gourdz
I basically like any horror movie crossover but I believe this one is superior to most out there. Of course, don't bother to watch this if you expect a non-stop action flick filled with expensive special effects or if you belong to any US military fan club - you will be disappointed. For the rest of us however, this movie packs some solid acting, beautiful photography, chilling atmospheric music/audio and creeping slow paranoia that got my attention and wholly entertained me until the credits rolled on. I am a two decade horror movie expert and I must say Red Sands is a low budget jewel that impressed me... although he ending was predictable but still very efficient and true to the spirit of the movie.
dicnar
Well. As a horror fan I was hoping for a fun flick. I love movies where some mystical being is hunting a group of people. Be it an animal, a medical experiment gone wrong or a vengeful ghost. This movie sets a nice mood. It takes place in Afghanistan and features a group of soldiers in a remote outpost, deep in the desert. But after a loooong while you start to wonder "when it's finally gonna happen". The group finds a young, local women and decides to take her hostage. We all know that there's something wrong with her and there are literally dozens of scenes that constantly remind us of that fact. Watch out BIG SPOILER ALERT - she's a freaking djinn! That's almost immediately established and I really don't understand the false suspense with her strange shadow, stretching arms and stuff. She finally makes her move in like 15 last minutes of the film, revealing her true self but she really should have done it like 40 minutes ago. That would make this movie better.
missionary
Red Sands is reminiscent of supernatural terrors like John Carpenter's The Thing. Without the big Hollywood bucks, this is skillful film-making with characters and setting doing the storytelling. The abandoned war-torn stone house serves as an interesting choice of backdrop for a group of US soldiers sent to monitor a strategic Afghanistan road. What they encounter is more than they can handle...While Alex Turner's cinematic action is superb, the only thing I find lacking is scale throughout the film. It just seemed too confining at times. A few grand establishing shots and culture elements would have given the film more depth and scale. Definitely worth the ticket price.
k5019517
Before seeing this movie, I expected something better from the director of 'Dead Birds' which was a very decent movie (not breath-taking, but interesting and worth-seeing in the horror genre). I got disappointed very early on, but I continued to watch it, maybe hoping for an interesting turn or at least something that would compensate me for the 90 minutes spent seeing it. But it kept on going worse. OK, the story setting is good, a group of American soldiers stationed in the Afghanistan's desert waking up a djinn. That's all that was good. It could be a nice movie but the result was boring, dull, not at least frightening, and the end is totally predictable. The actors were rather mediocre, the dialogs poor, the characters stereotypical, the special effects very cheap, the attempt to describe the American view of the Muslim religion childish and lacking, and the overall plot had a lot of holes in it. With one word, boring. A waste of time, there must be hundreds of other movies in this category better than this one so do not waste any time on this.
AD
