#given the horrific u.s. politics surrounding “the southern border”

[cantsayidont]

THE BAD BATCH (2016): Not to be confused with the recent dreadful cartoon spinoff of THE CLONE WARS, Ana Lily Amirpour's followup to A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT is kind of a druggy homage to the low-budget Italian MAD MAX ripoffs of the early '80s, starring Suki Waterhouse as Arlen, a young woman among an apparently growing number of people sentenced to permanent exile from the United States to die or eke out a miserable existence in the deserts of the Southwest. She's immediately captured by cannibals, who cut off and eat her right arm and right leg, but she contrives an escape in a truly disgusting fashion and makes her way to a Burning Man-like community called Comfort, which is basically a cult run by a man called The Dream (Keanu Reeves), busily accumulating a collection of pregnant sister-wives. Arlen then ends up entangled with a Cuban exile from Miami (Jason Momoa), another cannibal whose daughter (Jayda Fink) Arlen has more or less kidnapped after killing his baby mama (Yolanda Ross).

As you can probably guess, this is not a movie for the weak of stomach, although it doesn't play like a horror movie, with a spacey, doped-out detachment that makes it feel like a vivid if often unpleasant dream, and it's populated by high-profile ("Hey, wait, isn't that …") guest stars, many of them unrecognizable. It's strikingly photographed and sometimes inventive, with an unusual use of pop songs (I will certainly never look at the Ace of Base song "All That She Wants" in the same way again), but after a while — if you haven't noped out after the extremely gruesome first half-hour — you may begin to wonder if there's a point.

Like GIRL, there isn't a lot of what you'd call plot, but the earlier film's sense of desperation and romantic longing has dissipated into a kind of post-apocalyptic ennui; there's nowhere really for Arlen to go, and while at one point she tells The Dream she wishes she had a time machine so she could go back and fix things, we never really learn where she's been or what's happened either to her or to the world. Also, even given the general level of violence and ickiness, the Black characters are treated with what seems like a disproportionate level of brutality, which sits ill. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Nope. VERDICT: An oddball curiosity, but stay well away if you're squeamish at all.