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Grim Prairie Tales
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The
low-budget, independent American feature Grim
Prairie Tales – with its title changed to Hellbent on the Australian video release, perhaps in a vain attempt
to make it seem like a regular horror movie – features two fine actors, Brad
Dourif and James Earl Jones, as cowpoke storytellers stuck around a campfire
for a night. It’s a haunting prairie in the middle of nowhere.
Like
in that great Australian film, John Heyer’s The
Back of Beyond (1954 – not to be confused with this),
storytelling seems like a form of survival for these starkly different
wanderers. The ritual swapping of yarns sparks all manner of games, contracts
and exchanges.
The
stories they tell – duly illustrated by Coe and (later) famous cinematographer
Janusz Kamiński – are
basically tall horror tales, escalating from a ho-hum fable of American Indian
payback, to more tantalising, troubling parables of pioneer civilisation and
its discontents. Coe skilfully finds, in this material, the connecting line
between the Western and horror genres.
The
film is afflicted with a certain dainty self-consciousness, like Orlando (1992) or Poison (1991), rather too eager to spell out its intentions and pull its punches. It
did not lead to a directorial career for Coe, whose main line of film work has
been in art departments, poster design, and in the storyboarding of title
sequences (including Se7en, The Island of Dr Moreau, Spawn and Dead Man on Campus). He apparently envisaged a
sequel titled Grim Prairie Takes: Rescue
Party that has never eventuated.
Still,
it’s an intriguing oddity playing in the margins of popular cinema. And it has
one wonderfully horrific scene devoted to the male nightmare of what really
goes on inside the belly of a pregnant woman.
© Adrian Martin September 1991 / July 1993 |
