The folks out at Entertainment One sent out a copy of Born of Earth, and this one looked on the surface like it had all the makings of a good monster movie. Nifty cast, not only featuring a Baldwin (Daniel, but still) but also one of my personal favorites in Brad Dourif, as well as some decent looking monster effects. But would this whole be greater than the sum of its parts…or less?

Born of Earth revolves around Danny Kessler, a man that’s been having a rough time of things lately. His wife was recently murdered, and his children recently abducted. That’s rough enough for anybody, but when Danny discovers that, just to make things even worse, there’s a race of horrible monsters living right around the area, he’s going to not only have to find out the truth behind these horrors and put paid to them before they can run amok on a killing spree of their own over large chunks of the planet.

Implausible? You bet! But then, some of the best monster movies are exactly that, at least in the early going. The down side here is that, not only is it implausible, it’s also kind of dull. See, Born of Earth has a run time of about eighty four minutes. We see the monsters only a couple times in the first five minutes, and then, not again for better than the first half. When you’ve only got about an hour and twenty minutes on your movie, you need to hit things hard and fast. Thankfully, the ending does somewhat make up for this with loads of monsters running around and lunching up the assorted residents, many of whom actually deserve to get gnawed on for one reason or another, which makes this something of a strange one.

It’s always kind of a weird sign when you have to ask, are the horrible twisted flesh-eating forces of justice or murderous monsters? Equally thankfully, the doubts won’t last long. They rapidly reassert themselves as horrors, and this is for the best. Born of Earth does quickly pick up its pacing toward the end, and though the ending isn’t the best, the end does at least take care of most of the loose ends. It’s really rather underwhelming, and looks more like the kind of thing you’d get out of a SyFy Channel Saturday night special than something you might more notably expect in video store shelves or theatrical releasing.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Born of Earth a somewhat nonplussed five out of ten. A good rental, but really, not much more than that.