This is not a western, as it may seem on first look. This is like an acid trip into a roasting Hell on Earth. There's a lot of familiar scenes such as the lawman out to find the biggest, baddest hombre, his dainty wife at home, he's in over his head, his deputies don't think he's worthy of being the sheriff, all that's very familiar, but on the other side you have our villains in the film, The Burns Brothers gang. They are very unlike another set of brothers we watched in the last round, the Bloom Brothers. These brothers seem to have no other bond to each other (except Charlie to the young one Mikey) except they all love carnage and being outlaws. Strang thing about these outlaws is we never see them rob anyone, just maim, kill and burn until there is only a blackened smudge left on the ground.
Violence is not shied away from in this film and as you watch, you get the true sense that this is what times like this may have been like, no hollywood dramatic moments, but pure survival, in most cases, Arthur Burns is in a sense, one of the more realistic bad guys there are, a rampaging nightmare that we never know the motivations of. For that facet of the film, it's all a big muggy as to what exactly the moral of this tale is, but I still enjoyed watching it. Could have done without the strange voiceovers and whispering, but the music was a refreshing bit of notes for this type of film. The end wasn't all together too satisfying either because we aren't left with any type of feeling that the future holds much for any of the characters that survived, which in hindsight we don't get much of a feeling any of them were headed for a very good future in the first place.
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