DVD REVIEW: SAND SERPENTS

The Pitch

It’s a bigger badder version of the Graboids from Tremors meets the ineffective military of The Hill’s Have Eyes II.

The Humans

Director:  Jeff Renfroe

Cast:  Jason Gedrick, Tamara Hope, Elias Toufexis, Sebastian Knapp, Michelle Asante, Chris Jarman, Imran Khan

The Nutshell

A military squad accompanied by an military engineer captain are searching the desert of Afghanistan looking for working mines(the kind you dig, not step on). Running into a group of Taliban. During the battle some giant 60 foot long worms are awakened. Trying to escape with their lives the remaining members of the unit try to fix a(unsurprisingly) broken radio and contact base. Meanwhile Taliban fighters are themselves on the hunt for the American troops.

The Lowdown

I’m pretty sure it’d go without saying that being a SyFy(I know, get over it) channel quality movie this one would be graded on a sliding curve. Mostly I find these type of things very watchable, if completely without any sort of great merit. If there is one thing that I find disappointing about this film it is the lack of gloriously absurd stupidity. Mostly you could at least count on a handful of ridiculous moments of usually unintentional comedy(I say usually because it seems more these days that SyFy is in on the joke). Unfortunately, minus a couple of bits of goofiness, the movie is too well made.

                                                          “Ohshitshitshitshitshitshit!”                                      

Jason Gedrick does well as the Lieutenant who nobody expects anything good from. He is enough of an action star to carry some B material. Tamara Hope(the cute/creepy girl from the Palm Pre commercials) is the engineer they were assigned to
along to inspect the gem mines and she is likable and has enough presence to carry the co-starring position. Elias Toufexis as Private Andrews does enough to bring emotion to the movie as the proud papa of the unit. Sebastian Knapp is the survival movie cliche of the ever complaining member of the group. If there was anything wrong with these actors it was what the script asked them to read. There are a couple of exposition bombs and they try to cram in a lot of plot for a movie that runs under and hour and a half.

Going into this I expected two things, bad acting and bad special effects. I can safely say outside of some exceedingly cliche characters and bad dialog this movie actually seems to have surpassed my low bar of expectations. Don’t get me wrong, there is some dry stretches in the middle and the monsters probably didn’t get enough screen time to my liking, but it actually seemed like a movie. Whether you take that as a compliment or enough to keep you away is something you probably already know.

                                    

The Package

The picture quality is quite good and is shown in enhanced widescreen. There are no language options. Trailers for Carny, Sea Beast, Rise of the Gargoyles, and Backwoods are shown before the title screen but are not available as an option in the menu. In fact the only “special feature” is a chapter selection and there is only eight chapters.

                                 
 “SHIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTT!!!”