Ghost Town (1988)

               It’s impossible to write about this movie without first explaining the nature of Empire Pictures and its founder Charles Band. For anyone familiar with the direct-to-video market of the 80’s and 90’s he was as inescapable as Roger Corman with somehow even more unnecessary sequels. I shouldn’t be using the past tense, he’s still out there shoveling out movies under the Full Moon Entertainment banner. Empire Pictures been defunct long enough to have earned itself a decent amount of nostalgia. It released some pictures that even normal people have heard of like ‘Troll’ and ‘Robot Jox.’ Some of them were even good. The company was founded in 1983 and, in a very similar fashion to The Cannon Group, tried to do too much too quickly and ran itself into the ground by 1988. The first version of Full Moon Entertainment sprang up and collapsed between 1995 and 2002 but it looks like he’s finally figured out a way to make his movie factory sustainable since the second version is still up and running to this day.

I mean, they didn't lie.

              ‘Ghost Town’is very much an example of the assembly-line process of movie making. If you survive in the industry for long enough you start to feel the rules of production in your bones. At that point filmmaking can turn into something very mechanical and predictable. You turn out a script with these restrictions, you secure these locations for this number of days, you hire a director who can bring things in on time and within budget, and finally you round up some actors who can hit their marks. The order of these steps can be random. The reason Band isn’t usually mentioned in the same breath as Roger Corman, who has a staggering amount of respect within the industry, is that he almost never lets himself get distracted by artistry. Corman went out of his way to seek out and develop new talent, allowing directors like Joe Dante and Peter Bogdanovich to take bold swings with style and content as long as they kept within their budgets. With Empire Pictures they did turn out some genuine genre classics in ‘Re-Animator’ and ‘From Beyond,’ but that was more a case where Stuart Gordon’s path happened to cross Band’s than anything intentional. Looking over the Full Moon catalogue I don’t see something like ‘Gingerdead Man vs. Evil Bong’ still getting deluxe reissues a couple decades after release.

              There really isn’t much to be said about either the crew or the cast. The director was Richard McCarthy, who according to IMDB had previously only done some filmed sequences for a Benny Hill movie in 1977. I’m sure this is a case where the internet has failed us as obscure Australian 70’s and 80’s tv shows might not be the best documented anymore. Mac Ahlberg is listed as an uncredited co-director, and since he was the long-term cinematographer for Empire Pictures as a whole I’m going to guess he stepped in to exert control over a troubled production. The story credit goes to David Schmoeller who wrote and directed a number of features for Empire including the original ‘Puppet Master.’ The script was by Duke Sandefur who wrote for some tv shows in the 90’s and is also one of three credited writers for 2012’s ‘Atlas Shrugged II: the Strike,’ so I’m sure he’s real fun at parties.

              The cast is mostly made up of career actors, the kind of people with the number of credited roles in the high double digits. Our hero, Langley, is played by Franc Luz, who spent the next decade knocking around tv shows. The other character who’s present for the entire movie, I’d be lying if I called her a main character, is Kate as played by Catherine Hickland. If you’re a fan of soaps you’re likely familiar with her work as the character Tess Wilder in 469 episodes across the ‘Loving’ / ‘The City’ televisual universe and Lindsay Rappaport for 145 episodes in ‘One Life to Live.’ The villain, Devlin, is played by Jimmie F. Skaggs in his first film role. He doesn’t really impress, so I can’t say I’m surprised he spent the rest of his career doing mostly bit parts. There’s also a minor character called The Dealer whose role in the movie is so unclear and underdeveloped I’m not even mad about it, just sincerely confused, and he’s played by Bruce Glover. He played an assassin in ‘Diamonds are Forever’ and Grady Coker in the ‘Walking Tall’ films. I’m not going to criticize anyone’s acting too much because what can you do with material like this?

              Here is the entire plot of the movie: cowboy ghosts kidnap a woman, a local deputy goes looking for her and finds a town filled with ghosts who can’t go to the afterlife until the bad guy dies, the deputy kills the bad guy and he and the woman escape the town, the end. I left out remarkably little in that summary. The only even semi-interesting scenes I skipped were a sex scene and … and I think that’s it. It wasn’t even a very good sex scene. They can’t even be original with a structure this simple, the end just directly rips off huge chunks of ‘A Fistful of Dollars.’

              The premise is at least established relatively quickly: we open on a red convertible tearing down a dirt road. Camera cuts to the driver who’s a young woman smiling brightly. She grabs a wedding veil from the passenger seat and tosses it into the air with a whoop. Runaway bride, got it. She hears invisible horses surround her car. She pulls over to figure it out, a fog bank appears containing horses and she’s grabbed and spirited away. Takes less than four minutes, let’s go.

