Wobbly, ineffective and obvious messaging comes through Terror on the Prairie, a feature that, regardless of a viewer’s political alignment, comes across as self-obsessed and sloppy. Very plain and obvious assertations give the classic western rundowns an agonisingly poor angle. As though those hogtied individuals are the real heroes. Gina Carano stars and her continued complaints of cancel culture and the heroic, religiously charged post-Civil War circle jerk that features throughout this Michael Polish-directed film is uninteresting with or without the controversy that film Twitter pressed onto it. At its core, it is a sloppy western that would benefit much more from some detailed run-through. Terror on the Prairie is no different to that of the revisionist western.
Bloodied bandits, bad guys on the back of ragged horses and benefitting more from the brutal and unflinching scope of its kills and torture than anything else, Terror on the Prairie sets its mood well. Josiah Nelson’s writing is the real heart to this feature, though. His influences of time spent studying the craft alongside Randall Wallace are shown well. Gruesome, gutsy punches are thrown without much thought or aim, the initial shock is enough to hook a viewer even if the point is not present or even ill-defined. Makes sense considering The Daily Wire produced feature. Terror on the Prairie is remarkable for its surface-level presentation. If the viewer is to look at this in the same way as glancing at a painting, then it is not so bad.
But Terror on the Prairie makes the mistake of having moving parts and its attempts at convincing audiences of a spectacle or grand story is undone by its non-commitment to the western structures. Hoping to present family life as the saving grace of God’s green, American earth, the heroism that is inherently tied to the stay-at-home Carrano is spilt into obvious conclusions of protecting your home under that gorgeous right to bear arms. Westerns did that too, just not with the intention of making it their primary focus. Terror on the Prairie has some keen shootouts and some intense moments that isolate themselves well with a lack of a soundtrack. Polish develops these scenes of a siege on the homestead in a Straw Dogs style of interplay, but drops the ball and comes to the conclusions set out before him that are not earned through dialogue but exposed by ulterior motives.
When audiences are deprived of so many westerns, it is hard to see how Terror on the Prairie manages to drop itself into a muddy, elongated mess. Bloody leads and gory showings attempt to push themselves for the respect of the enemy. It lacks the ballsy displays of those classic John Wayne spectacles Terror on the Prairie hopes to rely on while also ineffectively trying to showboat the Clint Eastwood action of the genre which has died a thousand deaths. Having Carrano appear at the heart of that doing very little beyond screeching and shooting under the thumb of the nuclear family and the husband at the heart of it, despite being the lead, is the obvious problem. Not because of the message, there is nothing inherently wrong with the fundamentals of the American cowboy roots, but because of The Daily Wire trying to deploy revisionism in dull spiels and intense turns.
