Red Sands (2009)

One of my all time favorites.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

I was surprised to see the movie score only a 4.. but then I realized the majority of voters are probably young Americans (or Americans in general) who are too ignorant to understand foreign culture. Sadly, a nation that does not endorse free thinking and cultural knowledge robs it's people of many wonderful things in this World. The movie is actually quite disturbing but demands an alert mind (with longer attention span than 3 minutes) and even some knowledge about middle eastern countries and an insight into Islam. There are numerous Iranian truly magnificent horror movies covering the same topic as Red sands out there. This movie is creepy and lingers on in your mind. It is well made because it focuses on the characters and the story and does not try to cover up a poor script with expensive visual FX. Knowing how it ends does not stop me from watching it again as the overall feel and weirdness in the movie what makes it great.

I don't really understand the many negative criticism of this movie, I think it was pretty good. I don't watch horror movies often, perhaps one a month, so maybe I haven't been "buffed up" enough, but this movie make me feel awkward for a few nights after watching it.To be honest I started watching from the moment they broke that statue, so looks like I missed that part about the djinn. But it didn't take long to put together the pieces and realize that this is a modern clone of The Thing. The soldiers are isolated. They find an empty village where everyone has mysteriously disappeared. There's something that keeps killing them one-by-one and is able to take on the shape of the person it killed. I thought this movie is about some aliens, but looks like it's about djinns... oh well, it's still a The Thing clone.But it's pretty scary at the same time. The Thing wasn't scary for me, it was more like an adventure movie. This one was scary. That dream sequence with the woman in the burkha was especially creepy, thanks to the weird music and light effects. It was good entertainment.

Explosions, apparitions, lots of cuss words. They came at you over and over and over and over again. What a waste of time and money. Real red sand is more exciting. This is a major time-waster. Better spend your time snoozing, and this so-called movie will help you in that direction. The scenery? A whole lot of sand and a few dingy buildings. What did the movie makers have in mind? Who knows? Who cares? If you want to see action on sand take another look at "From Here To Eternity." "Red Sands." The title should be changed to dead sands. Special effects seemingly made by a junior high school group of film makers. In words of two --- forget it.

In the Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, the Staff Sergeant Marcus Howston (Leonard Roberts) is assigned to stay temporary based in the desert nearby Kabul with six other soldiers guarding a road that they can not see from Al Qaeda. While patrolling the desert, they find a millenary temple with a stone carved idol; their translator Gregory Wilcox (Callum Blue) explains that worshippers come to that place to idolize Djinn, a race that have hatred for humans and was made by Allah from the smokeless flame in the beginning of the times in accordance with the Islam and pre-Islamic Arabian folklore. One racist soldier shots the statue that falls apart, unleashing a supernatural force. They camp in an abandoned house and during a sand storm, a Muslim woman (Mercedes Masöhn) comes out of the blue. Sooner they find that their truck was sabotaged and their communication broke down. The group stranded in the middle of nowhere gets mad and they are consumed by their sins and guilty."Red Sands" is a claustrophobic and tense psychological horror movie, with a great surrealistic story that can be interpreted as a madness process of a group of soldiers stranded in a place that they do not understand the culture and the language. There are many racist and stupid dialogs and situations, like when the sexist soldier shots an archaeological site, but what else could the viewer expect from invaders under stress? The distributor Sony of Brazil shows a total lake of respect with the Brazilian consumers, releasing a shameful DVD without subtitles in Portuguese. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Força Maligna" ("Malign Force")