The Far Side of Jericho

When three outlaw brothers are hung after a bank robbery, their put upon, over-the-hill wives go hunting for the gang's stashed loot, using their husband's rawhide treasure map. Following them is mean sheriff Patrick Bergin and sleazy preacher/hangman James Gammon.

Sure, this gets high marks for casting three real women in the leading roles instead of the usual dull assemblage of models and twenty-somethings that usually plague these modern feminist westerns, but the ladies are terrible and their unlikable, unsympathetic character's brassy banter is obnoxious, growing quite tiresome quickly. Needless profanity and the "ladies" crude talk about people's balls and stuff are a poor substitute for good dialog!

The decision on the part of the filmmakers to have the women's husbands turn up as ghosts is pretty darn silly and throws out whatever little credibility this has left.

However, the rest of the cast is great. Bergin is good, as is the cameo appearance by C. Thomas Howell, while Gammon is the best thing about the movie and the cinematography, sets, costumes look more like they belong in a top Hollywood production instead of a dreadful B-movie like this.

I say bring the director, producers, and cinematographer. Give them a better screenplay and fire the women. Replace them with some of those twenty-something models I was talking about.

Im guessing the big names in this movie just had nothing better to do? Painful to watch and the budget mustve been in the hundreds of dollars.

Between the horrible acting, with apparent symptoms of low-grade voice-immodulation, and an extremely lacking story line, this film goes nowhere pretty quickly.

I have to say that I was surprised that the acting could seem so unnatural. The lines were delivered as if they were read by a monotone second grader off of a hard-to-read cue card. The action was anything but. The musical score was non-existent. The make-up was done by someone trying to imitate Adam Ant. They should have hired Adam Ant instead, as the video for Stand and Deliver at least had intentional humor.

I doubt anyone will read this review before renting, and thus this will merely be preaching to a choir for people visiting this page. Hopefully, someone will read the back of the DVD before renting. I didn't. It contains this gem: "the woman must find the courage to trust, care, and kill for one another". When there are only two sentences, you would think someone could take the time to check the grammar. Maybe the person writing the description was trying to warn us in a stealthy fashion not to rent this.

you'll like this weak western. As a enthusiast for bad cinema, I seek out the bad, really bad and unwatchable film, and this film is just plain bad. Beautiful cinematography and stunning film locations juxtapose stilted acting, trite dialogue and pointless plot devices. Add in ghosts, gratuitous vulgar language, racial and ethnic stereotypes, poor sound recording, anachronisms such as automobile tire tracks, stock sound effects from 1950's cowboy serials and cap it off with a muddled script and you get a honest to god, crappy movie. Even the final music will cause spontaneous laughter. If you like bad movies, this one will satisfy, sort of.

This film essentially begins with three brothers named "Jemmy Thornton" (C. Thomas Howell), Cash Thornton (John Diehl) and "Frank Thornton" (Steve Cormier) robbing a bank and subsequently riding off with the loot--but with a young female hostage being killed in the process. Eventually the brothers are caught and brought back to town and hung. However, since the loot was never recovered, suspicion falls upon their three wives, "Bridget" (Lissa Negrin), "Claire" (Judith Burnett) and "Maxine" (Suzanne Andrews). Naturally, the townsmen want their money back, but the problem is that these three women don't know where it is. So, realizing their dire predicament, the women ride off into the wilderness with several different groups all chasing them in order to get their hands on the money. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that, although the overall plot had promise, the manner in which it was carried out was rather poor-to say the least. The female characters weren't likeable and having the ghosts of the three brothers pop up every now and then completely ruined the film. In short, while I like a good Western as much as the next person, this isn't one that I would recommend and I have rated it accordingly.