              Cut to our assigned hero Langley. He wanders around a junkyard wearing headphones, posing and taking potshots at garbage. He’s a good shot but that’s still all he’s doing. Then a radio goes off and reveals that he’s a cop, so there go any good feelings towards him. His chief informs him about Kate running away from the wedding and that her rich and powerful father is forcing them to look for her. There’s a report of a helicopter spotting the car by the side of the road (no footage, this production couldn’t afford a real helicopter) so he heads over to check it out. He spots some horse tracks and follows them along until a masked man on a black horse shoots at him. While he’s shooting back his car spontaneously catches on fire. He scrambles out and the horseman is gone. He has a hat, a shotgun, and nothing else as he’s stranded in the desert. He wanders for a little bit before stumbling across a wooden memorial mostly covered by dirt. He scrapes it off and it says that a sheriff was murdered there in 1870. For some reason this makes Langley move the memorial and start digging around in the ground, which of course triggers the zombie to sit up and start jabbering at him. His lines, in their entirety: “You’re the one. You’ll rid my town of evil. Don’t fail or risk a fate worse than death. Go now.” Then he lays back down. Whole speech took eight seconds.

              That is the last interesting thing that happens for a full fifteen minutes. Langely wanders towards the town, he wanders into the town, through the town, through a bar, through a house, he wanders a lot. He talks to a couple of people who disappear the second he looks away and it’s still going to be another twenty minutes before he figures out there are ghosts. Eventually he meets a blacksmith and a young woman staying with him and something like a plot starts to happen. While he’s talking to them, asking if they have a phone and stupid questions like that, a couple of guys who are clearly outlaw cowboys come over and threaten him with their guns. They use words at each other for a little bit then Langley shoots them dead and has his forehead grazed by a bullet.

There have been higher-budgeted movies.

              He wakes up in bed with the young woman, who has a name but who cares, she’s going to be dead soon. They have sex because of course they do. While that’s happening we cut back to the real world where Langley’s chief is concerned. He never shows up again so don’t worry about it. We then finally cut over to Kate a full 35 minutes into the movie. She’s set up in an upstairs room at the hotel slash saloon. The moment she steps outside she’s suddenly surrounded by outlaw cowboy ghosts. She retreats back to her room and soon we hear thumping steps coming towards her. It’s Devlin, who’s finally revealed to the audience to be a guy with a bullet hole through each cheek and slightly green skin. He’s not an interesting villain, he’s just an asshole. He’s also one of those old-west bad guys who swans around talking faux-fancy, so we’re going to mostly ignore him for the rest of the movie. It’s confirmed later that he’s been sexually assaulting Kate, not going to dwell on that.

              While he’s asleep post-banging Langley dream-witnesses the day that apparently cursed the town. It’s the Old West and the sheriff is running around town asking the citizens to help him confront Devlin. Since they all refuse he calls them cowards and decides to take the gang down all by himself. He doesn’t and they kill him, but he does put a shot through one side of Devlin’s face and out of the other so there’s that. Langley sees the woman he just boned pick up the sheriff’s gun and carry it off, which will be important shortly. He wakes up and asks the woman how she’s still around, and here is all the explanation the movie gives for what’s going on: “Smith and me, ones like us are trapped somehow. The others, the voices you hear in the night, are souls lost between heaven and hell, I think.” And that is IT. There are going to be some very inconsistent rules established later on how things do and don’t work but nothing as to why. There is a throwaway line later about how Devlin rode back into town and killed everyone, which I guess explains how the town is full of ghosts, but since it doesn’t say that he and his men also died why are they here? Also why are they trapped there until Devlin is destroyed, he’s not established to be into voodoo or black magic or anything. They really did just slap a ‘somehow’ on the end of a description of what’s going on and call it an explanation.

              It’s at this point that Langley gets the woman and the blacksmith who’ve been helping him killed. He asks about the rider who shot up his car, but she doesn’t want to say his name because he’ll magically hear it due to ghosts. He promises to protect her, so she says it and it reverberates all over a montage of the town. Somewhere in there she also gives him the sheriff’s gun from back in 1870. Later Devlin will kill both of these people while Langley isn’t there specifically because she said his name, so one more reason to dislike this idiot.

