"Heart's" About All They Had
Today's review: Wildfire: The Arabian Heart
I remember putting Wildfire: The Arabian Heart on my “To Watch” list several years ago, when I saw it as part of a DVD pack of animal movies but wasn’t interested in buying the whole collection. Instead, I wrote down the titles of the movies that had interesting summaries and planned to track them down individually. I finally found and watched Wildfire this year…and I’m left kind of boggled by it.
The story centers around Lindsey Owens (Willa Townsend), a teenager who’s forced to spend her summer vacation visiting her uncle Jack’s (Gary David Keast) ranch in Minnesota. Her mother is hoping to draw Jack out of his shell, since he’s been in a funk ever since he was injured in a shootout that also killed Lindsey’s father. When Lindsey, her two friends, and her little brother Nick (Tucker Garborg)-who stowed away in the trunk of the car-arrive at the ranch, Lindsey initially has some trouble adjusting to farm life, but finds some things she enjoys about it. Specifically, there’s an ex-show horse named Wildfire, and a cute farmhand named Logan (Alex Bartlett), who also works for snooty rich girl Abigail (Crystal Hipple). Inevitably, Lindsay winds up in competition with Abigail in more ways than one, Lindsay and Logan bond while Lindsay learns to ride Wildfire, and other obstacles are overcome. It’s all pretty standard stuff on paper, but seeing it in practice is something else entirely.
The movie is a mess on pretty much every level. As the summary suggests, the plot takes pretty much every trope you might see in horse movies and crams them all into one story. The problem is, doing that makes it difficult to actually flesh out the various ideas. The material surrounding the uncle is mostly covered in one scene, dropped for the majority of the movie, and then when we next see him, he appears to have pretty much gotten his life back on track offscreen. Other things come completely out of nowhere, like a scene that suggests that Nick has a female admirer, when we haven’t seen this girl for most of the movie. Then there are times where you get the predictable plot beats, but they’re done in a really truncated form. There’s an inevitable Big Misunderstanding scene where Lindsay gets mad at Logan after Abigail claims they used to date, and in most other movies, dealing with this conflict would be one of the key elements of the second or third act, probably interspersed and intertwined with a secondary conflict. Here, the whole conflict is wrapped up in three scenes that come one right after the other. In fact, most of it is all done in one scene, which is a grand total of five minutes long. There are times when this could be seen as efficient storytelling, but this is definitely not one of those times.
Then you have the theoretical main plot of the movie, which tries to include all the classic tropes and fails miserably. Abigail tricks Lindsey into participating in a charity horse race at an upcoming county fair, even though Lindsey has never ridden a horse before. First off, these are extremely low stakes; normally, horse races in movies are either done to earn money to pay for something or because the rider or the horse have something to prove. Secondly, Lindsey says she’ll do it, then immediately tells her friend that it doesn’t matter, because they’ll probably have left the farm before the fair. She says this directly in front of Abigail in a normal tone of voice, and you’d think this would be where Abigail uses some sort of dirty trick to ensure that Lindsey has to race. Instead, all she says is “Oh, and by the way, you’ll be racing me” and leaves. Keep in mind that we’ve only seen Abigail in one other scene prior to now, so there hasn’t been any time for a rivalry to develop between the two girls. Yet from that point on, Lindsey seems committed to riding in the race, and the whole “I won’t be here for the fair” argument never comes up again. So now we have low stakes and a lack of clear motivation. Third, we don’t actually see all that much of Lindsey training, and when she is on Wildfire, it’s always at a slow walk. The out of universe explanation is probably a combination of low budget and not having the ability or permission to film the horse running, but in-universe, it makes it difficult to believe that Lindsey is actually learning how to ride and race a horse, or that she’s forming a bond with Wildfire. And then on top of all that, the whole conflict is resolved anticlimactically in the most ludicrous way possible. I’d spoil it, but I think such stupidity should be discovered for yourself. Especially since it’s the high point of the movie for all the wrong reasons.
While I don’t think you could have ever gotten a good movie out of this script, it might have been more tolerable if there were good actors involved to sell the emotions if not the lines. That doesn’t happen here. All of the actors are either stiffly delivering exposition, or delivering more natural sounding lines, but ones that are kind of random and have no bearing on the story. Then there’s the just plain inexplicable, like a very long scene where Logan and Lindsey go to have dinner at a restaurant, and their waiter (Brandon Reese) is an overly talkative, perky guy who wants to tell them all about the one-act play he’s working on. It’s insufferable and cringeworthy, but most of all it makes no sense. One, the waiter never appears again, so he has no bearing on the plot. And two, this is set in Minnesota, not L.A.; what reason would he have for trying to talk up himself and his work, especially to two people who are obviously teenagers? It kind of suggests that the filmmakers were desperately trying to pad out their movie, and if that’s the case, I’m a little afraid to ask what (if anything) wound up on the cutting room floor.
