It’s October. Time to talk horror. This year I’m reviewing a different horror movie each day of the month.
I had no idea what to expect from Ghost Town. I went in blind because I’m a sucker for a desert setting in horror. Highway to Hell, Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat, Tremors, and Full Moon’s Oblivion were all oddly compelling western mashups. Speaking of Full Moon, Ghost Town was released by Charles Band’s Empire Pictures, the precursor to Full Moon Productions. It’s well known this was a superficial name change in lieu of bankruptcy; Ghost Town was among the last batch of films that would carry the Empire name, along with Robot Jox and Cannibal Women of the Avocado Jungle of Death.
A sheriff (Franc Luz) tracks a missing woman (Catherine Hickland) to a literal ghost town. Early on there’s a great bit of fantasy when a gnarly-lookin’ corpse bolts upright out of the ground and begs the sheriff to save his town. At first you’ll be thankful the movie doesn’t exhibit many of the horror clichés that drag down most movies like this, then you quickly realize it’s only because it trades in horror clichés for western ones. The stunts, by the way, are only as exciting as what you’d see at a western theme park.
The sheriff soon finds out the damsel in distress (who you might recognize from small appearances on CHiPs, Airwolf, and three episodes of Knight Rider) was kidnapped by an outlaw ghost named Devlin, who conveniently wears black to remind us that A) this is a western and B) he’s the villain. Devlin is alternatively kind of cool and lame as a villain. He and his gang crucified the town’s original sheriff a hundred years ago, but not before the sheriff shot a bullet through one of Devlin’s cheek and out the other.
Whereas most of the ghosts look like normal people, Devlin looks like a zombie. Why? I don’t know. I don’t think the filmmakers know, either. And none of the ghosts seem to know why they haunt the town or how to lift the curse… that is until the movie closes in on its climax, at which point a bartender tells the hero exactly what he has to do to dispatch the villain, which is oddly specific for a character who, up until then, didn’t even seem to know she was dead.
Other offenses include a serious take on the old Bugs Bunny routine where the wascaly wabbit would plug Elmer Fudd’s gun with his finger to make it backfire. Then there’s the blind character, whose actor wears cloudy contact lenses in the first half of the movie, then resorts to just trying (and failing) to keep his irises tucked behind his eyelids. Yikes.
I’m being harder on this movie than it deserves. It’s decent enough fun and I’ve raved about movies here which weren’t as well made. But there’s much wasted potential here as desert horror is almost always funner than this. It’s just a mediocre western with a handful of horror elements tossed in as an afterthought.
Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.
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