Badlands (DVD)

Description: Genre: Action & Adventure / Theatrical Release: 1973 / Director: Terrence Malick / Actors: Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek ... more

Badlands (DVD) ... ... / DVD released 26 May, 2003 at Warner Home Video / Features of the DVD: PAL / Still one of American cinema's most powerful, daring film-making debuts, Terrence Malick's Badlands is a quirky, visionary psychological and social enigma masquerading as a simple lovers-on-the-run flick. Inspired by the 1958 murders in the cold, stark badlands of South Dakota by Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, the film's plot, on the surface, is similar to that of other killing-couple films, like Bonnie and Clyde and Gun Crazy. Martin Sheen, in an understated, sophisticated performance, plays the strange James Dean-like social outcast who falls in love with the naïve Sissy Spacek--and then kills her father when he comes between them. The two flee like animals to the wilderness, until the police arrive and the killing spree begins. What sets the film apart from others of its genre is Malick's complicated approach. Gorgeous, impenetrable images contrast sharply with Spacek's nostalgically artless narration, serving as ironic counterpoints, blurring concrete meaning and stressing that nothing this horrific is simple. Malick observes, rather than analyses, the couple in a manner as detached and apathetic as the couple's shocking actions. No judgment or definitive motivations are offered, though Malick's empathy often leans toward his senseless protagonists, rather than the star-struck society that makes killers famous. Compared with the interchangeable uniform cops who hunt them and the film's other nameless characters stuck in suburban banality, the couple are presented like tarnished, warped andfrustrated results of squelched individuality. Badlands, on one level, views America's suffocating homogeneity and, conversely, its continued obsession with celebrities (individuals considered different but adored) as hypocritical. Ambiguous and bold, the movie hints that society may be as guilty as the killers. --Dave McCoy

Newest Review: ... more bleak and scary - because my initial feelings on the film were indeed correct - and that made it all the more chilling. ... more

... It is an insight into a guys psychotic life who doesn't really know or understand what he is doing - and if he does he doesn't care, he doesn't really know about the evil that he is committing and because of this the film almost seems to glorify murder and violence but instead its message is to show murder through the eyes of the main protagonist as just being so meaningless and yet remain with the viewer as being so incredibly brutal. The whole film is just one giant contrast on itself, Martin Sheen's character bei...more

Price Comparison for Badlands (DVD)

	Badlands [DVD] [1973] Still one of American cinema's most powerful, daring film - makin ... Last Update 25.12.2009 05:45	£ 3.88	Free! within 24 hours

Badlands [DVD] [1973]
Still one of American cinema's most powerful, daring film - makin ...

Last Update 25.12.2009 05:45

£ 3.88

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Read Reviews for Badlands (DVD)

Badlands (DVD): Badlands (374 words)
by - written on 03/08/09 (1 readings)
Rating:

Badlands is a strange film when you watch it through the first time, i remember not really knowing what to make of it all, it seemed to be just a lot of senseless violence and murders revolving round a love affair between a young teenager who doesn't really understand what she is doing and a sociopath who cares for nobody but himself and his girl. But once i really started to analyze this film with repeated viewings i found it all the more bleak and scary - because my initial feelings on the film were indeed correct - and that made it all the more chilling. It is an insight into a guys psychotic life who doesn't really know or understand what he is doing - and if he ... Read the complete review

Great but dated (281 words)
by - written on 27/07/09 (Useful, 2 readings)
Rating:

note: also appears in part on The Student Room Badlands is a film that has somewhat become rather dilluted and muted because its concept has been copied and re-used so much in other films, not to mention it had been done many years before in films like Jean Luc Godard's Breathless and Bonnie and Clyde. Nevertheless, this is a well crafted film with some really solid performances from two young up and comers - Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. Holly (Spacek) is a young girl that lives in a rather drab and dilapidated town, and through a combination of boredom and curiosity, she comes across Kit (Sheen), a rebellious greaser who seems to sort of style ... Read the complete review

Badlands (DVD): Sheen & Spacek Rule (433 words)
by - written on 15/04/01 (Very useful, 61 readings)
Rating:

Atmospheric. Eerie. Chilling. Scary. True. "Badlands" is based upon the real-life episode of terror that reigned in mid-fifties America. The screenplay follows the accounts, but gives the characters different names from their true identities. The real people were Caril Fugate, a young and impressionable teenager, and her boyfriend, an angry young man of the first order, Charles Starkweather. Together they embarked on a killing spree, that also claimed the life of Caril's father, and made themselves part of American folklore. A more recent version of Bonnie & Clyde, if you like. The film does a wonderful job in recreating the ... Read the complete review

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