I hope this ain’t the guy that’s gonna help us out…
Main Cast: Emmanuelle Vaugier, Luke Goss
Director: Matthew Leutwyler
Each year there are movies produced that are never seen by the public. Their content is considered too graphic, too disturbing, too shocking for general audiences. This is one of those films.
Actually, that’s not true. Sure, a few scenes are seriously gory, but overall the thing that kept UNEARTHED out of the theatres wasn’t its graphic scenes; it was just too stupid.
Outside a small desert town in the middle of New Mexico (filmed in Utah), a 900-year-old creature has been dug up in an effort to get to the bottom of an ancient Anasazi myth. The creature wakes and wreaks havoc, killing everything in its path. A small band of clichés has gathered at the gas station/home of Grandpa (Russell Means) and his granddaughter Nodin (Tonantzin Carmelo), a scientist who has moved back to take care of her aging grandfather. We’ve got two blonde young women on their way to Hollywood, one stranded country boy the girls picked up on the side of the road, and Charlie Murphy as Hank, just another passenger on the highway of life, trying to get to the next town. Everyone is out of gas, including the gas station, but everyone’s also stranded because the tanker truck that was supposed to be bringing in the fuel is overturned and burning about 20 miles outside of town.
Enter Sheriff Annie Flynn (Emmanuelle Vaugier). Annie’s got one week left on the job before a town meeting decides her fate as Sheriff, and things aren’t looking good for her. She’s haunted by an accident the previous year, and now she starts each day with vodka, her only friend left in town.
Over the first half of UNEARTHED, the creature kills off various side characters before finally turning its attention to our little group, but by that time I was no longer interested in anything it had to say. This movie was so dull and so cheap looking, it should have been included in a double feature with one of those terrible movies on the Sy-Fy channel like MANSQUITO or SHARK IN VENICE.
The creature, in silhouette, could have been the monster from ALIEN, and in the light greatly resembles a bad CGI creature because that’s exactly what it was. They might as well have taken old ALIEN footage and just Photoshopped their own details onto the form. And man was this CGI bad! I can forgive a lot in bad movies, but if you’re presenting a movie to me as one that should have been given a chance in theatres, for God’s sake clean it up.
Sometimes you reach a point in the creative process where you think “Okay, I know it’s not PERFECT, but it’s the best I can do right now, I’m tired, I need a weekend off, I’ll just hand it in and call it done and hopefully they won’t see the flaws I know are glaring.” Writer/director Matthew Leutwyler seems to have reached that point with UNEARTHED, and I have to say, he shoulda worked that overtime, because the cheapness of the creature effects really hurts the movie THAT bad.
Another flaw was in the details of the plot. We don’t know what town this is–if the name is ever spoken, I certainly didn’t hear it–nor do we know anything about its specifics. We know there’s a town meeting coming up to determine whether Annie stays on the job or not, so it can’t be THAT big a town, right?
We know there are farms and we know the place is pretty isolated. But when the creature is shown at this farm, outside this restaurant, it’s here, it’s there, but unfortunately we have no clear idea where here or there is, we don’t know anything about the layout of this town, nor the dynamics of its people. All we know for sure is that, unless the restaurant is just across the street from this barn where this other guy just got killed, we’ve got one super-fast creature on our hands, and it’s also a bit scatter-brained because it killed two dudes outside the restaurant (several hours ago, if the timeline is to be trusted), then went to the barn (which may be across the street, but is more likely nowhere near the restaurant), killed someone there, then went back to the restaurant to take out the waitress.
Unfortunately, through Leutwyler’s lack of direction and focus, we never get a clear idea where we are, what time of day is it, or how much time has passed since the last scene. The characters, monster and humans alike, seem to just be able to hop skip and jump all over town without having to traverse any real distance or pass any real time. It’s a mess.
I’ve seen worse acting, but I’ve seen better, too. However, the CGI creature effects here are so distracting that I found myself focusing more on that than I did the acting, so it must not have been too bad, if a bit over-the-top in several scenes where the creature wasn’t featured. Each character was its own cliché, and each actor played the part as well as can be expected considering the material they were given.
I wish I could find a few positive things to say about UNEARTHED, but aside from a few awesome kills, there just wasn’t anything. It wasn’t frightening in the least, it wasn’t even creepy. And the plot was about as worn-out as you can get. It could have been a slasher picking off the characters one by one, it could have been zombies, it could have been rabid radioactive wolves, it really didn’t matter what the killer was in this movie; Leutwyler just took a basic plot outline, called it an alien buried for 900 years, and made a movie. I can’t even say the movie’s heart was in the right place, because not once did I detect even a glimmer of passion here. Everything about this movie was by the numbers, let’s turn in the work, and pick up a check when it’s all over.
I went into UNEARTHED like I do most movies, hoping for the best, but expecting mediocre. In this case, I’d have been thrilled with mediocre. This one was just BLAH from start to finish.
More 8 Films to Die For Series II
Find all of the 8 Films to Die For Series I here.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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