The Collaborative International Dictionary
Bad lands \Bad" lands"\ Barren regions, especially in the western United States, where horizontal strata (Tertiary deposits) have been often eroded into fantastic forms, and much intersected by ca[~n]ons, and where lack of wood, water, and forage increases the difficulty of traversing the country, whence the name, first given by the Canadian French, Mauvaises Terres (bad lands).
Wikipedia
Bad Lands is a 1939 Western film. Bad Lands is a remake of John Ford's The Lost Patrol, with the locale changed from the Mesopotamian to the Arizona desert starring Victor McLaglen.
Usage examples of "bad lands".
Recent discoveries in the fossil beds of the Bad Lands of Nebraska prove that the horse originated in America.
They were out of the bad lands at last, back into the foothills above the river valley.
John Metcalfe, in the collection published as The Smoking Leg, attains now and then a rare pitch of potency, the tale entitled The Bad Lands, containing graduations of horror that strongly savour of genius.
Craig thought, and had a sudden nostalgic twinge as he remembered that rutted, tortuous track through the bad lands below the Chobe river, that wide green tributary of the great Zambezi.
The whole people turned out as spectators of the struggle, and the battlefield was a plateau between the two camps, in the midst of picturesque Bad Lands.
There was a professor from Ann Arbor come out with his wife to see the Bad Lands, and they asked if we could rig them up a team, and we said we guessed we could, and Foley's boy and I did.