Just as the postmodern teen horror movie has largely supplanted the unironic slasher movie, the revisionist Western has long threatened to overtake the conventional Western as cinema's dominant take on the mythology. While the darkness and ambiguity of revisionist Westerns can serve as a bracing antidote to the regressive matinee heroics of the average oater, the subgenre has created a set of clichés nearly as tired and silly as those it replaced. For proof, look no further than South Of Heaven, West Of Hell, an astonishingly inept exercise in cowpoke perversity set in a turn-of-the-century Tucson populated entirely by drunks, whores, rapists, murderers, and histrionic character actors. The screenwriting and directorial debut of Dwight Yoakam, who also stars, South Of Heaven, West of Hell casts the balding Clint Howard lookalike as a decent marshal harboring dark secrets. Formerly an adopted member of a feared gang, Yoakam is revisited by his past when one-time partner-in-crime Vince Vaughn and his band of outlaws ride into town, leaving a path of destruction in their wake. Some time later, Vaughn and his gang return to bedevil Yoakam, but not before countless molasses-paced digressions involving hot-air-balloon enthusiast Peter Fonda, nerdy government official Bud Cort, and Billy Bob Thornton, who pops up just long enough to model a grotesque blond wig. Also along for the ride are Noble Willingham, Bridget Fonda, Paul Reubens, and Michael Jeter, although it's difficult to understand exactly what—other than professional masochism—could have attracted them to Yoakam and Stan Bertheaud's simultaneously incomprehensible and simplistic script. A vanity project in the worst possible sense, South Of Heaven, West Of Hell feels like it was cobbled together at random from the most self-indulgent odds and ends of other revisionist Westerns. While enough blame cannot be heaped upon Yoakam, part of the film's incoherence may be attributable to post-production tampering. Though the video of Heaven clocks in at an exceedingly loose 104 minutes, the invaluable Internet Movie Database lists its run time at 139. It's possible that a longer version would be more coherent, if not necessarily better. Considering the twaddle that did make it onto video, it's probably not worth the time or energy to find out.