Finally, there’s the matter of the technical aspects, which are just as inept as everything else. The camerawork and lighting all feel very amateurish. There are awkward scene jumps and lots of continuity errors. The music seems to consist of two or three songs all played by the same whiny indie band. There’s only one scene that’s in any way striking-a scene in a pitch-black barn with just a single large circle of light illuminating a saddle-and that’s brought down by a) being the scene that deals with the Big Misunderstanding, and b) being pointless. What purpose does shining a spotlight on a saddle serve, and why would you keep your barn in the dark in the middle of the day? Unless the horses were embarrassed to be part of this production and wanted to be shown as little as possible…
Now, here’s the part that really gets to me. The entire production feels extremely amateur, the sort of thing you might expect from a high school video production class that managed to get a halfway decent budget. And if that was actually the case, I’d be more inclined to be lenient towards it (not to mention I probably wouldn’t be reviewing it here). But as I said in my introductory paragraph, this thing has managed to appear in DVD collections alongside actual Hollywood movies. Even as I write this, Amazon is selling Wildfire in a double feature DVD set with a movie called Misty from 1961, which appears to have actually gotten a theatrical release. At the very least, 20th Century Fox was involved in its distribution. I’m just curious to know how something that really has the feel of a vanity project managed that stunt. It also, in a weird way, helps the movie loop around from “genuinely terrible” to “so bad it’s good”. I guess I end up amused by the sheer audacity of it all.
That being said, I’m not sure I can recommend this movie to bad movie buffs (everybody else absolutely should stay away). Sure, it has its particularly laughable moments, but it’s generally more boring or painful than funny. Perhaps this is one you should watch with other like-minded people; not only can you talk to your viewing companions to get you through the slow parts, you can take advantage of the phenomenon where people are more likely to laugh when they’re in a group. But if you don’t think even that would be enough, that’s completely understandable. I doubt even the MST3K guys would be able to do much with this.
I remember putting Wildfire: The Arabian Heart on my “To Watch” list several years ago, when I saw it as part of a DVD pack of animal movies but wasn’t interested in buying the whole collection. Instead, I wrote down the titles of the movies that had interesting summaries and planned to track them down individually. I finally found and watched Wildfire this year…and I’m left kind of boggled by it.
The story centers around Lindsey Owens (Willa Townsend), a teenager who’s forced to spend her summer vacation visiting her uncle Jack’s (Gary David Keast) ranch in Minnesota. Her mother is hoping to draw Jack out of his shell, since he’s been in a funk ever since he was injured in a shootout that also killed Lindsey’s father. When Lindsey, her two friends, and her little brother Nick (Tucker Garborg)-who stowed away in the trunk of the car-arrive at the ranch, Lindsey initially has some trouble adjusting to farm life, but finds some things she enjoys about it. Specifically, there’s an ex-show horse named Wildfire, and a cute farmhand named Logan (Alex Bartlett), who also works for snooty rich girl Abigail (Crystal Hipple). Inevitably, Lindsay winds up in competition with Abigail in more ways than one, Lindsay and Logan bond while Lindsay learns to ride Wildfire, and other obstacles are overcome. It’s all pretty standard stuff on paper, but seeing it in practice is something else entirely.
The movie is a mess on pretty much every level. As the summary suggests, the plot takes pretty much every trope you might see in horse movies and crams them all into one story. The problem is, doing that makes it difficult to actually flesh out the various ideas. The material surrounding the uncle is mostly covered in one scene, dropped for the majority of the movie, and then when we next see him, he appears to have pretty much gotten his life back on track offscreen. Other things come completely out of nowhere, like a scene that suggests that Nick has a female admirer, when we haven’t seen this girl for most of the movie. Then there are times where you get the predictable plot beats, but they’re done in a really truncated form. There’s an inevitable Big Misunderstanding scene where Lindsay gets mad at Logan after Abigail claims they used to date, and in most other movies, dealing with this conflict would be one of the key elements of the second or third act, probably interspersed and intertwined with a secondary conflict. Here, the whole conflict is wrapped up in three scenes that come one right after the other. In fact, most of it is all done in one scene, which is a grand total of five minutes long. There are times when this could be seen as efficient storytelling, but this is definitely not one of those times.
