Into the Badlands (1991)

Absolutely amazing

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

You have to admit, Bruce Dern cuts an impressive figure in the black frock coat and white beard. You'll usually find him as a supporting player in older Westerns, usually as a villain, but here he's got the lead as a supernatural bounty hunter named Barston, book-ending a trio of tales set in the Old West. His character does a good deal of narration as the tales move forward, offering bits of gritty, sage advice as he roams an area, by his own admission, somewhere between civilization and the Ninth Circle of Hell.Picking a favorite out of the stories presented is a toss-up to my mind, I liked each one about equally. A casting surprise in the first entry had Helen Hunt as a consumptive whore falling for an itinerant killer portrayed by Dylan McDermott. Her character switches personas in the twist that occurs, reverting to an apparition like figure who might have been right at home in The Band's plaintive song, 'Long Black Veil'.Mariel Hemingway and Lisa Pelikan are distant neighbors in the second story, at odds with each other over the relationships with their respective men. The story is one in which Dracula would have been right at home, considering all the howling in the night the prowling wolves outside their cabin door emitted.Dern's Barston achieves his goal in hunting down bad man Red Roundtree (Michael Metzger) in the final story, but runs into some bad old boys who have other things on their mind when he shows up for the bounty. Even though he's done in by the baddies and is set up for the long dirt nap, he winds up heading for Colorado, just around the bend, and dead ahead. Dead ahead just might have been the operative word here. Throughout the bounty hunter's entire ordeal, I couldn't help but admire an unusual and unlikely physical characteristic - the guy had a beautiful set of pearly whites.

Some might describe "Into the Badlands" as a surreal tale of the Old West. I on the other hand would call the film a sleep inducing waste of talent and time. Sure Bruce Dern looks convincing as a bounty hunter, in his black duster and specs. Even the music is interesting and appropriate. Everything else is not good. It begins and ends with the story, which is disjointed and talky. The first part involves a gunslinger talking and talking with barroom whore Helen Hunt. The second is something about Mariel Hemingway talking and talking to a frontier neighbor before some unexplained wolves show up. Dern reappears in the final sequence killing a wanted baddie and then dragging his rotting body around the desert for the rest of the film. - MERK

Dern burns up the desert.Dylan McDermott & Helen Hunt are good, but who needs supporting cast when Dern's soliloquies with corpses are so deadly riveting. A character reminiscent of Kane the `preacher-man' in Poltergeist II, and portrayed almost as eerily, though with Dern wit.Good western portrayal with authentic undertones. And a dern-good soundtrack too, if you can find it.

This movie is a bit of an odd duck - it is sort of like an episode or two of "Twilight Zone" masquerading as a western. Nothing wrong with that, it's just that the various story threads in the movie never get developed to their fullest.However, what this movie lacks in the way of compelling story development, it more than makes up for with a very rich, absorbing Old West atmosphere. There is just something about the feel of this film - the photography, the costumes, the weapons, the Old West sets and real western locales (New Mexico), the expressions on people's faces... Call it a victory of style over substance... In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed the "look and feel" of this movie from start to finish. Watching the movie, there were more than a few times where I felt myself being transported back to a different place and time. I just wish the rich story development of a good western-genre movie such as "Unforgiven" (1992) with Clint Eastwood and Gene Hackman, could have been woven into "Into the Badlands," as that would have completed this film and would have ultimately made for one very awesome Western movie. But even in its current configuration, this movie is definitely worth checking out. I think you will be suitably dazzled by the Old West atmosphere that is conveyed in the film. Just don't expect a dazzling story to complement it.