen, film reviews, films, Ghostbusters, Hellbenders, horror-comedies, J.T. Petty, Larry Fessenden, Last Supper, Macon Blair, Movies, religious-themed horror, Robyn Rikoon, S&man, sins, Soft For Digging, Stephen Gevedon, supernatural, Surtr, The Augustine Interfaith Order of Hellbound Saints, The Burrowers, writer-director

In an era where ideas (and films) seem to get recycled with as much ease as hand-me-down clothes, it’s more than refreshing to come across an original concept: it’s downright life-affirming. Writer/director J.T. Petty’s Hellbenders (2012) has one hell of an original concept, pun intended: six priests, all of various denominations, exist in a state of constant sin so that they may serve as the “nuclear option” for exorcisms. When there are demons that are too powerful for “regular” exorcists to handle, the team swoops in, invites the demons to possess them and then commit suicide, thereby dragging the demons straight back to hell with them. What this really is, of course, is a perfect excuse to witness priests swear, booze it up and engage in some very bad behavior, ranging from the slightly assholish to the downright blasphemous. It’s a great concept and almost guarantees an interesting film: even though the final product ends up a religious-themed Ghostbusters (1984) with a touch of Fallen (1998), there’s enough wicked good times here to make genre fans pay attention.

The film actually has a rather inauspicious beginning as we witness Angus (Clancy Brown), Larry (Clifton Collins, Jr.) and Det. Elrod (genre auteur Larry Fessenden) tromping around in some nondescript attic-area, lit only by flashlight. The scene recalls [REC] (2007), which seems like a strange point of reference, before jumping into some sloppy pseudo-mockumentary, talking-head-type footage. Just when things seemed to be taking a turn for the generic, however, the glorious opening credit sequence swooped in and saved the day: set to a swaggering, stomping tune, we see our six heroes arrayed around a table, Last Supper style, engaging in everything from excessive drinking to make grilled cheese sandwiches with a Jesus sandwich-press. It’s a silly, visually impressive and, most importantly, utterly badass intro and ends up setting an impossibly high bar for the rest of the film. For a time, however, the movie almost lives up to its potential.

Our resident exorcists are Angus, the de facto leader and oldest of the group; Larry, the second-in-command (fulfilling the Peter Venkman role); Elizabeth (Robyn Rikoon), the resident spitfire who casually sleeps around with Larry; Stephen (Andre Royo), the “accountant” of the group, who keep track of their ledger of sins; Eric (Dan Fogler), who not-so-secretly pines for Elizabeth and Macon (Macon Blair), the free-lovin’ Southern Baptist minister who’s obsessed with his pretty-boy looks. The group lives together, cracking wise and engaging in their various sins with gusto, living just like a parochial version of the Ghostbusters. Their antics may be necessary as far as keeping the world safe goes but they certainly don’t go over well with certain bureaucratic elements at the Vatican, as evidenced when holy pencil-pusher Clint (Stephen Gevedon) comes around to keep an eye on the wayward priests. He definitely approve of the drinking, drug use, fornicating and blasphemy but he seems to be even more irate over the inherent waste of funds: sinning be damned, the Hellbound Saints just don’t make good fiscal sense!

As with any film like this how, however, we know that our dutiful heroes will be needed even if their superiors don’t. They’re forced to spring into action when they get involved with one seriously badass demon, an elder god by the name of Surtr. It seems that Surtr is known as a “god-killer” and has roamed around eternity putting the snuff on other deities that it considers to be weaker. Surtr has now set his sets on the Judeo-Christian God and it’s up to Angus and his crew to stop it before all of Heaven is destroyed in the process. Things get complicated, however, when Elizabeth becomes possessed by Surtr but neglects to kill herself, giving the elder god an earthly vessel, as well as a convenient way to gain more followers (achieved via a noxious cloud of flies). Angus wants to kill Elizabeth in order to send Surtr to Hell. Larry, on the other hand, is in love with Elizabeth and would rather not see her suffer eternal damnation, despite it being pretty much her only job duty. With all of humanity on the line (or, at least, the Judeo-Christian portion), will love or duty win out?

For the first ten minutes or so of Hellbenders, I laughed so hard that I cried: no lie. The script is impossibly witty, choked with so much rapid-fire obscenity, bad behavior and juvenile attitude that it feels like one’s being pummeled by a prize-fighter armed with one-liners rather than fists. It’s a heady experience and, for a time, I was pretty sure this was going to be the funniest film I’d ever seen, hands down. And then, of course, the honeymoon was over and tedium began to set in: what was uproariously funny in a compressed ten minutes became wearing and tiresome over the sustained course of the film. This might sound like harsh criticism of the film and, in a way, I suppose that it is. It’s also, conversely, a big compliment: if you can stay on the film’s wavelength, it’s pretty much the apex of this type of movie. I ended up really liking the film but was disappointed, ultimately, because I didn’t love it: there was potential for so much more than was fully realized here and that kind of let me down.

