Interesteg What makes it different from others?

Brightlyme i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

Lidia Draper Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Robert J. Maxwell There is a fine movie about the serial murderer Charlie Starkweather and his hostage/girl friend Karil Ann Fugate out there. Its title is "Badlands." There is also a very good TV movie on the subject, starring Tim Roth.This thing is so bad that no words can describe it. Everything about it is less than poor.It's not just the low budget. With imagination and talent that kind of obstacle can be overcome -- "Mean Streets", "The Honeymoon Killers," "The Littlest Fugitive," "The Savage Eye," "Detour." But this abortion lacks not just money but everything.The acting, or rather its absence. Not only isn't there a decent performance from anyone in the cast. Some are so bad that I've seen better in high school productions of "Our Town." The sheriff is probably the worst, but they're all bad, about as reactive as a noble gas.The editing. Continuing with the sheriff's disarticulation, please note what happens on the screen when he has a line. ("A line" because he reads them as if they didn't come in packages.) The camera shows us the sheriff's grim and uninteresting face. Seconds pass. Finally he speaks. "If they want to go out in a blaze o' glory, this is their chance." The camera lingers for a few seconds more on his face although he has nothing more to say and the muscles of his face remain marmoreal. After a few scenes like this the effect on the viewer is that of a hypnotic drug -- and not even a good HIGH first, but a precipitate drop in consciousness of the sort you get from chloral hydrate.The direction. Abominable. Nobody can hold a gun still. It must be jerked around or waved from side to side, or jabbed as if shoveling dirt. Even when a lawman takes a bead on a window he waves his rifle as if it were a magician's wand.Location: Not Nebraska farmland but clearly the Mojave Desert in California.I can't go on with this, really. I hate to dump on people and this is no fun. It's more embarrassing than anything else. Reminds me of a professor who once told us that when we wrote our term papers we should do our very best. Then he paused for a moment and mused out loud, "What if you did your very best and it turned out pedestrian?" Okay. Fair and balanced, right? There are two valuable things in this movie. There are some nice shots of vintage 1940s and 1950s cars, though sometimes mislabeled. And this film would serve as a very good bad example in any film school.

r-e-studley This movie is full of holes. It takes place in Lincoln, Nebraska and we see tall mountains in the background. I've been to Lincoln and there are no mountains there. It also shows cactus growing along the highway. There are no cactus there either.The police radio says they found the killer's car (a 1955 Chevy) by the side of the road near the farmhouse. I don't know what that car was, but it sure wasn't a 55 Chevy.The Lincoln Sheriff was chasing Starkweather into Wyoming (near Douglas). He has no juristiction there and certainly can't make an arrest in another state.

Don3620 For all those who complained about killer boom mikes the copy I saw didn't have any but then I wasn't looking for them. There was a comment from someone in Oz that stated that they all sounded like southerners not mid westerners. In post-depression Nebraska and Kansas out in the country they were poor and uneducated for the most part and thats what they sounded like to me.Now for the good stuff. There is a very nice set of articles amassed by Court TV in their crime library. All you have to do is a Google search on Charles Starkweather. It's under mass and spree murderers. I only looked at this movie to see if it had stayed true to the facts. And as far as I can see it has. (except for the mentor appearing every now and then). They didn't glorify his deeds or anything like they did in the "loosely based" movies like Natural Born Killers etc. They pretty much stayed with the facts and what I remember reading in the newspapers back in 1957-1959. So like the rest of the U.S. we read about it in the morning and evening papers when all of this was happening. When I saw the American Justice documentary on this a few years ago it was stated that when she got to prison a kindly matron took her under her wing and made sure she got a proper education and turned her into a nice young lady so if she ever got out she would have something to work with on the outside. At her parole hearing in 1977 (at which members of the families also testified) The matron and the wardens testimony must have carried a lot of weight because she was paroled after spending over half of her life in prison. And from what I understand from that documentary she is leading a useful and productive life. Caril Ann Fugate is only 18 months younger than me. So if anyone really cares about the facts and not just the content and acting in the movie what I saw was good.

evanne-1 I have to wonder at the completely opposing reactions this film has garnered here, people seem to either love it or hate it. While I didn't hate it, I have to chime in with a few of the things that they've been talking about. I grew up in the Belmont neighborhood of Lincoln, Nebraska, only a few blocks away from Caril Anne Fugate's house. Understandably my childhood was literally steeped in the mythology of the crimes depicted in this film and as I grew older I began to do my own research about them. I've had extensive conversations with older relatives who were living in Lincoln at the time and read an entire book about the crimes based on contemporary newspaper stories about the events as they happened (Headline: Starkweather by Earl Dyer, much better than the movie, if a little dry).Firstly, anyone who says that this is an accurate depiction of the events is fooling themselves. There are parts that are accurate but many that are not. The sad part is that the things that are accurate are the kind of things you would learn after doing a Google search. In fact, as I watched this movie I kept telling my husband that I suspected that was the extent of the research done for this film, which is a sad testament to the people that died in these events, the filmmakers couldn't even be bothered with an in depth examination of the crimes. It's not hard to get the dates and body positions of the dead right, what's hard is making a picture that tries for the truth based on a melange of forensic evidence/psychology and police statements. In this case, where Fugate and Starkweather gave such conflicting stories, it could have been so interesting, but instead we have the gimmicky "Devil" character...please! Now I'll get nit-picky. I will pretty much guarantee you that there is only one shot in this movie actually filmed in Nebraska, and that is the brief beauty shot of the state capitol building. Everything else was clearly in California, my husband and I had that pegged before the Bartlett's even appeared on screen. Where is the snow!? There is a reason we used to call Nebraska winters "Ragnorok". There is also a crepe myrtle in bloom behind the Bartlett house, which I have to say, cracked me up. There are no cacti around Lincoln, and the landscape has _no_ mountains of any type, only rolling prairie and the occasional line of trees as a windbreak. I also enjoy that Lincoln literally seemed like a non-city, with no real shots of streets, traffic, or even any of the houses still exactly like they were in that time period. The southern, stereotypical, hick accents were annoying me before the movie got going. Nebraska has it's own dialect, why ignore that in favor of something so pedestrian? There were other little anachronisms here and there, and other little things that only matter to me; like the fact that there is no Lincoln Gazette (never has been as far as I know), just the Lincoln Star and the Lincoln Journal that covered the events in question.But who cares about all that junk, right? Well, those things are only a barometer that indicates the general level of production value achieved on this movie. You can literally see the actors working their butts off to turn this load into something worthwhile, and I commend them for that. The two leads accurate portrayal of the couple too vacant to stay out of trouble seemed genuine. In fact, the only thing I liked about this movie is the choice to make Charlie to hopelessly dense, violent and romantic all at once.