Film review: Red Sands

Mathew F. Riley — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 17:59:26 +0000

Red Sands is Alex Turner’s follow-up to the undeniably eerie Dead Birds, an American civil war period piece, involving a squad of soldiers coming across a terrifying house situated in a field of corn, haunted by vaguely Lovecraftian horrors. In Red Sands Turner takes the same set-up and updates it to Afghanistan, placing a unit of American soldiers in an isolated location and spooking them out with a series of strange phenomena and bloody deaths; except, this time it doesn’t work.

Charged with seizing and then monitoring an important road the soldiers get lost due to some random artillery fire, come across some ruins and out of boredom (regardless of the fact they’ve just been attacked) set about shooting up the statues carved in the sides of the red sandstone hills. This act of ignorance unleashes a Djinn which then takes its revenge on the soldiers. We know it’s a Djinn because there’s a plaque in the stone that says so.

The problem with Red Sands is that at the very beginning of the film you are shown who survives, and because you also know what’s shape-shifting and taking on the appearance of those it kills, causing hallucinations and generally making their stay in a strangely abandoned stone house uncomfortable (especially as the radio is unusable and the jeep’s engine is mysteriously ripped out) there’s absolutely no intrigue, suspense or surprise to the experience.

The shallow and clichéd characters of the soldiers are played by the numbers (why does every radio operator have glasses, and be literately nerdy?) The shadowy interior setting of the house is way too dark to see any detail; and there is a tired re-use of ideas from Dead Birds – a lot of the decent effects are dark, hollow eyes and wide gaping mouths of those victims sucked dry by the Djinn; admittedly they are scary the first time around, but if you’ve seen them once…

Ultimately, and unfortunately because I really wanted to like it, Red Sands is a disappointing and predictable film.

[This review was originally published in the Spring 09 edition of Prism, the Newsletter of the British Fantasy Society]

Welcome to The Great White Space

Mathew F. Riley — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:09:45 +0000

Well, hello there. So now that I’ve finally got some bits and pieces sneaking out into the real-world, (from the twilight world of acceptances), I’m setting up this place. It’s named after one of my favourite novels written by one of my favourite authors, Basil Copper. The Great White Space may also be an appropriate title if I get lazy, sell nothing else, or simply have nothing of interest to say.

Please check out the Stories page where you can find details of my published writing.

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Film review: Red Sands

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