Unearthed (2007)

 

After a sinister crash on the highway in a small New Mexican town, people start disappearing and animals begin dying.  For Sheriff Annie Flynn, already facing the loss of her job after the accidental shooting death of a child, it's yet more pressure in her personal fight against the resulting post-traumatic stress and the retreat into alcohol that it has brought on.

The Sheriff's troubles are worse than even she realises, however.  The deaths and disappearances are the work of an alien monstrosity.  Bio-engineered to be all but unstoppable, it is slaughtering its way through all the local life forms in pursuit of its (murky and ultimately irrelevant to the events of the film) agenda.

No-one believes in Sheriff Flynn, not even Annie herself, but she is going to have to find some way to put a stop to this menace.

Unearthed is not good.  It features cookie cutter movie characters being killed off by a cookie cutter monster for poorly defined reasons in poorly defined footage, because the movie's always either murky or jumping around like crazy to try and keep the monster off screen.  There is good reason for that: when we do get visual effects, they are not very good.

And then there's the casting and writing of non-white characters, which is straight out of the 1950s.  The one African-American character is a walking stereotype of all the worst kinds, while the elderly Native American character waxes hippie at the drop of a hat.

And then there is the casting of former pop singer Luke Goss as Kale, a mysterious mercenary with a horrible face tattoo, who appears to be coded as an 'honorary' native by the script.  The British and extremely white Goss can usually be relied upon to deliver a decent performance in even a bad film, but he's woefully miscast and unconvincing here.  To be fair, though, I'm not sure anyone could have salvaged such a hackneyed role.

Is there any plus to the movie?  Well, the sound design is actually quite good.  The film makes good use of wet, squelching noises in the creature's attacks.  Given that most of the time we hear the monster's kills to a much greater extent than we see them, the audio needs do a lot of the heavy lifting in selling the violence, and it does the job quite well ... at least until it gets overly familiar and over-used.

Boring, listless and bad.  Steer clear.