Constantly teetering on the brink of absurdity, “Prairie Love” is saved by a quirky sensibility, perceptive scripting and a painterly style. Savvy distributors will perceive the film’s modest theatrical potential and could maximize returns with DVD and VOD. As a high plains drifter travels across the wintry North Dakota prairie, it’s clear that first-time feature filmmaker Dusty Bias intends to leverage a checklist of genre tropes in this depiction of a contemporary anti-hero. The Vagrant (Jeremy Clark) drives a beat-up, barely roadworthy old station wagon towing a trailer along nearly deserted rural byroads. Bundled against the freezing weather in an ankle-length fur coat and fur-lined hat, his features are barely visible.

Chancing upon an abandoned pickup truck, he finds the owner laying in the middle of the road unconscious. The Vagrant loads the nearly frozen man into the back of the wagon and drives on, listening to dating self-help cassettes on the car stereo and rifling through the guy’s suitcase. Once his rider defrosts and begins conversing, the Vagrant learns that NoDak (Garth Blomberg) is on his way to pick up his penpal girlfriend (Holly Lynn Ellis), who’s about to be released from prison, even though the two have never met. As NoDak becomes increasingly nervous about the Vagrant’s intentions, he flees the car and ends up frozen and unconscious again. This time the Vagrant doesn’t try to revive him, dumping NoDak back at his truck and assuming his identity as he heads on to meet the girl at the prison.

Unaware that the Vagrant is impersonating NoDak, the girl embarks with him on a high plains odyssey, visiting abandoned farmsteads as they grow gradually more intimate. But minor lapses in the Vagrant’s familiarity with NoDak and the girl’s prison correspondence arouse her suspicions until a fateful development puts their relationship on the line. Referencing Westerns, crime dramas and fateful romances, Bias favors fixed shots of widescreen landscapes that are reminiscent of large-format paintings, alternating with close-ups on the features of the rather unlovely actors. The performances are as restrained as the rather nebulous storyline, leaving the audience to fill in details of plot and character.
Cryptic and darkly comical, “Prairie Love” makes for a prickly package that won’t be embraced by every viewer, but those who open their arms to its allure will find the film a gratifying departure from overly predictable indie dramas. The title refers to a (perhaps apocryphal) practice among single homesteaders migrating West to couple up when stranded on the open plains.

A would-be experimental horror film that earns more giggles than gasps, “The Oregonian” starts off as an exercise in lead-footed David Lynch mimicry and heads downhill quickly. If it ever surfaces on video, the only viewers who will be impressed are those who’ve seen so little of the avant garde that its non-sequitur atrocities look like innovations. An unnamed woman (Lindsay Pulsipher) wrecks her station wagon on a back road and wanders, dazed, in search of help. Instead she finds grinning, speechless idiots and (on the rare occasion somebody speaks) spouters of cryptic lines like “these trees, they have a code, but it’s not for our understandin.”’ Sure, mister. And the owls are not what they seem.
At the film’s Egyptian Theater screening, walkouts began a quarter-hour in and continued at a pace of nearly two per minute for 50 minutes, up until a man in a tutu raped a corpse with a gaping, foot-long hole in her back. Describing that scene and what preceded it — vanishing folk singers, a man-sized, masturbating faux-Muppet, and the world’s most repulsive daiquiris — makes “The Oregonian” sound a lot more interesting than it is. At one point, the title character wanders through an abandoned, ‘70s-decorated house shouting “What the f—-!? ... What is this s—-?!” Most viewers will feel she’s speaking for them. (RTRS)