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Typical monster-on-the-loose shocker, nothing you haven’t seen before.
Back in the late 1950s, there was this little regional horror film made that never got released. It was called Teenagers Battle the Thing. It was about a group of archaeological students in the middle of Podunk, Middle America who dig up a strange creature which then proceeds to come back to life and slaughter people. In the 1970s, footage from it was used in the bigfoot film Curse of Bigfoot, but that’s neither here nor there. My point is that after fifty years, someone thought the idea of remaking this turkey was a good idea.
Okay, so Unearthed isn’t technically a remake. It just has a lot of the same plot, though I’m sure writer/director Matthew Leutwyler probably never even heard of Teenagers Battle the Thing. But the similarities certainly are there. Released to theaters and DVD as part of the “8 Films to Die For: After Dark Horrorfest” series, Unearthed is the story of an archaeological dig in the middle of the New Mexico desert that uncovers a strange creature that’s been buried there for 900 years. Naturally, it comes to life and starts picking off the locals one by one.
Unearthed isn’t a terribly bad film, but it is pretty generic. Everything about it has been done before. Hell, even the monster looks like a near-direct rip-off of the Alien creature. It even has a secondary creature latching on its chest that acts like a face-hugger, except it grabs onto peoples’ chests. Special effects are of the CGI variety, and not done very well at that, though I did like the gallop they gave the creature, as opposed to a more conventional run.
This Lionsgate DVD doesn’t have much in the way of special features. The only ones are webisodes of the Miss Horrorfest Contest, a promotional contest that ran as part of the 8 Films gimmick. They suck. Bad.
Unearthed is completely unoriginal. It’s decent enough B-film fodder, but it doesn’t have a single unique idea in its running time. I haven’t seen the other seven films from this year’s set, but if they’re anything like Unearthed, expect the whole thing to move from theaters to Sci-Fi Channel debuts within a year or two.
