Grim Prairie Tales (1990)

Very few films announce their level of quality as early on as Grim Prairie Tales. Right before the credits role, the title logo appears, along with the immortal tagline, “Hit the trail...to terror.” There can be no surer warning to your audience.

It's a shame, really, because there's nothing more frustrating to a movie buff than a squandered good premise. And a horror anthology with a Western theme is an impeccably good idea for a film, since the horror and Western genres blend together like cheese and crackers. After all, Westerns delve into a landscape that's ideal for excellent horror: vast unmapped territories; the mysteries and mysticism of dispossessed ancient peoples on the brink of cultural and racial genocide; casual violence and a thick atmosphere of lawlessness on the semi-civilized (or quasi-uncivilized) frontier; and a natural environment that can be just as ruthless as it is unpredictable. To their credit, the makers of Grim Prairie Tales do understand all this potential, and at least four of the above points are exploited in the course of the film. Unfortunately for us and them, Grim Prairie Tales becomes a prime exhibit that the best of ideas can be thoroughly undone by poor execution.

To be fair, it starts well enough: in the closing years of the nineteenth century, an uptight middle-class urbanite, Farley (Brad Dourif), while on his way across the American prairies to meet up with his wife in Tennessee, finds himself sharing his camp with a friendly but quite possibly unbalanced bounty hunter, Morrison (James Earl Jones!), who for one thing is totally nonchalant about the dead man he has slung across his horse. With the full force of James Earl Jones behind the character, Morrison easily becomes the most interesting element in the entire film, hitting the right tone for a low key of menace. Further the framing sequence is fairly well-written, if more than a bit self-conscious, and the chummy yet tense interaction between Morrison and Farley easily becomes the film's one major asset. Unfortunately, then they settle in and start telling the actual stories...

This has been said many times many ways about anthologies, but it's worth repeating here that film anthologies, especially horror anthologies, are a difficult medium. A filmmaker has, at most, twenty or so minutes to establish a setting, a hook, build-up, and finally a satisfactory climax. With the slapdash way the stories in Grim Prairie Tales are put together, it looks at times like the script was the end result of a midnight cram session. To start with, the first tale Morrison spins is about a man who tries to take a shortcut through a sacred Native American burial ground where the elderly come to die and are “buried” in the open air. Even though there's an elaborate set-up where the victim-to-be is bitten by an old man, it turns out to have nothing to do with the “shock”, where the unfortunate traveler ends up buried alive by the local tribe. How that ending up by the man-on-man bite or even how it makes thematic sense (after all, this is a tribe established as a society that places its dead on the ground). It is a well-filmed segment; the shots of the tribe preparing to make Edgar Allen Poe's worst nightmare a reality are effectively chaotic while the opening shots of the burial ground at midnight are effective in crafting a solemn, menacing atmosphere. There should be some credit that the victim is not portrayed as an out-and-proud bigot, thus giving what might have been just another EC Comics-esque tale of justified and eagerly anticipated revenge some ambiguity. All in all, though, it feels like large chunks of the story have been surgically removed.

The same is true for the second story Morrison dishes out. Here a young man named Tom comes across a wandering pregnant woman, Jenny. Guessing that she was thrown out of her community because she had gotten pregnant out of wedlock, Tom offers to escort her to the next town. However, the entire situation is not at all what it seems, and Tom is about to take – and fail – a test on his good intentions. Again, the basic concept here is an interesting one: taking a common mythological trope, a wandering hero has his virtue tested by a supernatural entity in disguise, and placing it in a Wild West setting. Unfortunately, the “twist”, while sporting a bizarre (if poorly actualized even by 1990's standards) visual, is broadcast from almost the beginning. There is one interesting bit, where Farley pretends to be outraged by the story but Morrison calls him on his badly hidden titillation, but brief as it is, it turns out to be more interesting than the tale itself.

Farley counters with his own story, which turns out to be the most interesting of the crop. After just arriving in the Midwest with her parents, an adolescent girl named Eva accidentally discovers that her father Arthur is involved with a Klan-like group and helped murder an entire family. Eva is thoroughly repulsed, but eventually decides to love her father anyway, in the most likely vain hope that he'll change. It's an innovative interpretation of “horror” (and really the challenge of having to cope with the monstrous beliefs and actions of a loved one should qualify as horror, one we're all more likely to encounter than a brush with a psychotic killer), but unfortunately the very core to the entire story, Eva's decision to accept her father for who he is and what he does, is sorely underdeveloped. Viewers are supposed to pick on that Eva's choice came after an emotional and intellectual struggle years beyond what any adolescent should face; instead it seems like Eva reconciles with her father because of a short pep talk from her mother and a small gesture from her dad (and a rather obvious piece of symbolism).

Weakest of all the stories is the very one Morrison promises Farley will top all the others. A professional gunman, Martin, joins a deadly competition to determine who will be the top assassin of the local crime boss in a frontier town. He thinks he wins, but unfortunately he's haunted by visions of the last hired gun he killed, which seem to be on the brink of driving him insane. This is an old horror trope that's made no fresher by its Western wrapping. The one idea that actually still has a gleam, Martin as a sophisticated gunslinger who approaches his illicit occupation as an art form, is tossed aside for Martin's portrayal as a standard issue Wild West hood.

Throughout the movie Morrison and Farley both wildly compliment on each other's stories, creating the impression that their scenes have been culled from another, more polished anthology film or that the viewer has been missing a few scenes here and there. Even the “twist” that closes the framing story is rather limp. In the overview Grim Prairie Tales is still an interesting experiment in genre filmmaking. It's just too bad that none of the stories here seem to have gone far past the drafting stage.

Cast Connections

Besides James Early Jones, who goes without saying, there's Brad Dourif (Farley), who has a prolific career starring in horror films, but is probably best known as Wormtongue in the Lord of the Rings movies and as the voice of pint-sized mass murderer Chucky. Will Hare (Lee) has had a lengthy film and TV career too, but computer nerds will spot him as the official face of the "Chessmaster." And William Atherton (Arthur) was Richard in the first two Die Hard movies.