lancekoz

This 200 minute monster turns up on cable every now and then, and it always reaffirms my original opinion. How did this get made, and why would anyone think it requires over three hours? The art direction, sets and lighting are all so humorously fake, as bad as the acting. After some local color shots early in the film, it goes mostly indoors with a lot of languorous suffering and unhappiness. Is it an amazing, dense epic that requires its 3 hours? Not a chance. Your time is wasted by things like a café fight scene where Rock gets in a fistfight with the racist owner. It goes on relentlessly, with one facial meat-punch after another as these two fly over tables and chairs and not one person in the place gets up to stop it or flee. After maybe three solid minutes of this poorly enacted brutality, we cut to Rock at home in a family scene with a light bruise on his face. Anyone knows that a few face punches leads to stitches and probably broken hand bones, but he is chuckling with his baby. Well, that is but one example of the weird surrealism of this stinker.

Weird how things like this got made back then. Truly amateurish in all ways, but created out of a real love for the west, horses and ranch life. I get a kick of films like this, ones that try to be semi-documentary in content as they deliver a thin story. We are shown clips of salmon spawning, wild horses running, old fashion lo-glitz rodeo, Indians doing a tribal dance for show. In-between, there are men punching, flying, riding and shooting, and a really lame love story. Take it for what it's worth, I enjoyed it as a pre-dawn distraction from insomnia. I liked all the western plaid coats and handsome hair, but would've liked more pickup trucks.

I know that incest and sexual abuse within families is a MAJOR problem, seemingly in all societies. And I believe it could be a good or meaningful topic for a movie.... but this is not it. This film is so uniquely, surrealistically dismal and disgusting in the events portrayed, that it became more about how it was shown and could it be shockingly, relentlessly depressing, not a credible depiction of the way this problem exists within families. Therefore, it became exploitive of this issue rather than meaningful.

Besides the issue of the molesting father, we get a gratuitous, shocking car crash... relevance to the story: zip! We get all sorts of female nudity around the house, including long shots of the teenage daughter's breasts while in discussion. Relevance: zip! Including the silly concept of a girl sleeping naked under a single blanket in an old house in England's winter...why? Just so the blanket could be shockingly pulled away, of course. Add to all this the Euro style of filming where tight shots linger on barely lit sad faces for silent minutes at a time. It was like the director just wanted to practice everything you might do in a Eurotrash horror movie, but give it a topic that might propel him into the realm of "meaningful". I'm not buying it. And WARNING: Do NOT bring this home for the family thinking you are going to see something enlightening about normal family issues. This is a rough, ugly, sad ride thru some real prurient exploitation.