MOVIE REVIEW: Into the Badlands (Sam Pillsbury, 1991)

Into the Badlands on IMDb

I was looking desperately for a moody western the other day, something with solitary blues instead of symphonic openings, and dirty yellow deserts instead of hardworking, brave little towns. And by god I found it. This little TV movie contains a world just outside the gates of Heaven and Hell, a cross between an eerie Limbo and the Twilight Zone, centered on and voiced by the bounty-hunter to bury all bounty-hunters, so wonderfully archetypal he might as well have been drawn in pencil.

The man doesn't just look like the end of the world, he talks like it too:
A bounty man, he don't live for nothing but that poster reading, "Wanted dead or alive" and blood money that will line his pockets. Always taking, never giving nothing in return, except sometimes, with the folks he meets, he leaves behind a little bit of his contagion, that poison, that rot. It can sneak itself inside behind your eyes, and all of a sudden, it's like rats let loose in your skull, and life's a place you only ever seen before in your nightmares.
 
The movie is composed of 3 different stories. In the first one, a wanted outlaw, played by the too pretty Dylan McDermott, falls in love with the weary prostitute played by Helen Hunt, none of which is too interesting if it weren't for Helen's expression of bitterness, with the corners of her mouth turned downwards and a glimpse of desert in her eyes. In the second story, we have Mariel Hemingway defending herself and a pale, huge-eyed Lisa Pelikan against the wolves of their own fears. And the third story, the most lovely of them all, is a reminder of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, with Bruce Dern's bounty hunter, Barston, trying to obtain the signatures of four zombified rednecks for the Indian / Irish wretch he had finally killed (and thus turned into his only friend :D). Barston recounts the eerie events ending up with his own killing and burial in the arms of his bounty, and his eventual refusal of death, leading back to the scene in the beginning of the movie. Either the Badlanders are all caught in a never-ending mirage of pain, or Barston alone is endless Retribution, watching over the lives and demises of the wretched souls this side of the River.
 
And over all, the slow guitar riffs and harmonica tunes, the dry rot of the desert, of ghostly loves and palpable fears. I loved this thing.