Homestead

It sure had me going until it bogged down. Characters mumbled their lines so I missed 80% of the dialog. So contrived. A bunch of bad guys.. an outlaw band.. and they don't have a horse? It has its moments, but ultimately turned boring. The soundtrack music was cheap and out of place... like from some cheesy film from the eighties. It was ultimately an amateurish production. Filmmaking is an art, and this movie lacked expertise in direction. Very good premise... the beginning really hooked me... but as it deteriorated, and revealed itself to be an amateur production, I lost interest, struggled to stay awake, and turned it off. Must have been a shoestring budget... no horses! A western and no horses....the bad guys just walking around for miles.. like something from Monty Python.

I was very excited by the first act of this film, mainly due to the very interesting set of characters. Betsy Sligh in particular stole the show as a feisty adolescent with a professed itch for dangerous adventure, but all four members of her frontier family are excellent and well cast.

The costumes and setting are also very authentic, except for the glaring absence of any farm animals - not even a dog or horse in sight. Even the band of outlaws who turn up arrive on foot!

Said outlaws appear at the start of the second act, and that is where things go awry. This group of characters is not nearly as interesting, starting with the tired old cliche of a "hellfire preacher" leader iof the gang. There's an effort to give the others distinctive personalities and conflicts, but their interactions are muddled, as is the last half of the script.

Although the adolescent fireball Irene is set up as a "Becky" type vengeful warrior, her character soon gets lost in the messy script and has minimal impact.

Making things even worse, this is a movie plagued with the kind of illogical last minute pauses taken by movie villains that allow their victims to escape the jaws of death. Believability goes out the door fairly early and with it any real suspense.

It's too bad the writer-director didn't have someone looking over his shoulder to question his bad decisions. This could have been a minor classic.

1. Animals. It is set on an isolated homestead. Yet, there is no livestock. This is a western with not a single horse. How did the gang of bad guys get across country..bus?

2. Injuries that stay, well, injured. Bad guy gets stabbed in the foot. In following scenes there is a total absence of blood on, well, boots, floor etc.

3. Dead guys that stay dead. Dead man's buddy picks him up from the porch, and dead guy lifts his arm to hold on.

The plot holds together, but is highly derivative. And why do they keep the ammo in a box on the hill, and not in the house?

Had some attention been given to continuity, and stitching together some plot holes that were overly large, and given the gang horses and not Shank's pony, it would not have been such a frustrating watch.

I was expecting a decent western flick. The story had promise but there was so much missing. The acting was decent and some of the dialog was well written. What ruined it was all the missing ingredients for a decent western. Using a brass frames pietta 1958 Remington black powder pistol was a big sin. Remington never made brass framed pistols, Those are cheap replicas made today. Pa stated he had a heifer and was waiting for a bull to start breeding. Where did the heifer stay? All they had was a one room shack with a good electrical service as the lighting was poor and too bright. No corral, barn, of any kind for animals, Not even a single horse in the whole movie. There was too much un-needed conversations that drug on forever.

Decent movie if it was a movie. Just so everyone is aware before they go spend money to see this. It is basically the first two episodes to their show. A show that is only available on their app that also requires a monthly a subscription. This is either genius or stupid. For someone like myself that does not like shows because I cannot commit the time I feel totally ripped off. If you watch the movie and don't subscribe to continue the show you are basically left completely hanging at the end of the "movie" overall it was ok. Just feel they may have a better response if they were more clear on what this actually was.