Red Sands follows a group of soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. But the trouble really starts on the way to their post. The group ends up making an unexpected stop. While wandering around, they stumble across a statue, which one of the soldiers, Gregory Wilcox (Callum Blue), miraculously recognizes as a statue made to contain a Djinn. The fact that he's their linguist it makes it a little more probable that he would know this information, but still not likely. Anyway, he proceeds to tell the rest of the group how evil Djinn were (which I'm really not sure why they showed his exact speech at the very beginning of the movie if they were just going to explain it again here), and then some idiot, Chard Davies (Brendan Miller) decides to shoot the statue. I'm agreeing with one of the other soldiers who got mad at him for shooting it. It's survived untold number of years, why bust it up now? I guess every movie has to have an idiot, and you're going to continually hate Chard. After the group make it back to the vehicle, they're dropped off at a supposedly abandoned house (unfortunately, they find the dead occupants inside so they're forced to bury them) to settle in and "observe." Granted there's nothing there to observe, but we're going to ignore that for now.
At this point, there are only two of the soldiers that we even like. The rest seem like asses. We already know that one of the likable guys, Jeff (Shane West) is the one that's going to survive since they opened the movie with that knowledge. Now it's just a matter of what order they die in. Anyway, of course, the one likeable guy starts to have nightmares. After they all wake up, they decide to go visit the nearby "city." This city is made up of maybe 10 tents total and an old, beat-up bus. There's nobody there though, other than a dead body, so they go back to the base camp. Sound boring so far? Well, it is. Nothing even remotely interesting happens until almost 30 minutes in. Given that it's less than 90 minutes long that means 1/3rd of the movie is beyond boring.
The night that they return from the city, the movie starts to get a little interesting. A mysterious woman (Mercedes Masohn) stumbles into their post from the middle of a massive sand storm. She doesn't speak English, and she doesn't speak a language that their translator can translate either. Given that she can't understand them and they can't understand her, everyone has differing opinions on what to do about her. The movie really picks up here, and the last 30 minutes or so are pretty good. I really have to give them credit because the ending wasn't what I expected. I'm always happy when I can't predict the end and it's still a fitting ending.
Red Sands has some good and some bad qualities. The first part is very boring, so boring in fact that I balanced my checking account during it to keep from falling asleep. Most of the time the quality is somewhat grainy like it is an older VHS movie instead of a new DVD. On the plus side though, overall the acting is really good. I was most impressed with Mercedes' portrayal of the mystery woman. The ending of the movie was nice too. There are also some special features like deleted scenes and the making-of that add value to the film.
So in summation, I can't completely recommend that you just go out and buy this today. I would recommend watching it if you catch it on TV or see it at the rental store.
