Badlands

1974, USA, Terrence Malick, 94 min.

With Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, and Warren Oates

Introduced by interdisciplinary artist and environmentalist Sarah Cameron Sunde

“You had to take the consequences though, and not whine about it later.”

Badlands is Terrence Malick’s impressionistic take on the notorious 1950s killing spree by Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. The serial-killer narrative acts as a springboard for an oblique teenage romance, lovingly and idiosyncratically enacted by Martin Sheen (Apocalypse Now) and Sissy Spacek (Carrie).

“In Terrence Malick’s cool, sometimes brilliant, always ferociously American film, Badlands, which marks Malick’s debut as a director, Kit and Holly take an all-American joyride across the upper Middle West, at the end of which more than half a dozen people have been shot to death by Kit, usually at point-blank range.” —Vincent Canby, The New York Times