RESURRECTION ROAD - Mark Reviews Movies

Resurrection Road, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 5, 2025

When the surviving members of a Union squad arrive at the Confederate fort they've been ordered to sabotage, the structure sits precariously on a hilltop, set in shadow against the silhouette of mountain. It's night, and this sight doesn't look like some war stronghold from the Civil War era. No, the appearance of this building in Resurrection Road gives the sense of something much older and out of place in the American South. It's akin to the sort of haunted castle one would expect to see in Eastern Europe at the sinister point in a tale when the characters realize some otherworldly evil is at play.

Writer/director Ashley Cahill's horror-infused war drama possesses a few moments like this during the buildup to the movie's big shift in purpose. This is certainly not a project with a massive budget, but the filmmaker understands that a fine sense of mood and strikingly old-fashioned visuals has more of an impact than expensive visual effects can often accomplish.

The shortcomings of Cahill's movie, in other words, aren't in its look or even the mishmash of a story he's telling. No, they're simply in the fact that the story is counting its gimmicky premise and structure to carry far too much of the movie's weight. There's a better version of this tale that spends more time with its characters or, at least, gives us some idea of them beyond their place in the plot.

Even so, the movie we do get here isn't too bad. It's fairly entertaining at its best—when Cahill embraces the Gothic horror of its setting and the grim absurdity of its central twist. There are some neat tricks to be found in this movie—from the evolving nature of its narrative, to the way Cahill stages some of its more violent showdowns, to the fact that whatever budget limitations might have existed for the production stop mattering as soon as the movie reveals what it's doing.

The story, though, might be its most effective bit of sleight of hand. It begins with Barabbas (Malcolm Goodwin), who escaped slavery and volunteered to fight in the Union Army. He's currently being detained by the powers-that-be for something or other and given not much of a choice by a pair of higher-up officers. Either he and the surviving members of his unit infiltrate a heavily guarded Confederate fort in order to destroy the large-caliber guns on its towers, or they'll hang him. Even though the orders are likely a suicide mission, Barabbas decides he'll take the odds, since refusing them would be a death sentence.

Initially, this plays as a fairly traditional behind-enemy-lines plot, as Barabbas and his team—made up of other Black soldiers who seem a bit too quickly disposable within the broader context of a story that is ostensibly about a Black company fighting those trying to defend slavery—make their way to the fort. Obviously, they witness some of the horrors of war, such as a farm where everyone—save for a few people—has been slaughtered, and encounter some Confederate fighters, who underestimate the unit to their peril. Before we even meet some of Barabbas' men, they're already dead, and a couple more of them die later, before anything of note is established about them.

The movie's in a rush, obviously, because it does have a good hook to reveal. Some hints of that come at the farm, where the survivors—including a Native American woman named Tsula (Triana Browne)—speak of some evil in the woods, and upon the remaining team actually arriving in the forest. There, they find a dead body with its throat ripped out, a patch of mist that mysteriously retreats into the trees, and a colony of bats flying as soon as darkness arrives. Most will have a sense of where this might be going with those little details, but as soon as that first image of the fort appears on screen, the movie has effortlessly transformed itself from a gritty, bloody war story into an eerie, soon-to-be-bloodier form of horror tale.

The narrative's hastiness does pay off in the movie's extended final stretch, which tosses aside any need for these characters to do, say, or be anything other than killers of this undead threat or fodder for their supernatural foes. The interior of the fort, with its cramped hallways and weapon-filled rooms and what would be—if not for who/what lives there—an uncharacteristic catacomb, is a creepy setting, to be sure. Going back to that initial view of the fort from afar, there are shots of that artillery on those towers that almost possess the quality of something from the silent era, and one can't help but admire the kind of in-camera effects trickery that Cahill uses for one shot involving a mirror and who appears, as well as doesn't appear, within it.

The skeleton of a clever, genre-bending movie is here. Even though Cahill shows some skill in shifting those genres and injecting the whole affair with dread and sometimes-noteworthy visuals, the movie does ultimately feel stuck as merely the bones of the outline for a better one (especially since the run time is only about 70 minutes without credits). Resurrection Road is a valiant effort in terms of its narrative and its appearance, but it comes up just short, regardless.

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