1 out of 5

Director: Zev Berman

A good basis gone wanderingly astray in the hands of a writer/director too obsessed with the topic to make it a solid movie. Along the US/Mexican border, people are disappearing. The cops seem to know about this but avoid it, as the kidnappers dabble in profitable drugs and some pretty wild and violent voodoo that seems, uh, scary, I guess. Borderland does a few things pretty well – making characters act/react fairly believably in their scenarios (in the context of a horror movie), doesn’t chop up anybody too easily, and is shot steadily, without too much of the flash that pops up in modern horror (besides the washed-out “gritty” look that Saw seems to have made popular). But the pretty well stretches over everything: the horror is not horrific, the characters are not definable enough to care about or loathe, and the script apparently seemed so creepy on its own that there was no need to develop anything overtly threatening about these cults except that they’re sort of violent. Listening to Zev Berman’s interview on the DVD explains why the material may have failed to connect: it’s a passion project. Sometimes that works, but often it doesn’t. Here it doesn’t. Borderland is not horrible, it just doesn’t incite any kind of feeling, and that’s a sin for movies, especially ones with good premises.