GallowWalkers

Bite-sized Review

Gallowwalkers is an ambitious attempt at a supernatural western/horror mashup starring Wesley Snipes whose acting talent unfortunately can’t help us overlook the underdeveloped story. The film introduces several story ideas early on and raises many questions, but either does not address them or does so too late in the film. I’m rarely in favor of making a movie longer but here a little switching around the story boards and a few extra minutes of fleshing out the ideas could have made a tremendous difference. And by tremendous difference I mean the difference between terrible and beer-and-pizza watchable.

Brief Plot Overview: The story focuses on Snipes’ character, Aman, who is haunted by his past. Separately, a gang of monsters cuts a destructive path through small towns as they try to track down Amman. I use the term monster in a literal sense; these guys (and gal) take the skins of their victims in order to wear as replacements for their own rotting exteriors. Throughout the film additional details regarding the characters’ motivations is revealed. We learn that Aman was cursed as a child when his mother (a nun… a naughty, naughty nun…) turned away from god and pleaded with dark spirits to save Aman from some sickness. And this bargain was made possible by the cozy coincidence of this corner of the west converging on an entrance to Hell. After his mother died Aman found refuge with a woman and her daughter on a ranch (or something like that, maybe just a slaughterhouse?) where he grew into a man and had a loving relationship with the daughter. That is, until the day when a gang strolled by the ranch while Aman was away; they also had eyes for the daughter and forced themselves on her, leading to her death. Later on, Aman finds the gang locked up in a local jail for some other crime. He proceeds to massacre the hell out of them in their jail cells and assumes his business is finished. But it turns out Aman’s curse is that anyone he kills will come back from the dead. The leader of the gang, Kansa, is crushed to see that everyone in his gang came back from the dead except for his son so he determines to track down Aman and figure out the resurrection secret. In true western fashion, the two meet for a final showdown with only one (guess who?) emerging victorious.

Thoughts: If the story above sounded like it could be decent, that’s because it could have been. The order of events I laid out above is nowhere near how things are revealed in the movie. The bit about the curse and the motivations of the bad guys would have been better served much earlier in the film and not late-stage flashback reveals. There’s also a supporting cast of characters that warrants almost no mention here due to their having nothing to do with advancing the story. Those include the character Angel (Tanit Phoenix) a woman of loose morals whose only role here is background cleavage, Kisscut (Simona Brhlikova) the vampire-looking bad guy background cleavage, and Skullbucket (don’t you love these names?) another bad guy goon played by “Diamond” Dallas Page. The makeup effects are pretty good overall and there’s a great amount of blood flowing but that isn’t quite enough to make this an entertaining venture. This film is said to have been plagued by production issues, not the least of which was Snipes’ own legal troubles, leading to a very delayed release. It would be interesting to see how this might have turned out under better filming conditions but we’re left with a tangled mess instead.

Well, I’m convinced there is a good western/horror mashup out there. Is Dead in Tombstone “the one”? Read my review and find out!

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