Coroner’s Report: Red Sands

Posted by Robert Fure (robert@filmschoolrejects.com) on February 12, 2009

From the team responsible for the reasonably alright Dead Birds comes Red Sands.  Clearly these guys are in love with the title format of Adjective + Noun, though unfortunately they’re also in love with making the same kind of movie again.  Dead Birds was about some bad dude robbers holing up in a spooky house and being haunted by their past and the things in the cornfield.  In Red Sands, a squad of US soldiers with troubled pasts end up in a spooky little Afghani domicile and are haunted by their pasts and a Djinn (Muslim demon).

Normally my first paragraph is all full of jokes and the second is the plot, but I’ve basically given it to you already.  After unwittingly destroying an ancient artifact and releasing an angry Djinn, the group of soldiers start to develop animosity and mistrust amongst themselves.  A suspicious Afghani woman finds herself amongst their midst right about the time things start going badly – a coincidence?  Oh come on, you know better than that.

Kills

We see 8 deaths throughout the film, though a couple are through flashbacks and none of them are especially entertaining.  Most happen quickly.

Ills

There are some burned up bodies, a gory gunshot to the cranium, a cut up body, gunshot wounds, a slit throat, and an attempted rape.  The headshot and throat slitting are both good, but other than that this is not one to watch for the blood.

Lust

We briefly see some exposed boobs in a sort of dream sequence.  They’re nice, but didn’t really fit in with the rest of the movie.

Learning

Don’t break ancient sculptures, they’ll release ancient evils.  If a stranger shows up and things immediately start going really fucking weird, put two bullets in the chest and one in the head and watch your troubles go away.

Review

For the first 15 minutes of the movie, I was enjoying myself.  There was a cool and stylish introduction to the characters in the beginning and the costumes looked great.  The landscape also looked fantastic – it passed for Afghanistan in my book.  The relationships between the squad also came across as a pretty legitimate view of US soldiers, at least at the beginning.  They were funny, a little crass, and had a good dynamic.  But then one of them turned out to be the stereotypical asshole who suggests raping their female stranger and after that any hope of them resembling a real unit disappears.

What follows is a pretty predictable plot about how the unit tears itself apart after the arrival of the female who is, obviously to the audience, the personified version of the Djinn.  The story is punctuated with an unnecessary amount of terrible CGI, from poor looking dust storms to odd looking hallucination type sequences and a laughable computer demon.  There are at least two jump scares in the movie, but that’s all that will get a rise out of you.  Though you will learn that while bullets can’t stop a Djinn, making a big explosion that you slowly dive away from will at least buy you time.

Is it wrong the character that was most interesting was the asshole rapist one?  Brendan Miller plays Davies and was my favorite part of the flick.  JK Simmons has what basically amounts to a cameo as a base commander who clearly has to be a bad guy intent on lying to cover up the mysterious death of several soldiers under his command.  The deaths are lackluster, the film lacks tension, and the last half isn’t even visually interesting to watch.  I wish I could muster up something else to say about this, but really as the credits roll I just found myself relieved that it was over.  This is one you should probably skip.

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