Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on April 28, 2007, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Unearthed marks the return of a disturbing presence that has unsettled many a viewer of recent genre fare. I’m talking, of course, about the jerky-cam (which might also be called the shaky-cam, had that term not been applied to Sam Raimi’s impressively fluid jerry-rigged device from The Evil Dead). Intended to elicit tension by creating swerving, bouncing and jittering images on screen, it often has the counterproductive effect of making the action hard to follow and, when applied to dialogue exchanges, the scenes difficult to watch. It’s employed in full force on Unearthed (playing at New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival), and it becomes a headache to watch by the hour mark.
Perhaps younger viewers raised on this TV-spawned technique will have an easier time viewing Unearthed than I did. It’ll certainly help if they’re too young to remember the post-Alien and Aliens years, when every other genre film seemed to be about a motley group of humans terrorized by a creature or creatures resembling an escapee or escapees from H.R. Giger’s drawing table. Even today, these seminal films cast long and influential shadows, and Unearthed shapes up as one more in their legion of imitators, in which the players and a few details may be different, but the game remains the same.
The setting this time is a small desert town where the only road out becomes blocked by a crashed tanker truck. (The best jolt and best joke involve this vehicle and its driver, who is nonetheless quickly and unceremoniously dispatched.) That’s double bad news for the residents, for not only does it mean they’re not gonna get the supply of fuel that would allow them to drive out, but the accident knocks out the area’s power as well. And the triple bad news is that a local archaeologist (Luke Goss) has been digging up a nearby cave, seeking the reason for the long-ago disappearance of the Anasazi tribe. He finds it in the form of a big biomechanoid critter, which causes that crash and soon begins picking off the hapless stranded humans.
These include the sheriff (Saw II’s Emmanuelle Vaugier), who’s got a de rigueur troubling incident in her past, a Wise Native American (Russell Means), a Wisecracking Black Guy (Charlie Murphy), a couple of blondes on their way to Hollywood and a hunky guy they pick up who’s…hunky. Though the characters are standard-issue, the performances are all good, with M.C. Gainey making the strongest impression as a local rancher with an attitude, who wants to know what’s been ripping apart and feeding on his cattle.
Even with the formulaic plot and people, Unearthed could’ve been a diverting creature feature had the action been cleanly and inventively staged. Instead, writer/director Matthew Leutwyler indulges in lots of that unsteady camerawork, coupled with tight close-ups and harsh contrasts (despite most of the film taking place at night, half the interiors seem to be lit by inexplicable blasts of sunlight from outside). The result is that it’s near-impossible to get a bead on what’s happening at numerous key moments, which serves only to distance viewers from the action instead of drawing them into it.
There are startling moments here and there, and the early sequences build a decent sense of impending dread, with the help of Joseph Bishara’s ominous score. Leutwyler teases with only brief glimpses of the monster in the early going, which is the right choice; despite the involvement of ace physical creature creator Steve Johnson, the being is largely a CGI effect once we start getting good looks at it, and its digital origins are obvious enough that its threat is diminished. And quite frankly, it looks too much like the Alien to carry the shock of surprise when it’s ultimately revealed; the beast even totes with it a crablike parasitical sidekick strongly reminiscent of the facehugger.
Unearthed is Leutwyler’s follow-up to Dead & Breakfast, in which he applied offbeat and sometimes very funny variations to standard zombie-movie tropes. The approach felt progressive, but his invention fails him here; all the trendy camerawork aside, Unearthed feels like too many fright flicks we’ve seen before. In that sense, the title may be even more appropriate than Leutwyler intended.
