This week, the most interesting DVD to appear on release lists is:

“Badlands”

With native Oklahoma filmmaker Terrence Malick possibly set to shoot a new movie in Bartlesville, it’s a good time to revisit his first feature in a newly repackaged DVD of “Badlands,” due out Tuesday.

The 1973 film, which many critics rank among Malick’s best, is a deeply evocative dramatization of the Charles Starkweather-Caril Ann Fugate killing spree of the 1950’s, in which a teenage girl and her twenty-something boyfriend slaughtered her entire family and several others in the Dakota badlands.

In Malick’s stylized, fictionalized version, shiftless garbage collector Kit Carruthers strikes up a relationship with baton-twirling teen Holly Sargis (Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in brilliant performances that were prelude to distinguished careers). When her father objects to their romance, Kit guns down the old man and the rest of Holly’s family and the two sociopathic young lovers go on the run.

As Kit and Holly live in the woods in idyllic flight and trek across the badlands in an effort to reach Canada, the body count rises. But Malick makes this more than a murder-spree tale as he manages to get inside the heads of this bizarre pair and produce one of the most stunningly stylish and psychologically compelling crime sagas in film history.

Casting calls for an unspecified new film project were conducted earlier this fall in Bartlesville, and unconfirmed reports had it that former city resident Terrence Malick, who is notoriously press shy, would be directing a “romantic drama” in the area starring Ben Affleck, Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams. But officials of the Oklahoma Film Office have declined to comment specifically.

- Dennis King

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