Buried in Barstow (Walking Tall, Untitled Entertainment,The Cartel, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My first Lifetime movie yesterday was one that had actually premiered the previous night, Buried in Barstow, featuring former Law and Order prosecutor Angie Harmon as Hazel King, former hit person for the Las Vegas Mafia until she was rescued from a life of heroin addiction and turning tricks to support it by a gangster who, when we meet him in the current part of the story (there are a lot of flashbacks in the script by Thompson Evans – the sole credited writer on the film itself; though imdb.com lists one “Tom Evans” as a co-writer I suspect that’s a mistake and the two are the same person), is white-haired and jas just been sprung from prison after serving nearly 30 years when one of the charges against him was thrown out on a technicality. In the story’s present Hazel is the hard-bitten owner of a diner in Barstow which services both locals and tourists on their way to Las Vegas. The place is called “Bridges Barbecue” for some reason Evans never bothers to explain (and they don’t seem to have any barbecue food on their menu, either; in fact there’s a curious running gag ini which Hazel’s “regulars” ask her for out-of-the-ordinary foods both she and they know full well aren’t on her bill of fare), and Hazel is a single mom raising her daughter Joy (Lauren Richards) and obsessing over the truly wretched choice Joy has made in a boyfriend.

His name is Travis (Timothy Granaderos), he’s the son of a family of powerful crooks, and his sole interests are drugs and getting his hands on the money Hazel has saved up for Joy to go to college on, so he can blow it all on drugs. For some reason Joy has decided that this piece of dung is the great love of her life, and when Travis finally hits Joy and Joy says it was an “accident” (the depressingly familiar refrain of every woman victim of domestic violence in history), Hazel decides to hse her hit-person skills to get rid of Travis once and for all. Hazel also encounters a homeless man named Elliot (Kreistoffer Polaha) who’s ordered and eaten a meal at her diner he has no way of paying for. Hazel takes pity on him and offers him a job as a dishwasher and a place to stay at the diner. Elliot explains that he was a heart surgeon who lost everything – both his career and his fiancée – when he was involved n a drunk-driving accident and she was killed. What she doesn’t realize – and neither do we until about two-thirds of the way through the film – is that Elliot is a spy, sent by her old employer back in Vegas to keep an eye on her and report back to him regularly. Elliot got involved with him when he went to prison for four years for vehicular manslaughter and the gangster put out the word that Elliot was not to be messed with, sexually or otherwise, and so Elliot thougnt he owed him one.

This doesn’t stop Hazel and Elliot from engaging in a quite hot sexual encounter over the counter of her diner, though after that one time she draws back from any repeats. Midway through the film her mystery employer summons her back to Las Vegas to kill Perry Gamble (Ben Cain), a Black man who’s doing money-laundering for the gang. Since Hazel and Perry had an affair back in the day – and Perry wants to resume it even though, as we learn later, he’s already married to a Black woman – Hazel goes to his hotel room with poison with which she intends to spike his drink. Only she goes back on it and tosses the poisoned drink away, and just in case we were wondering why casting director Jason L. Wood cast a racially ambiguous actress like Lauren Richards as Hazel’s daughter Joy, it turns out that Perry is Joy’s biological father. That gets hinted at quite a lot before it’s nailed down when at a later meeting, Hazel gives Perry a photo of Joy inscribed on the back, “Ours.” Later Hazel shows up in Vegas again for a final shot at killing Perry – who thinks she’s there for an assignation and orders lobster via room service, only his wife shows up (this is the first realization we get that he has one), he tells her he ordered the lobster dinner for her, and we wonder how Hazel is going to kill Perry when she’ll have to off his wife as well.

Instead she’s there to kill the gangster as well as his bodyguard, even though the gangster pleads for his life by telling Hazel that he is her biological father. Hazel then returns to her diner in Barstow, only to be ambushed by a gang of human traffickers her cook, Javier (George Paez), may or may not be part of – Thompson Evans gives us conflicting signals as to whether he’s part of the trafficking gang or he’s tracking them because the gang abducted his sister in Mexico. Elliot uses his skills as a heart surgeon to keep Hazel alive after she’s shot by multiple gunmen for the trafficking gang – up until then she’s been shown as a superwoman but even she couldn’t go up against several men with guns at once – and this is obviously supposed to redeem him both for his long-ago crime of vehicular manslaughter and his spying on Hazel as part of her gangster employer’s plot. The movie ends with a jarring tltie, “To be continued,: a bit of obeisance to the Great God SERIAL that would be annoying enough on a weekly TV series but is really infuriating at the end of what was presented as a stand-alone movie. At the end we have no idea just when we’ll be able to see the continuation. Also, given how hyper-violent this movie is, it’s curious that Lifetime pulled the film The Bad Seed Returns from their schedule after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas but let this one air as scheduled.

I quite liked Buried in Barstow – at least until that horrible non-ending – mainly because of Angie Harmon, who despite turning 50 when this film was made is in excellent physical shape (though I’m presuming she was doubled in some of the action scenes) and she’s also quite sexy. It’s obvious this was a personal project for her since she’s credited as an executive producer, and I’m guessing she developed the project and probably had a hand in writing it as well. Harmon plays Hazel King with a tough, no-nonsense attitude, whether she’s chewing out the regulars at her diner and making fun of them for expecting (or pretending to expect) her menu to change or dealing with gangsters, hit people and Joy’s scumbag boyfriend Travis. It’s an engaging film and I’ll be looking forward to seeing the continuation – whenever Lifetime gets around to airing it!