Make no mistake, however: when Hellbenders is good, it’s pretty damn great. The acting is top-notch, from top to bottom, with Robyn Rikoon being particularly stellar as Elizabeth. It’s a great ensemble cast and they work together like a charm: in fact, the film really starts to come off the rails when it moves from the opening “bad priests hanging out” material into the more familiar “battling supernatural evil” territory. I’ve seen plenty of films that look exactly like the latter but precious few like the former: I really wish that we could have had a little more to get to know our priests before they were off butting heads with ancient evil in some rather clichéd fight scenes.

J.T. Petty directs the film based on his own graphic novel and there are plenty of points where the film actually feels like a big-screen comic book adaptation, not least of which is the odd moment where the film actually becomes a comic, complete with panels. That odd misstep aside, the film looks consistently great and features some pretty exemplary effects work. The film also ends up being pretty violent, which might seem like a given but is only odd when the majority of gore is loaded into the film’s conclusion: suffice to say that I was rather surprised to witness someone bite out another character’s eyes, although I was certainly forewarned when a nose was later chewed off in similar manner.

While I will freely admit that I disliked Petty’s debut feature, Soft For Digging (2001), with a zeal that I normally reserve for much shittier films, I’ve actually enjoyed the rest of his filmography quite a bit. In particular, I think that his 2008 horror-Western The Burrowers is an amazing, nearly perfect film that’s equal parts eulogy and nail-biting terror, although his found-footage experiment, S&man (2006), is an equally interesting, if substantially more flawed, production. Even though he’s never mentioned alongside the likes of current genre faves Ti West or Adam Wingard, I personally feel that Petty has the potential to be the best of the bunch, some day: The Burrowers is such a monumental achievement that I keep hoping it wasn’t his magnum opus.

Even though Hellbenders ends up in a much more familiar place than it begins, it’s still a ton of fun and seems perfect as a party/crowd film. There are plenty of glorious setpieces here, the overall storyline is pretty genius and the ensemble cast is superb, riffing off each other in near perfect synthesis. I wish that the film was able to sustain its gonzo tone longer than it does but I’m also reminded of the saying that the flame that burns twice as hot only burns half as long. Fair enough: Hellbenders is hot enough for most of its running time that I can forgive if it seems to fizzle out a bit before the conclusion. There appears to be hints at a sequel, however, which could easily take the film’s universe into some pretty awesome Hellboy-like territory. Sign me up! I may not have loved Petty’s Hellbenders but I liked it enough to anticipate the next installment. In the meantime, it’s good to know that we have people like Angus and his crew watching over us, keeping humanity safe one upraised middle finger at a time.

The 31 Days of Halloween (Week 2)

Tags

31 Days of Halloween, Blood Glacier, Chillerama, Dead Birds, Friday the 13th, Halloween, Halloween traditions, horror, horror movies, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Kiss of the Damned, Only Lovers Left Alive, Stage Fright, Stoker, The Burrowers, The Last Winter, The Thing, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, The World's End, Under the Skin, Visitors

One week down, four more to go. Due to some scheduling issues over the weekend, my planned films for this previous week ended up changing around. In the interest of being complete, here’s a recap of what went down last week:

Oct 1st — The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) / The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2 (1986)

Oct 2nd — Halloween (1978) / Halloween II (1981)

Oct 3rd — Alien (1979)

Oct 4th — Hellbenders (2012) / Some Guy Who Kills People (2011)

Oct 5th — Invaders From Mars (1986)

As I mentioned, just a wee bit different than the proposed schedule. Since I don’t expect this week to be quite as chaotic, here’s what I expect to screen over the next seven days:

Oct 6th — The World’s End (2013) / Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Oct 7th — The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976) / Friday the 13th (1980)

Oct 8th — Stoker (2013) / Under the Skin (2014)

Oct 9th — Stage Fright (2014) / Chillerama (2011)

Oct 10th — Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) / Kiss of the Damned (2012)

Oct 11th — Blood Glacier (2014) / The Last Winter (2006) / The Thing (1982)

Oct 12th — Visitors (2003) / The Burrowers (2008) / Dead Birds (2005)

Stay tuned on write-ups for Friday, Saturday and Sunday of last week as I try to clear out the weekend backlog. As always, thanks for hanging out at the Graveyard!