Bubba Moon Face

For a rich, heaping slice of Sam Shepard pie, aim your fork at the excellent grit feast Bubba Moon Face, written and directed in 2011 by the secret auteur of the Midwest, Blake Eckard. Horton Bucks (Tyler Messner) has returned home to backwoods in Missouri for his mother’s funeral in a dead car pulled by chains. He is flat broke and doesn’t have any idea how he will pay for his car repairs. He waits outside the garage for 90 minutes until his brother Stanton (Joe Hammerstone) picks him up in the dark. They drive out to the woods where Stanton built his own house, full of frozen animals he shot and stuffed.

Horton begs for a place to stay, which further burdens Stanton, who has prepared nothing for the burial. They sort through a thrift store for a dress for their mother’s corpse, then head out to the run-down watering hole where Leslie (Misty Ballew) works. Leslie and Horton go way back to a tragic event when he was 19 and she was 12, and he hasn’t seen her in forever. Leslie now does sex work on the side while working the bar, all while sporting a black eye from her man (Brent Jennings). The night’s drinking leads to blurry misdeeds, and the next day, Horton wakes up on the couch to a pounding on the door. Sabetha (Sylvia Geiger) is looking for Stanton, as she says the infant she is toting is his daughter.

“…Horton Bucks… has returned home to Backwoods, Missouri, for his mother’s funeral in a dead car pulled by chains.”

Stanton can’t deal with any of this, leaving Horton to scoop up the baby girl to look after for the time being. Then their drunken degenerate daddy, Gus (Joe Hanrahan), shows up with a pretty young thing on his arm named Tammy (Jennifer George). With Gus on the scene, things go from bad to unimaginably worse.

Nothing makes me happier than seeing buried treasure like this unearthed, in this case, the double DVD rerelease with another Eckard feature, Coyotes Kill For Fun. This is what indie is all about: untamed, unpolished, and unapologetic. You simply cannot get films like this anywhere near the gears of industry; they have to be summoned out of nothing in the middle of the night in the woods like a black mass.