Then you have the theoretical main plot of the movie, which tries to include all the classic tropes and fails miserably. Abigail tricks Lindsey into participating in a charity horse race at an upcoming county fair, even though Lindsey has never ridden a horse before. First off, these are extremely low stakes; normally, horse races in movies are either done to earn money to pay for something or because the rider or the horse have something to prove. Secondly, Lindsey says she’ll do it, then immediately tells her friend that it doesn’t matter, because they’ll probably have left the farm before the fair. She says this directly in front of Abigail in a normal tone of voice, and you’d think this would be where Abigail uses some sort of dirty trick to ensure that Lindsey has to race. Instead, all she says is “Oh, and by the way, you’ll be racing me” and leaves. Keep in mind that we’ve only seen Abigail in one other scene prior to now, so there hasn’t been any time for a rivalry to develop between the two girls. Yet from that point on, Lindsey seems committed to riding in the race, and the whole “I won’t be here for the fair” argument never comes up again. So now we have low stakes and a lack of clear motivation. Third, we don’t actually see all that much of Lindsey training, and when she is on Wildfire, it’s always at a slow walk. The out of universe explanation is probably a combination of low budget and not having the ability or permission to film the horse running, but in-universe, it makes it difficult to believe that Lindsey is actually learning how to ride and race a horse, or that she’s forming a bond with Wildfire. And then on top of all that, the whole conflict is resolved anticlimactically in the most ludicrous way possible. I’d spoil it, but I think such stupidity should be discovered for yourself. Especially since it’s the high point of the movie for all the wrong reasons.
While I don’t think you could have ever gotten a good movie out of this script, it might have been more tolerable if there were good actors involved to sell the emotions if not the lines. That doesn’t happen here. All of the actors are either stiffly delivering exposition, or delivering more natural sounding lines, but ones that are kind of random and have no bearing on the story. Then there’s the just plain inexplicable, like a very long scene where Logan and Lindsey go to have dinner at a restaurant, and their waiter (Brandon Reese) is an overly talkative, perky guy who wants to tell them all about the one-act play he’s working on. It’s insufferable and cringeworthy, but most of all it makes no sense. One, the waiter never appears again, so he has no bearing on the plot. And two, this is set in Minnesota, not L.A.; what reason would he have for trying to talk up himself and his work, especially to two people who are obviously teenagers? It kind of suggests that the filmmakers were desperately trying to pad out their movie, and if that’s the case, I’m a little afraid to ask what (if anything) wound up on the cutting room floor.
Finally, there’s the matter of the technical aspects, which are just as inept as everything else. The camerawork and lighting all feel very amateurish. There are awkward scene jumps and lots of continuity errors. The music seems to consist of two or three songs all played by the same whiny indie band. There’s only one scene that’s in any way striking-a scene in a pitch-black barn with just a single large circle of light illuminating a saddle-and that’s brought down by a) being the scene that deals with the Big Misunderstanding, and b) being pointless. What purpose does shining a spotlight on a saddle serve, and why would you keep your barn in the dark in the middle of the day? Unless the horses were embarrassed to be part of this production and wanted to be shown as little as possible…
Now, here’s the part that really gets to me. The entire production feels extremely amateur, the sort of thing you might expect from a high school video production class that managed to get a halfway decent budget. And if that was actually the case, I’d be more inclined to be lenient towards it (not to mention I probably wouldn’t be reviewing it here). But as I said in my introductory paragraph, this thing has managed to appear in DVD collections alongside actual Hollywood movies. Even as I write this, Amazon is selling Wildfire in a double feature DVD set with a movie called Misty from 1961, which appears to have actually gotten a theatrical release. At the very least, 20th Century Fox was involved in its distribution. I’m just curious to know how something that really has the feel of a vanity project managed that stunt. It also, in a weird way, helps the movie loop around from “genuinely terrible” to “so bad it’s good”. I guess I end up amused by the sheer audacity of it all.
That being said, I’m not sure I can recommend this movie to bad movie buffs (everybody else absolutely should stay away). Sure, it has its particularly laughable moments, but it’s generally more boring or painful than funny. Perhaps this is one you should watch with other like-minded people; not only can you talk to your viewing companions to get you through the slow parts, you can take advantage of the phenomenon where people are more likely to laugh when they’re in a group. But if you don’t think even that would be enough, that’s completely understandable. I doubt even the MST3K guys would be able to do much with this.