South of Heaven, West of Hell

Starring:Luke Askew, Natalie Canerday, Matt Clark, Bud Cort, Joe Ely, Otto Felix, Bridget Fonda, Peter Fonda, Bo Hopkins, Michael Jeter, Matt Malloy, Terry McIlvain, Ritchie Montgomery, Paul Reubens, Billy Bob Thornton, Joe Unger, Vince Vaughn, Noble Willingham, Scott Wilson
Studio: Lions Gate
Product Type: DVD

Editorial Review:
Amazon.com
If you've never heard of South of Heaven, West of Hell, there's an excellent reason. If you have heard of it, it's probably because you stumbled upon the information that it marks the directorial debut of singer-actor Dwight Yoakam, who managed to sweet-talk a spectacularly quirky cast into abetting the enterprise: current girlfriend Bridget Fonda and her papa Peter; indie-world luminaries Vince Vaughn and Billy Bob Thornton (for whom Yoakam made a memorably loathsome villain in Sling Blade); character-acting stalwarts Bo Hopkins, Matt Clark, Luke Askew, and Scott Wilson; and such icons of the florid fringe as Bud Cort, Paul Reubens, and Michael Jeter. All should file for workman's comp and alienation of audience affection because they got themselves mired in one of the dumbest, most inept, most tediously self-indulgent messes in the history of showbiz hubris.

Amazon.com

If you've never heard of South of Heaven, West of Hell, there's an excellent reason. If you have heard of it, it's probably because you stumbled upon the information that it marks the directorial debut of singer-actor Dwight Yoakam, who managed to sweet-talk a spectacularly quirky cast into abetting the enterprise: current girlfriend Bridget Fonda and her papa Peter; indie-world luminaries Vince Vaughn and Billy Bob Thornton (for whom Yoakam made a memorably loathsome villain in Sling Blade); character-acting stalwarts Bo Hopkins, Matt Clark, Luke Askew, and Scott Wilson; and such icons of the florid fringe as Bud Cort, Paul Reubens, and Michael Jeter. All should file for workman's comp and alienation of audience affection because they got themselves mired in one of the dumbest, most inept, most tediously self-indulgent messes in the history of showbiz hubris.

Customer Reviews:

This movie went South, straight to Hell right from the beginning........2007-06-27

The dialogue is artificial. The acting is ridiculous. The photography is beautiful. That's the only good thing about it.
Don't even rent this one.

This one's pretty bad.......2007-01-06

This has to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Bad acting, bad, dialogue, nonsensical plot; one can't begin to describe all of the things that are wrong with this movie. Paradoxically, the cinematography is pretty good, so in a way you end up thinking that you're not watching a movie as bad as it really is. I guess that's why I endured about 45 minutes of it before finally giving up on it--something I very rarely do, even with the worst of them.

This movie sucks beyond belief.......2006-05-18

This is by far the worst movie I have ever seen. I would rather push a nail through my finger then ever watch this movie again. Everyone please trust me when I say that you should not waste one penny on this film or take one second out of your lives to watch a moment of this film.

Semi-intriguing but lame........2006-05-01

There are some very intriguing scenes here, mostly underdone, to include fresh takes on the western perspective, nice landscape shots and setting with potentially great characters, but the dialogue was diseased with an excess of modern day cussing/linguistics and as such was absurdly out of historical context - noted lack of enthusiastic acting/acting skills /enough to make this a lame sort of semi-intriguing unintentional spoof.

Mostly Unwatchable.......2006-01-26

Rebecca: This is so bad it's almost good.

Enid: This is so bad it's gone past good and back to bad again.

We rented this DVD shortly after Noble Willingham's death, thinking that we would watch it as a tribute. There were two problems with this idea. Noble's character gets killed off very early and the DVD was defective. It was missing the scene that explains what's going on. I have to assume that the handful of positive comments were from people who watched an obscure director's cut that had this explanatory scene.

But seriously, the writers of the screenplay were totally inexperienced (at screenplays) and the director was totally inexperienced (at writing screenplays and at directing screenplays), so the roadkill that resulted should be no surprise. Let this comment serve as a warning to potential viewers, just because a lot of actors who have performed in excellent films are part of this ensemble does not make it worth viewing. There are some decent performances but the whole is a lot less than the sum of its parts, which in fact adds up to less than zero.

Bizarre (in an uninteresting way), sadistic (in a vaguely boring way), foul-mouthed (in a grammar school way), half-baked (in a bad raw egg way), and disorganized (in a director should burn in hell way). It is mostly unwatchable, as even the isolated parts that could be entertaining are burdened with Yoakam and Bertheaud's comically false dialogue. Although this at least gives the production its only hint of unity and should dispel the temptation to blame the result on excessive improv.

Imagine inserting clips of "El Topo" in no logical order into "Tombstone" and you can approximate the product Yoakam inflicts on us unsuspecting Noble Willingham fans. He gave himself the lead role as Valentine Casey, a U.S. Marshall in 1907 Arizona. Casey's old gang and surrogate family keeps popping up and a lot of people are killed and Casey goes after them and eventually everything gets sorted out, although even after just watching the whole thing I couldn't have told you how. Don't understand why the gang keeps turning up or why the Marshall left them to become a lawman or why Pee Wee has put on so much weight. Don't really care either, I think we will just stick to "The Corndog Man" and the real "El Topo".

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

DVD:

DVD

Liebestraum (REGION 1) (NTSC)

DVD: C.I.A.: Code Name Alexa

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