Customer Reviews

Out of the Wilderness

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Too violent, too hokey, too predictable, too shallow.

The violence is the part of that that's a surprise: The characters suffer crippling injuries, near deaths, and ruinous destructions of property time after time after time. On the plus side, the director knows how to make explosions big.

This is absolutely the best David Carradine
movie (he's only in about one third of it,
though...)in the last five years. All the
major players here, even Black Feather the
Raven, samrtest bird in the forrest, are
very good. Great role by bible quoting
judge played to perfection by Peter Jason
(he did a great episode of Hawai'i Five-0
years ago; I beleive 1971 entitled "To Kill
or Be Killed"), only to be upstaged by Car-
radine later! Kelley Miles as Prosecuting
Attorney for the Government and Robert Caso
are outstanding here as well. The video
cover art is a bit misleading. The girl on
the cover of this video, though blonde is
about six while adolescent actress Amy
Wiegert is about 13 in the film. Great
animal and scenery shots of both Alaska
and Portland where the film was made. A
fine effort on a modest budget! Bravo!

My son (age 10) says he can summarize this movie in three words: "Boom! Boom! Boom!"

He is correct.

Ostensibly, the film is about a raven named Blackfeather. Blackfeather's antics provoke humans into all kinds of stupid behaviors, but he really does not deserve to be executed by the state--and this movie depicts the hearing in which his fate (and story) are judged.

However, we think this movie was secretly and brilliantly made by someone who just wanted to blow up a lot of stuff, who maybe had a religious sidekick for a production assistant.

Supply shack: boom!
R.V.: boom!
bird coop (perhaps the most insane explosion scene ever filmed): boom!

We really appreciated how combustible everything is. Just the slightest bit of fire and gas creates an explosion equivalent to twenty pounds of dynamite. For those who would prefer violence minus pyrotechnics, there is also lots of insane carnage on the side: trees crushing little girls, two years olds nearly run down, foxes and wolves ready to maul anything innocent, random gun shots at various animals, a wonderful psychotic reunion scene with an axe-wielding father grimacing and scowling bizarrely at his wheel-chair bound daughter.

Many viewers will find Professor Byrd's performance of bird-calls in the courtroom ("caacaaa," gloobydoobie gloobiedoobie"), echoed by the judge and Blackfeather, to be a high point, but we know that the R.V. explosion is the one to watch. Here we see that the pyromaniac pyro-technician could not hold back til the R.V. actually tumbled over the ridge. As soon as it left the road, this highly-combustible vehicle (a warning to all looking for peaceful recreational trips!) randomly explodes into a glorious fireball for no reason whatsoever.

There is a very small scene in the middle in which a film crew borrows the captured bird to cynically show it off (planning to wring its neck after) and the whole film shoot goes awry with Blackfeather trying to peck everyone to bloody bits: what else could this be but a clever nod of the movie to itself and its own craziness?

We are considering watching this movie again next New Year's eve--perhaps indeed every New Year's eve for the rest of our lives--and especially because we can't decide if the money-crazed, vicious father's performance is the funniest or most disturbing thing we have ever seen. My favorite moment is when, after missing shooting a caribou with a high-powered telescopic pistol, he angrily kicks snow all over his snowmobile. My son's favorite father-moment was when he went from taking pot-shots at the bird to having his anger "drain away from firing his shotgun into the air many times" and suddenly becoming remorseful. By the next scene he is crazed again. We are OF COURSE NOT the least bit cynical and COMPLETELY accept that this man's last-second conversion into a loving dad (instead of a drinking, swearing, smoking, child-labor trafficking, animal abusing, gun-obsessed, mountain-man-jock-una-bomber) had NOTHING to do with the fact that Blackfeather brought this starving, wife-child-abusing, failed-close-range-caribou-shooting maniac a mound of gold nuggets. We love him.

We think, however, the ending could be slightly improved to go along with the theme of the rest of the movie. ("Boom!" "boom!" "boom!") Throughout the movie, Officer Holt gives an academy-award-worthy performance of a deadly bored wild-game officer. He enters the scene delighting in having accidentally slaughtered Blackfeather's mother with his helicopter blades. In his tour-de-force scene titled 'the bird-coop calamity', Officer Holt tries to take revenge because he deems Blackfeather "made a fool of him" but only succeeds in killing all the other birds in the flock. Blackfeather escapes because in a touching flashback we learn that by now he has learned that humankind's only desire is to shoot and blow things up. Officer Holt so nails this scene scene as a dangerous maniac that we believe the real ending should cut to show him with a detonator chasing Blackfeather across the city exploding everything in sight alongside Professor Byrd making bird calls. Complete Armegedon. (This would also enhance the scary use of the Bible in Court.)

See this movie.

A young raven becomes a family pet after it saves the life of a lost little girl. Later on, the family repays the favor by saving the extraordinary black bird from their neighbors who have deemed it a nuisance and demand its immediate destruction