The Locusts

"You know what happens to bulls in a feed lot, don't you?" asks a character in John Patrick Kelley's debut feature The Locusts. For those who don't, the film obliges by demonstrating in excruciating detail. But that's not the worst fate suffered by the bovine species in this ludicrously overwrought pile of pseudo-gothic piffle as they and the title insects are enlisted into Kelley's sophomoric symbology. When it comes to bull, Kelley knows how to sling it.

It's the early 1960s (requisite period pop-music hits grinding on the soundtrack), and drifter Clay Hewitt (Vince Vaughn) hitches a ride into a sleepy Kansas town. Ignoring the foreshadowing of a back-focus shot of a big spider in a web, he takes on a job at the cattle ranch of Delilah Ashford Potts (Kate Capshaw). A kind of Tennessee Williams version of Barbara Stanwyck in The Big Valley, Mrs. Potts boozes and smokes and beds the best of her help while emasculating her catatonic wisp of a son Flyboy (Jeremy Davies, in a cross between Anthony Perkins and Munch's The Scream) by keeping him in the kitchen with an apron on. Clay resists Mrs. Potts blandishments, preferring not so much pretty Kitty (Ashley Judd) as Flyboy, whom he coaxes out of his shell. Clay's challenge to Mrs. Potts's matriarchy erupts into a freewheeling farce of unearthed family secrets, misogyny, and rampant castration anxiety. The Locusts is a plague best avoided. At the Janus.

-- Peter Keough