(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Conservative movie review: Terror on the Prairie [1] ['Daily Kos Staff', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-01-19 You know, “conservative” movies in which all the cars belch smoke, people season their scrambled eggs with ammo casings, the cast mention how much they love Jesus, and there are none of those kinds of people to be seen—the kind of people conservatives don't like. Unfortunately, there aren't too many entries in this new genre. But conservatives are always going off on every last candy-coated bit of American culture someone dares expose them to. It feels only fair to return the favor … not by watching their movies, oh heavens no. Conservatives don't actually watch most of the movies or television shows or advertisements they go off on. Somebody at Fox News or a professional conservative off-goer tells them what new thing they should be mad about, and everybody goes along with it, no questions asked. Today's installment will be the Daily Wire-produced 2022 movie, Terror on the Prairie, starring the conservative Gina Carano—the MMA fighter turned actor who got herself canned from a recurring Star Wars role for a constant social media stream of pandemic denialism, conservative election hoaxes, and posts "denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities," to use the language Disney used in ejecting her from the franchise. She even compared American conservatives to Jews during the Holocaust: “Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors... even by children... Because history is edited, most people today don't realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?" This caused a lot of conservative outrage at the time, and Carano is currently attempting to resurrect her career with appearances in movies produced by (ahem) such notable cultural icons as the fascist-boosting Breitbart News and incessant whiner Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire. In the Breitbart-distributed flick about the supposed life of master criminal(?) Hunter Biden, she played a Secret Service agent; in this one, she plays, uh, someone who's having some terror. For this review, we're going to make our way through the publicly released trailer and base all our conclusions on whatever half-assed halfassery we can halfassedly deduce, based on a handful of scenes stripped of all context but which are probably, like, secretly made by groomers or whatever. So here we go. Presenting: Terror on the Prairie, 2022, produced by Whoever's Been Giving Ben Shapiro Money. Let's have a look. First off, we're going to have to be honest. Like pretty much everyone else, we didn’t even notice when this movie came out way back in June. But earlier this month, some uncouth wag was laughing on Twitter about how dismally the film did during its (cough) one-day theatrical release, and Carano got extremely ticked off about it, dragging the whole sorry episode back into movie nerd news for a brief moment. The historical record here is indeed pretty grim. The IMDB page for Terror on the Prairie, also released as 테러 온 더 프레리 if anyone's asking, puts the total box office gross at a skeletal $13,115, which means the film sold about a dozen tickets and eight, possibly nine, tubs of popcorn. IMDB estimates the movie's budget at about $75 million dollars, and I can tell you right now there's no way in hell $75 million was spent on this movie. That estimate is likely based on the talent involved, is what I would say if I recognized even one other name anywhere in the cast. So ... it ain't that. I don't know, maybe the sets were made out of cocaine. Filmed in Montana, the movie is about ... um ... terror, I guess? And it's on a prairie? See, there's the first major artistic flaw here. Is Terror on the Prairie a very good name for a movie, or a very bad name? What would come to mind, when you saw that title on a theater marquee? Well, it has Terror in the title, so it's probably going to be a horror movie. And it has Prairie in the title so you can guess it's going to be set on a prairie, as opposed to a peninsula or some sort of inlet. That's still more descriptive than The Phantom Menace was, so we can say that somebody here is better at naming things than George Lucas, but it's still maddeningly ambiguous. What's the terror? Why is it on the prairie? What general realm of terror are we talking about? Is it prairie dogs? Is this a thriller about prairie dogs? Because there's not a lot that comes to mind when it comes to things that provoke Terror on our Prairies. There's weather, and there's wildlife. Some say the real Terror on the Prairie is plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, which has decimated prairie dog colonies and is responsible for the near-extinction of their major predator, the black-footed ferret. Also, Terror and Prairie almost rhyme but don't quite, which is somewhat disconcerting, when you say it out loud. Not enough to inspire terror, mind you. It's just an uncomfortable title to say. A more pressing problem with the title, though, is that Terror on the Prairie is a phrase that far too readily brings up the only other prairie reference most Americans have ever heard of: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, turned into a smash television set in the 1970s. You can't compete with that. From the moment you first scan the words, Terror on the Prairie sounds like a sequel in which the Ingalls family scraps with a whole new level of folksy drama. "Pa, there's an unspeakable eldritch horror in the backfield again." "Darn it, I bet it's after the chickens. I'm going to go out with the gun and scare it off. You latch the door until I'm back." Little House on the Prairie owns the prairie and prairie-related cultural space. There's no room for anything else prairie related. There's the show, there are the prairie dogs, and that's it. If you want to set a new property down on that land and don't mean to reference either of them, you've got your work cut out for you. All right, that concludes our review of Little House on the Carrie, join us next time, when we'll—hang on, what's that? Crap, I forgot to hit play on the trailer. That was almost a gigantic blunder. Reviewing an important conservative movie without ever watching it is a reasonable proposition, given that there's no bloody way we're going to pay them money to watch it, but we'd look like heels if we didn't even bother to make it through