Homestead

I was very excited by the first act of this film, mainly due to the very interesting set of characters. Betsy Sligh in particular stole the show as a feisty adolescent with a professed itch for dangerous adventure, but all four members of her frontier family are excellent and well cast.

The costumes and setting are also very authentic, except for the glaring absence of any farm animals - not even a dog or horse in sight. Even the band of outlaws who turn up arrive on foot!

Said outlaws appear at the start of the second act, and that is where things go awry. This group of characters is not nearly as interesting, starting with the tired old cliche of a "hellfire preacher" leader iof the gang. There's an effort to give the others distinctive personalities and conflicts, but their interactions are muddled, as is the last half of the script.

Although the adolescent fireball Irene is set up as a "Becky" type vengeful warrior, her character soon gets lost in the messy script and has minimal impact.

Making things even worse, this is a movie plagued with the kind of illogical last minute pauses taken by movie villains that allow their victims to escape the jaws of death. Believability goes out the door fairly early and with it any real suspense.

It's too bad the writer-director didn't have someone looking over his shoulder to question his bad decisions. This could have been a minor classic.

I was expecting a decent western flick. The story had promise but there was so much missing. The acting was decent and some of the dialog was well written. What ruined it was all the missing ingredients for a decent western. Using a brass frames pietta 1958 Remington black powder pistol was a big sin. Remington never made brass framed pistols, Those are cheap replicas made today. Pa stated he had a heifer and was waiting for a bull to start breeding. Where did the heifer stay? All they had was a one room shack with a good electrical service as the lighting was poor and too bright. No corral, barn, of any kind for animals, Not even a single horse in the whole movie. There was too much un-needed conversations that drug on forever.

It sure had me going until it bogged down. Characters mumbled their lines so I missed 80% of the dialog. So contrived. A bunch of bad guys.. an outlaw band.. and they don't have a horse? It has its moments, but ultimately turned boring. The soundtrack music was cheap and out of place... like from some cheesy film from the eighties. It was ultimately an amateurish production. Filmmaking is an art, and this movie lacked expertise in direction. Very good premise... the beginning really hooked me... but as it deteriorated, and revealed itself to be an amateur production, I lost interest, struggled to stay awake, and turned it off. Must have been a shoestring budget... no horses! A western and no horses....the bad guys just walking around for miles.. like something from Monty Python.

This movie starts off well enough, it looks good and while the dialogue is iffy (as it remains throughout the movie), it clearly establishes the main characters. Once a new character enters shortly after, there's actually a great deal of tension. Then DDP shows up and it all goes limp, slumping to the floor and never getting back up.

The synopsis and setup make you think this little girl is going to be a total badass and save her family. Sligh's acting was so good that I was actually becoming invested and looking forward to see her become that hero. But she is totally wasted and the story suddenly becomes ill-paced, generic, and predictable. The tension dies as the movie slowly and weirdly shifts antagonist motive, gives us action that is unimaginative and either happening offscreen or onscreen with terrible special effects, and becomes increasingly clear with us that we're not getting the David vs Goliaths battle we were waiting for. The character is actually given a disappointingly small amount to do. And that's too bad because the actress was ready to give us something special. The writing really let her down and the movie ultimately lets us all down. Bottom line, watch "Becky" instead.

Beware of any film that sets to improve on a very well defined genre.

Westerns have given us some real masterpieces, films that stand out in the long list of great american films.

It's really too bad when a director feels he can improve on the style by showing his own talent and aiming much too high.

Here we have a situation that has been treated many times, a group of people, in this case a family, trapped in a house in the middle of nowhere under siege from a group of particularly mean killers.

What could have been the twist is that the person who will fight back is the one you'd least expect : a litttle girl.

Only every move every line of dialog take ages, it's so long and boring that it kills all tension, you just wish they would get along with the story and move on.

The director wants you to see how clever and intelligent he is and to do this he really takes his time. Long shots on people who don't say anything, meaningful looks that lead nowhere....

Had he played the story and directed his film more humbly he might have had a really good film to show.

This is not the case.

Special mention to the cast and particularly the little girl, but it's not enough.