Special consultant and voodoo huntress. Does more work than all the soldiers combined.
It’s a little like constructing a train engine without designing in the wheels: why bother? Lost Brigade (1993, aka The Grey Knight, The Ghost Brigade, The Killing Box) has many of the accoutrements of good movie, but in the end the plot does it in.
Captain Harling, aching to be dismissed from the Union Army, is assigned as a tracker for an assignment involving the apparent survival of a group of Confederate soldiers thought massacred early in the Civil War. His commanding officer permits him to interview the captive Colonel and only known survivor of the Alabama 51st, Colonel Strayn, and Harling persuades Strayn to accompany the mission.
Behind enemy lines, they come to the area of the massacre, where Strayn disappears into the creek and, impossibly, discovers his young nephew, the drummer boy of the 51st, alive in an underwater cave. The boy won’t leave and gives Strayn a dire warning and a bite on the hand. Returning to the mission, Strayn falls ill and is nursed by a young former slave who happens to be a mute. His former object of disdain becomes his best friend as the healing commences.
Soon, the detachment commander, Colonel Thalman, thinks they’ve discovered the location of the survivors of the 51st, and the he leaves to break through the lines and bring the Union forces in to finish the job. Strange incidents occur and then Thalman returns in the night … changed. He attacks the Union forces and seems invulnerable to their weapons, but they luck into disabling him. As he lays dying, he reveals all: the 51st, and in fact other dead soldiers of both sides, have been raised from the dead by African voodoo powers inadvertently transported to America by slavers. They are invulnerable to most weapons, but “pale metal” is deadly. The Union detachment arms itself appropriately with some stolen silver and awaits the 51st’s attack.
The attack comes, and it’s appalling, but the Union wins the day.
The movie seems well-made technically speaking, showing acceptable special effects when necessary, and well-chosen occlusion when possible. The acting is acceptable, cinematography is fine.
But … why? If there is interesting thematic material here, I don’t see it. Maybe it ended up on the cutting room floor. Characters run through actions that are logical, yet fairly lifeless. The supernatural pokes in, but for no particular reason.
My Arts Editor said she didn’t care about any of the characters, and, in the end, we shrugged and moved on.
