A Town Has Turned to Dust

Two hundred years in the future, in a radioactive scrap metal mining town on the almost completely abandoned, draught ridden, dying planet Earth, a young man of a "second class race" is lynched for the supposed beating and attempted rape of the wife of the town boss before he can be taken off planet to the new home of humanity for trial. The act exhumes an old guilt that begins the final disintegration of a town already half buried in the ugly dust of racism and prejudice.

This was a nice surprise as Sci-Fi Channel movies are hit and miss. Steven Lang does an excellent job as the useless, haunted town drunk and Sheriff Harvey Denton. The "Cain and Abel-ish" brother like relationship between his character and Ron Perlman's town boss and mob ring leader Jerry Paul is well done by both actors. You can see it there dying, being killed by time, guilt, booze and power. The abusive love-hate relationship between Jerry Paul and his wife Maya (Barbara Jane Reams) is very realistic, scary in its unhealthy depths of possession and desire to care and be cared for.

Definitely worth a buy.

Hardly original, taking elements from certain movies including Mad Max. The story in A Town Has Turned To Dust is about two classes of people trying to make a living on an earth which is almost uninhabitable and some reporter goes to earth to do a story about these people mining scrap metal. This movie is chucked full of morality and has the people looking within themselves and seeing what they've become. Some fairly big named actors could ruin their career by starring in an average made for TV movie like this but Ron Perlman seems to get away with it. Perlman is the only good thing about this movie so unless you are a total Perlman fan and need to see all his films i recommend you leave this alone and save 90 minutes of your life. Shame because with more money and a better story this film could have been good. 5/10

I write this as a warning to those who may be pondering whether or not to rent this "movie": don't.

I love Twilight Zone, and am a huge fan of Rod Serling. So I was rather excited when I saw on the video case of this movie at the video store that it had been written by Serling.

I turned it off after only 20 minutes. I find it extremely hard to believe that Serling could have written anything *close* to this movie. If he did, the Sci-Fi channel mutilated and amputated beyond recognition.

The scenes are disjointed, the effects are cheezy, and the acting pitiful. Pick up your fav Twilight Zone episode tape instead.

This movie was not well paced. There was no suspense and none of the plot twists were unique. I stopped the movie in the middle to take a nap so I could finish watching later with the hopes that something interesting would happen. Unfortunately nothing interesting happened. The mean town boss and the sheriff share a secret. An Indian gets lynched because of an affair with the bosses wife. Time would be better spent watching Mad Max or High Noon.

A town turned to dust is an average scifi movie, with a weak story. I did not like the story, because the same story has been the story for tons of other movies. But to my opinion, the art direction is good. So after all i did not feel watching this movie was a waste of time, altough some parts are boring and the acting is not always at a descent level. My advice is: watch it, if you like nice art direction, otherwise skip it.