Terror on the Prairie Review
Gina Carano returns from cancelation. But is the movie any good?
Recall when Gina Carano was cancelled for her completely innocuous political tweets c. early 2021. After five years of endless comparisons of Donald Trump to the big A with the mustache, one statement that it might not be good to demonize people for their political views and she was summarily vaporized from her role as Carasynthia in The Mandalorian.
I found Carano's beefy action-girl Star Wars character to be about what one might expect from an MMA-fighter-turned-actress. Good at punching people, not much for the acting. All the same she became very popular very quickly, and so to see her dropped so unceremoniously for statements so milquetoast--not just representative of beliefs held by the entirety of conservative America, but many Democrats too--was frankly appalling. Tell me again that Cancel Culture isn't real. Please.
Despite the fact that The Mandalorian is a boring piece of shit and Gina Carano's performance therein is among the worst within a series full of bad actors, this illegal act of wrongful termination and political discrimination in the state of California soured me forever on Disney. I immediately canceled my Plus subscription. I never intend to give money to the Mouse again, so long as I live. These companies cannot keep getting away with this.
Enter Shapiro
Thus despite not caring about Carano per se I was interested when I heard that The Daily Wire had un-canceled her and given her a star vehicle called Terror on the Prairie, a Western about a tough-as-nails frontierswoman fighting off a gang of bandits, as a piece of premium content for their video streaming service. "Witness her return," they said.
"Anything to stick it to Disney," I replied, and the more filmmaking decentralizes from Hollywood the better. So I spent five hours and $14 figuring out how to get The Daily Wire+ working on my TV, then sat down to give the film a try.
My concerns going into Terror on the Prairie were twofold:
The Daily Wire is an explicitly conservative political entity. I have no strong feelings for or against Ben Shapiro, but it's undeniable that a film like this is being made with the intention of being anti-woke. Un-woke is desirous; anti-woke carries with it the dangers of being too reactionary, especially in a period piece like this. I wasn't sure if I could trust The Daily Wire to make a film that was more than a soapbox--particularly given the circumstances of Carano's cancelation.
Gina Carano is an MMA fighter. Her acting was dreadful in The Mandalorian. Getting a compelling performance out of her was going to take considerable directorial talent.
My first fear was unfounded. Terror doesn't feel especially reactionary or political. It feels like a movie, like Hollywood used to make back when they still appreciated money.
My second fear was, alas, spot-on. Indeed I had underestimated the extent of the problem. Not only is Carano's performance as Hattie McAlister utterly inadequate for what her role demands, but the acting in general is poor. Her husband Jeb, played by UFC champion Donald Cerrone, is similarly wooden. Their son is even worse.
One wonders if it might be best to hire professional actors, rather than kickboxers, to lead dramatic films.
Yet worse than the acting is the writing. What I had not anticipated was for the quality of the screenplay to be so poor. Despite being free from the corrupt perversions of the studio system, The Daily Wire was unable to produce a film with a plot of any higher quality than might be found in Screenwriting 301 class at the University of Arizona.
You can take it from me right now that I don't recommend this film, so presume that anything in the plot that follows is fair game for discussion and analysis.
Disaster on the Prairie
In Terror on the Prairie, a band of savage ex-Confederates besiege a house along the frontier. They trap inside the McAlister family while the husband is away: the wife Hattie, her nine-year-old son, and her infant daughter. (Yes, this film about an unlikely heroine defending her home from outlaws does, in fact, star a family named the McAllisters.) This siege lasts more or less the whole movie, until Hattie decides to leave, at which point she does so effortlessly. There's a lot of shooting back and forth--often at close range--but no one is capable of making any hits, except for when the plot demands them to.
It doesn't matter anyway, because gunshot wounds are just makeup (until they aren't). One unlucky Reb has his bicep blown away Gaige Grosskreutz-style with 12-gauge but after a cauterizing he's right back to normal, good as new. A fellow with his eye gouged out is similarly undeterred by the severity of his injuries right up until the moment he's disemboweled.
Despite Hattie's propensity for brandishing weapons at strangers in ways that will inevitably lead to her family being slaughtered--the inciting incident--she has a heavy trigger finger. Personally, were I a mother defending my children from bloodthirsty killers, and had I their evil ringleader five feet in front of me, unarmed, clearly in the sights of my shotgun, I would follow Korben Dallas' advice from The Fifth Element and consider killing the leader to disperse the rest.
Instead what Hattie does, as she realizes that she's being tricked and that outlaws are flanking around the back door, coming to kidnap her children and rape her to death, is let the evil ringleader go for no reason. This happens ten or fifteen more times before the end of the movie.
Like in any bad screenplay the characters behave as pawns in a larger plot, with little consideration given to the nuances of the scenes at hand. Nothing Hattie does in the ninety-minute siege of her frontier home makes any sense. During one stand-still she takes takes the time to exposit her husband's past to their son; they do this while standing up, making coffee, and neither seem remotely traumatized or concerned about the unbelievably horrific situation they find themselves in. Although the moment-to-moment action feels more visceral and more plausible than what's on display in a film like The Northman, like perhaps the choreographers put in a bit more effort than none at all, the actions of the characters are no more truthful.
As the story progresses we learn that the Reb leader known only as the Captain (Nick Searcy) has come in search of Hattie's husband. He's seeking revenge for a deed done back during the War Between the States. It's fortunate that Hattie didn't shoot him while he explained this to her, like any sensible person would have, because otherwise we never would have known. Similarly it's fortunate that he regularly explains his tragic past to his men between exchanges of gunfire with the McAlisters, even though they would all know what he's telling them already.
