Gallowwalkers

A zombie western shot in the Namibian desert sounds like a hoot, but GALLOWWALKERS is something of a mixed bag when it comes to filmed entertainment. It may be due to the troubled waters behind the scenes, which saw Snipes arrested for tax evasion and jailed for three years. Not good news when your star is sent to prison halfway through filming.

Still, it could have been a lot worse and GALLOWWALKERS does have stuff going for it. The story is pretty unique, featuring a cursed gunslinger (Snipes on strong, stylish form) whose victims always come back from the dead to be killed a second time around. The zombie stuff is handled fairly well, but the production values are weak with a distinctive B-movie look and feel to the whole thing.

A solid turn from Snipes helps to anchor things, and there's enough blood 'n' guts for the horror crowd to stay tuned in. But in the end this has to go down as a failure, purely because it's completely forgettable as a film with little rewatchability. A failure that tries hard, but still a failure nonetheless.

I decided to give this flick a shot based on the "decent" looking trailer and Wesley Snipes. This isn't the first time I've been fooled by a decent trailer, and I'm sure it isn't the last. That being said, this is my attempt at not letting anyone else get fooled by the decent trailer and the fact that Wesley Snipes is in it.

The story is absolute garbage. The cast is terrible. Dialogue is corny. The only saving graces for this movie are corsets and cleavage. If Wesley Snipes wasn't in this movie, I'd assume this was a F-grade (if that even exists) movie. Because Snipes is in it, I kindly give it an E-grade.

In a nutshell, I have no idea how this movie even got greenlit and I pray that nobody else wastes their time on this steaming pile of crap.

"Gallowwalkers" is among the worst movies that I have seen.

The storyline is a complete mess and I was unable to write the plot summary since I did not understand anything about this horror movie in the Old West.

The characters are not developed and we just see monsters and shootings without explanation associated to very bad performances.

It is funny to say, but this flick is overrated in IMDb, with the User Rating of 3.8.

It seems that Wesley Snipes has joined the team of Steven Seagal and other decadent actors accepting to work in this trash.

My vote is one (awful).

Title (Brazil): "Caçador de Almas" ("Souls Hunter")

Synopsis: In an arid wasteland created by too many lacklustre Hollywood mash-ups, critics think they've put the final stake in Wesley Snipe's career, but surprisingly it returns from the dead and feasts on spaghetti using Leone and Joderowsky's silver spoon.

Verdict: Ambitious, imaginative and visually impressive film that warrants obvious comparison (Leone), but seems more indebted to El Topo's art direction and non-linear, Gothic, psychedelic spaghetti westerns like Matalo! and Django Kill, if You Live, Shoot! Personally, I enjoy this sort of thing, but I can see why many do not; it is brazenly uncommercial and unconventional (a brave choice at this point in Snipe's career decline), and that's part of its appeal.

Several reviews have complained about the incoherent (or completely lacking) plot, but being a fan of spaghetti westerns, I've become accustomed to going along with the film's visuals - like following a good jazz number. I found the plot to be simplistic and classic western: man seeks revenge, flashbacks ensue, he gets revenge and - here's the twist - the people he kills come back from the grave ... so man seeks young apprentice to help him kill them once again.

To some degree, I agree with the negative reviews. I did find it a frustrating and uneven watch. I couldn't help but think that a much better film was possible. Several scenes are cut in a manner that implies not enough footage was shot (made all the more infuriating by the fact that most of the film is extremely well photographed, making excellent use of the Namibian locations). There's also some reliance on rather cheap looking CGI - although the removal of heads and spinal columns was quite impressive. The voice-over narration - always problematic - sounds like a bad advert for men's cologne. The narration is made even worse by two narrators, possibly a necessity stemming from Snipe's three-year prison sentence in 2010 for failure to file income tax returns (Gallowwalkers was shot just before Snipes went to prison).

The music, so important to any spaghetti western, is also disappointing, veering from more appropriate classical to some sort of alt-rock. Lastly, the climatic journey into the "spirit world" looks like it was shot in an underground parking lot. After that, an incongruous animated credit sequence rolls by, suggesting Gallowwalkers wants to position itself with the postmodern, ironic works of Rodriguez and Tarantino. Clearly, it should have remained true to its spaghetti western DNA.

I rarely rate a movie as low as I am doing Gallowwalkers. Any worse and it would have been funny bad. Unfortunately it manages to stop right before it gets there, but goes far enough for almost all movies to be better. I am not kidding. The story is a confused mess, the actors play bad, the action scenes make no sense.

You know when you have dreams when it is really hot and everything seems to move in slow motion and doesn't respect any narrative and it is all a blur that you fight to make sense of and can't? That's how bad this movie is.

And you might dismiss my comment and think that I have something against Snipes. No, I do not. I know he is not a good actor, but I've watched a lot of his movies. I respect him as an action star. He is like a black VanDamme. But this film... I am really astounded that it could have turned this bad. Speechless, almost.