the trailer. All right, hang on. ... ... Wait, that's it? That's just a by-the-numbers gunslinging Western, but with Gina Carano in the Clint Eastwood role! That was such a bog-standard spaghetti western it looks like it was dubbed over from the original Italian! The trailer even had an obviously faked punch with the meat-slap sound overlaid! My assumption was that Terror on the Prairie was going to be a thriller, not a western, because that's what I thought "terror" was promising me. This isn't terror, this is just a Red Dead Redemption side quest. All right, all right, we're going to get through this. In fairness, the John Wayne or Clint Eastwood western flick is already the most conservative of Hollywood genres, right off the bat. It doesn't take anything more to make it extra conservative. The whole premise is of good, simple folk who are on their own because gubbermint can't protect them, and when outlaws or ethnic people descend on their God-fearing town or patch of land the only salvation good folk can hope for is that a barely-emoting gun-toting stranger will come by and absolutely murder the hell out of whoever's causing trouble. This is the premise of every National Rifle Association magazine. It's shoot or be shot out there! You can't count on the law, it's a seven-day ride to your house! Shoot people! Shoot em quick! This whole movie is just the Kamen Riders gun meme! Fine, whatever, I suppose we have to pretend at least to be professional about this. Barely. Sigh. Well, the first thing I notice is that the script screams spaghetti western, but the footage screams low-budget after school special. I already mentioned the very obvious fake punch. Everything else is just shooting or preparing to shoot more, with a few shots of Gina Carano explaining to a kid that from here on in murder is good now, so sure, it's conservative and whatever. The sad truth of it, however, was that conservative-leaning reviews showed that Terror on the Prairie was simply too "woke" for its intended audience. Conservative Daily Wire audiences didn't want to see Gina Carano in the Clint Eastwood role, they wanted to see a Clint Eastwood in the Clint Eastwood role and for Gina Carano to keep quiet and wait for the menfolk to get things settled. Or, at the least, for Gina Carano to stop acting and start punching people. Some reviewer sentiments on IMDB: "Watching this movie made me realize the pattern that is forming with DailyWire movies. They all follow "strong, independent" female characters who either have to rescue the men who are incompetent, or defeat the men who are evil. If I want the feminist messaging, I can go to Hollywood, they have plenty of that. This is supposed to be DailyWire, a company that stands for traditional values and against the wokeness of Hollywood." "I love the Daily Wire but how the hell did this happen? Every DailyWire movie is about strong women and with this one, it is no different from a Disney movie that has an unlikeable female protagonist who we are supposed to like but they make her unlikeable and crazy." "One of the characters is a vicious murderer who quotes scriptures, as if that isn't an offensive trope against Christians, the very people who truly want to support The Daily Wire. It's as if The Daily Wire doesn't truly understand its audience at all." "It feels more like a really bad date than a western." "Even in the heavy clothing she was wearing, it was unconvincing a woman of that era living in the wild would be as heavily built as Gina. It makes no sense." "Movie is about 107 minutes and not one punch or kick are thrown by either Cowboy or Gina. [...] It's a waste of any amount of time but luckily I skipped ahead 15 seconds at a time just to see if any fighting would happen. I mean what's the point of casting these two if they aren't going to throw down?" "So far every Daily Wire movie I've seen has so many nonsensical actions by the main character it ruins the movie, and this one is no different." Okay, point taken on that last one, but "nonsensical actions by the main character that end up ruining things" is pretty much the essence of the conservative movement. You don't like it now? Buddy, we've been living it. The crowd consensus was irritation at horrible acting, even worse aim, bad lighting, continuity errors, too much blood and violence, and a script that made no sense in whole or in part. I'm going to step in on the actors' behalf and say that if everybody in a movie is acting badly, that's not necessarily an actor thing. That's a director thing, or a script thing, or a budget thing. If you can get a horse to "talk" using a smear of peanut butter, you can get passable performances out of most adult working actors by just doing take after take until the orbit of the planets align to produce a shot you can use. Or it could be a case of stunt casting, where producers are insistent on using particular actors for particular roles for their own gratification—or, say, to try to score weird political points against the most powerful entertainment conglomerate on the planet—that nobody bothers to ask if any of these actors can really pull off the roles you're giving them. But mostly it's the script thing, and the budget thing, and the editing thing, and for God's sake, if you're going to set a scene in a blizzard, either commit to it or don't go whining when viewers ask where the hell all that snow went in the very next scene. I don't know about this whole reviewing-conservative-movies beat, to be honest. Even watching the trailers is a pretty grim task, and it's impossible to get invested in the subject when you're imagining what a movie called Little House on the Carrie would look like and how it could be absolutely spectacular, when put up against the thing we're supposed to actually focus on. Also, if literally all of the movies are going to have Gina Carano in them, then, like, that's going to be a chore all its own. I swear I never even hear about most of these "canceled" entertainers until they get "canceled" and are constantly shoved in our faces like bad report cards. I get it, you're canceled, I'm just trying to get my coffee over here. Be canceled somewhere else for a minute or two. RELATED STORIES: Movie review: 'My Son Hunter' is a soft-porn conspiracy flick for weird conservative incels [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/19/2147957/-Conservative-movie-review-Terror-on-the-Prairie Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/