Any movie that earnestly harks back to classic westerns and tries to strike a blow for human liberty at the same time can’t be all bad. Sadly, a single star is all I can justify for this direct-to-DVD oater. “Prairie Fever” brings us onetime TV Hercules Kevin Sorbo as Preston Biggs, a former small town sheriff turned town drunk. When several mail order brides start to exhibit signs of pretend-insanity – incessantly quoting Bible verses, miming playing the piano, and generally exhibiting signs of really bad acting – the woman are assumed to have fallen to a sort of female hysteria apparently brought on by living on a pretend-Western hamlet, i.e., “prairie fever.” The cure, such as it is, is to have Biggs take the women, and a tidy sum of money, to the nearest train station hundreds of miles away. Along the way, our not-so-anti-hero encounters the feisty and beautiful Abigail (Dominique Swain), who is on the run from an occasionally villainous gambler (Lance Henrickson). While this set-up initially appears lamely misogynist, rest assured that it is actually lamely feminist. These women are suffering from old West PTSD caused by frontier cruelty, but in true old school TV style, they will all fully recover within less than 81 minutes.
Written and directed by a triumvirate of TV veterans, “Prairie Fever” effectively evokes the bad television of yore. For all the attempts at characterization, it’s often possible to recite the dialogue in advance of the characters. Moreover, action sequences are badly muffed, though the three stars are, for the most part, able to keep their heads above water. The less said about the supporting cast, however, the better.
In fact, I pretty much knew this one was going to exceed expectations when I attended traffic school yesterday when a rather obnoxious (and really large) guy who kept babbling throughout the day, asked me out of no place during the class if “Kung Fu Panda” was out and seemed delighted when I tersely muttered “yes.” Also, an “insider” attributes part of the success to the popularity of pandas. This brings up some questions, such as, on the hierarchy of species, what are the panda’s Q rating…and is panda the new penguin? Only time, and unimaginative movie executives, will tell.
