Sand Serpents USA, NR, 90 m, 2009
Sand
Serpents can best be described as The
Hurt Locker meets Tremors. (Of course, the fact that it makes use
of other movies is no reason to dismiss it; a similar blending of genres paid
off handsomely for Predator.) Produced by RHI for Syfy (and released on
DVD as part of Genius Entertainment’s shrewdly packaged “Maneater”
series), this B-grade creature feature is often undermined by the very creatures
it features. Whenever the carnivorous, worm-like thingies (think of vacuum
nozzles with teeth) pop out of the ground to partake of human flesh, we have a
hard time forgetting that they were born of a Mac. (Their unnaturalness isn’t
as glaring when they’re kept at a distance.) Granted, these computer-generated
creepers are infinitely more believable than, say, the one that helped itself to
Dessi Morales’s muff in Boa vs. Python, but I doubt even the cleverest
digital effects artist could come up with something as horrifying as the
old-school animatronic asp that put the squeeze on Schwazzie in Conan the
Barbarian. Somewhere in the
dustiest, most inhospitable stretch of Afghanistan, a gender-neutral, ethnically
diverse unit of American soldiers is ambushed by the Taliban and taken hostage.
But we’re spared a reenactment of the Daniel Pearl video (all praise and
thanks be to Allah) when the Dune rejects emerge from their subterranean
sleeping chambers and wolf down the ragheads. A lucky break for the
“infidels,” to be sure, but now they’re stuck in the middle of nowhere
with a colony of man-eating whatsits tunneling beneath their feet. As in Tremors,
the monsters here are as blind as Mr. Magoo in a film noir directed by David
Fincher, but they more than compensate for that shortcoming with their ability to
pick up on the slightest of vibrations, like the flailing of a mosquito’s
wings. (Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit.) Needless to say, it’s going to take
some doing for our heroes to get back to the world; standing stock-still in the
boiling desert until Scotty beams them up is not an option. If you’ve seen
enough of these things, you know the only true suspense lies in which order the
characters will pop off. Naturally, the first ones to go here are the
African-Americans; they willingly pay the ultimate price so their
Caucasian compatriots can go on to drink martinis and watch the sun rise. Sand
Serpents makes a big to-do about tolerance, but apparently that tolerance
extends to non-whites only when they’re serving as useful idiots to the
Man. Its so-so SPFX and
spurious PC posturing aside, Sand Serpents is surprisingly tight, at
least for Syfy fare. Screenwriter Raul Inglis has a good ear for military
chitchat, and cinematographer Brendan Steacy proves unusually adept at
oscillating between sweaty realism and operatic whimsy. (My favorite example of
the latter is when one of the giant vipers springs into the sky and swallows a
Black Hawk whole.) The cast is also quite good, particularly Jason Gedrick as
Lt. Richard Stanley. You may remember Mr. Gedrick from such junky ‘80s flicks
as The Heavenly Kid and Iron Eagle. I haven’t seen much of him
over the last twenty-some-odd years (according to his IMDb bio, he’s
been working in television, a medium I tend to avoid), but those years have
given him a more camera-friendly visage. Time has been a lot kinder to this guy
than Hollywood. January 18,
2011 © Copyright 2011 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
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