              Langley wanders down the street and the two outlaw cowboy ghosts he killed are there, good as new. Because they’re ghosts. He runs into the saloon where the helpful owner, a woman named Grace, explains that Devlin kidnapped Kate because she looks like a singer from their time. This doesn’t matter to the plot, by the way. Langley also gives Grace his gun so she can dramatically give it back to him a few scenes later. Then Devlin stomps downstairs and our hero and our villain have their first conversation at 52 minutes into the movie. He confronts Devlin, who challenges him to a showdown outside. They have a little shooting contest which Langley wins but which is pointless because ghosts. He and Devlin trade shots until a near-miss makes Langley drop his gun. He gets captured and Devlin’s about to kill him when The Dealer causes a distraction. As he’s fleeing Langley runs into the bartender again who helpfully tells him that modern guns can’t hurt ghosts, only ones from the time when they were alive, which is lucky since she’s right there to give him that old gun back. Which, aside, was very stupid for her to take in the first place. She knows he’s a lawman from outside the town, she’s going to hope he kills Devlin, why did she take the gun away from him at all? Nothing he’s done since would have impressed her into changing her mind about him. Langley manages to kill one of the pursuing outlaw cowboys, which freaks the rest of them right out. They start complaining to Devlin how the guy is DEAD dead.

              So this is when the movie rips off ‘A Fistful of Dollars.’ He crawls through the town under the buildings, then sneaks into the hotel and back out with Kate in tow. They grab a bunch of stuff he’s going to turn into bullets then hide in the nearby church. As they’re busy mixing gunpowder and making shell casings without molds somehow Devlin is going around and killing everyone who helped them.

              This is as good a time as any to dig into this movie’s view of how these ghosts work. They seem to inhabit some kind of pocket dimension that’s separated by something like a permeable reality membrane. People and ghosts can go back and force pretty much at will, it seems. One character even mentions that others have wandered into town before. While outside their realm the ghosts are invisible, while inside they seem to be flesh and blood, both of which is very lucky for the effects department. There are inhabitants of the town who go about their day-to-day lives while fully aware they’re ghosts, which makes me wonder why they still bother pitching up to the saloon to have poker games. Maybe they’re that bored, who knows. There is also a crowd of people standing around the edge of town, mostly obscured by haze. I think these are who the woman is referring to when she mentions those “caught between heaven and hell.” Also, remember above when I said Devlin was going around killing everyone who had helped Langley? Yeah, apparently ghosts can get killed in this movie, and I’m guessing they lose their personalities and get absorbed in that crowd of people? I guess? I suppose I’m fine with Langley being able to kind of exorcise the dead because he’s alive and was empowered by the previous sheriff and has an olde-timey gun, that’s enough for me, but the ghosts can kill each other? Because they’ve been in there for over a hundred years and Devlin doesn’t seem the most stable guy to me, he would have killed every single other ghost in that town inside a week. It’d be one thing if they were doing the looping thing, like they’re forced to repeat the town’s last day over and over, but they’re just hanging out, still running forges and saloons, apparently.

Can't say I'm a fan.

              Eventually Devlin figures out they’re probably hiding in the only other building that they haven’t searched yet and marches over with his guys. He announces himself to the church and tells Langley to come out, which causes him and Kate to sneak out the back. The next several sequences involve these two sneaking around the town while the bad guys are busy yelling at the church. Eventually the bad guys go inside and the explosives Langley left behind go off. I can’t tell if this manages to ‘kill’ kill the ghosts, the movie’s sprinting toward the end at this point and doesn’t bother with details. Devlin eventually gives up on the church and walks back towards town yelling for the lawman to give himself up, which hasn’t exactly been a great strategy so far. Kate gets to contribute something by tossing over an explosive, which takes out everyone but Devlin himself. He says some stupid things and Langley kills him by throwing an old sheriff badge into his forehead. It’s stupid. Langley and Kate walk through the crowd of townspeople at the edge of town and out into the desert. The sun starts to rise and all of the buildings disappear, the end.

              I need to stress how much nothing they managed to include in this film. Every scene should have been cut down to about half its length. Walking shots happen not to establish geography but to kill time. There are pauses between lines of dialogue not to build tension but to kill time. Characters will monologue not to create a dramatic moment or underline a thematic point but to kill time. Less happened in this entire movie than in the first third of ‘The Changeling.’ And not a lot happened in that movie! But I have to admit that it does look professionally made. The thing about Empire Pictures is that there was a floor of quality below which they didn’t fall. They had extras, they had location filming, they kept boom mics from the top of the shots and crew reflections out of mirrors. This is not a good or a smart movie but it is also not infuriating. In terms of craft ‘Lady in White’ is miles ahead, but I would choose to rewatch this movie over that one every time. It is just barely good enough to be a real movie, which I believe has been the entire corporate strategy of Charles Band.