In the business, we call that "exposition." Terror on the Prairie has a lot of it.
Searcy gives the film's only standout performance. The Captain is a fire-and-brimstone outlaw who outsources the worst of his evil deeds to his men, who quotes the Holy Book right before he kills you. I can hardly think of a more trite cliche for a Western villain. This would be more forgivable were it not for the unfortunate fact that any real actor alongside Carano and Cerrone serves only to remind us that Carano and Cerrone are not actors at all. That he is so good in the role reminds us how bad our leads are.
I anticipated the siege to last half the second act and no longer before the film's scope broadened, but it persists until the beginning of the third. This single location lends a sense to the plot that nothing in particular is happening and we, much like Hattie, are simply waiting for something to walk by and end our suffering.
That 'something' is clearly the return of Jeb McAlister. So he does return, after the outlaws are so incompetent that all their sentries but one fail to notice Hattie and her son preparing their escape. The boy gets away but Hattie is captured, taken to a camp in the distant wilderness, yet just as the worst is about to happen, Jeb randomly stumbles into her.
This escape from the farmstead makes next to no sense. It's contrived and confusing. As a sequence it is nothing but an excuse to remove the McAlister children from the equation of the plot, because the sequences that follow are too disturbing to include a baby and a boy and the writers thought of nothing more interesting to do with them. They are never seen again.
How it is Jeb finds this camp remains a mystery. Apparently he stumbles upon it on his way home. Mind you he has no idea what's happening, although he suspects trouble, and he hasn't been alerted to the situation by his son (which is what would have made sense).
What isn't a mystery is the identity of the Captain and these goons. Jeb knows who they are. He recognizes them. He knows they're after him. Therefore one might expect him to use his revolver to snipe them off, catching them by surprise, ambushing them and thereby saving his wife. After all it was established early on that Jeb is an EXPERT SHARPSHOOTER--might this be a good opportunity to use those skills?
Alas it seems what attracted Jeb to Hattie was that they both share an utter lack of common sense. Rather than save his wife then and there, he decides to holster his revolver and jump like Batman twelve feet into the middle of the outlaws where he will then be defenseless and get captured.
This might be the most ridiculous scene ever put to film. Once on the ground he points his revolver at the Captain, but it doesn't do much good considering he's now surrounded.
I recognize what's happening in this scene because I've been here before as a writer. This is the first draft of a college student's screenplay. He wasn't sure what needed to happen, but he had some general idea of the plot and he wrote the first thing that came to mind--even though it made no sense and, when filmed, is nonsensical. Jeb could have killed the entire Reb gang then and there. But he didn't, because if he had, the film would have ended, and we still needed to shoe-horn in a rape scene to finish off the third act.
Except no one told the screenwriter that this wasn't good enough. They took this first draft and decided to film it, even though it's complete shit.
And in the end, as the Rebs stand defeated and we've forgotten about the annoying little kids and the McAlisters rebuild their farmstead, their love for each other rekindled, we ask ourselves: what was the point? What have we learned? In what ways have the characters grown?
I couldn't tell you. Hattie started off wanting to leave the frontier, to return to St. Louis, but apparently this horrific experience with homicidal maniacs has rekindled her desire to stay in a bitterly cold, miserably desolate place like Montana. Let's make a brief list of the hardships she endures in the single week over which this film takes place:
She's nearly raped
She gets shot
Her husband is partially scalped
Her son comes within seconds of murder countless times
She's dragooned into providing medical care to a group of Indians
She endures a brutal winter
Her neighbor's throat is slit before her eyes
Her dairy cow is stolen and slaughtered
Her baby is almost bitten by a rattlesnake
She stabs someone's eye out
She disembowels a person whose eye she stabbed out
She blows some guy's arm off
She executes a dude point-blank with a revolver
She almost kills herself and her children via smoke inhalation during a harebrained attempt to send smoke signals
She finds out that her husband killed a girl and never told her
Her house is burned down
With this final bullet point she has the perfect justification for leaving and never returning. Instead she decides Montana is her home after all!
Yet I'm not sure why anyone would stay after the events depicted in this film. Even a hardened veteran would be so traumatized by the silhouettes of those mountains and the shapes of the 'prairies' that he'd feel compelled to leave and never return. Moreover, presumably, they're now rich off the bounties on the Captain and his gang, so why not move someplace nice for a change? You know, like she's been talking about doing all film?
The screenwriter forgot to include the character development. There is no reason for Hattie to stay. No one would stay. Her arc is utterly disconnected from the plot. Nothing that would make anyone ever want to stay happens. Nothing occurs in the story that assures her this is the place she needs to be; just the opposite, in fact, time and time and time again.
But the story needed a different outcome, so she stays.
Bust for Daily Wire
Terror on the Prairie is the worst movie I've seen in quite some time. Were I a scoring man, I'd give it somewhere around three stars out of ten. Competent filmmaking is on display, particularly in special effects, but as I've said many times elsewhere on this blog it's storytelling that's the lifeblood of good cinema. Bad acting, nonsensical sequencing to enforce illogical plot outcomes, poorly done character arcs, ineptly handled exposition, cliched antagonists--well, let's say there's a reason why I disclaimed all spoilers. I do not recommend this film to anyone, not even Western lovers like me.