West of Hell

This was so baffling. You have MAJOR talent like Tony Todd and Lance Henriksen and you completely waste them and you choose to FILTER Lance Henriksen's voice? One of the most iconic voices in film? He's literally only in the last 20 minutes of the movie too, first appearance at 1:02:35, he lucked out by staying out of this as much as possible, though it was probably lack of budget or writing creativity to have him throughout.

The lead actress was so bad. Everyone was doing the most nasal-y modern voices and accents and the costumes were sloppy at best. There was no cohesive indication of what year it was supposed to be. The pathetic attempts to add "realism" via 1950's era racism will just make your skin crawl. Not to mention the humanization and attempts to make the slave owner and her confederate bodyguard cute and likeable. Don't waste your time.

This starts off well enough. There are some choppy edits, but the production, set predominantly on a train, looks good, with attention to period detail, and some fine performances.

Sadly despite all this, it soon becomes a confusing, rather dull mess. I'm sorry to say this, because there are some good moments, and things definitely liven up when Lance Henrikson arrives. The effects are decent, and it seems there is a message amidst everything that is going on, although I'm beggered if I know what it is. My score is 5 out of 10.

Having gained his freedom due to the Civil War, an angry black man named "Jericho Whitfield" (Tony Todd) is determined to avenge the cruel death of his young daughter by subsequently scalping and killing the daughter of his former master. To that effect, when he discovers that "Annie Hargraves" (June Laporte) has just booked passage on a train to Atlanta, he also boards it in order to carry out his evil scheme. Unfortunately for him, he soon discovers that she is being protected by an extremely skilled bodyguard named "Roland Bursey" (Michael Eklund) who has no intention of allowing him to harm her. Even worse than that, however, is the fact that there is a sinister presence aboard this train and it has its own plans for not just him--but everyone else on board this train as well. Now rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this film had an interesting plot but it seemed to get derailed somewhere down the line. Not only were some scenes a bit confusing but the ending could also have used significant improvement too. In any case, while I don't consider this to be a bad film necessarily, it clearly needed a bit more work in some areas and for that reason I have rated it accordingly.

'West of Hell' did actually intrigue me. It did have a great idea, it was interesting to see how western and horror would go together, and it had a capable cast on paper, Tony Todd, Lance Henriksen and Michael Eklund having given more than serviceable performances in the past (Todd in 'Candyman' is a notable example). So there was not any intent or prejudiced want to dislike it.

After seeing it, it is actually really quite sad that the potential that 'West of Hell' had was wasted by very lousy, and that's being kind, execution. How badly it executes a great idea is just shocking and one would not think that the cast showed themselves to be more than capable in other things judging from their performances here. Are there worse films? Oh yes, 'West of Hell' is not even quite one of the worst films seen recently, it is though one of the worst and most frustrating wastes of potential. Having seen a lot of those recently, part of me of debilitated by this.

Eklund is the least bad thing about 'West of Hell', he at least tries without being pantomimic and doesn't look like he was only doing it for financial reasons.

Cannot say the same for the rest of the cast, Todd tries too hard and the over-acting does become painfully desperate and Henriksen is merely phoning it in (he has come off reasonably well in stinkers before, and he has been in a lot, but not this time). The rest of the cast are not worth mentioning, mainly because most are completely forgettable but those that aren't quite so much are that for reasons that are not good.

In all fairness, everybody is saddled with one dimensional archetypes that have no depth or shade to them whatsoever, cliché-ridden and barely coherently structured script writing and barely existent direction to work from, but that they don't act quite plays as big part too.

Visually, 'West of Hell' looks cheap with far from authentic settings and photography and editing that looks very static and disorganised. It works neither as a horror or a western. The horror elements are too predictable and the scares and shocks go through the motions just as much as Henrilsen does, with no tension, suspense or dread in sight. One never doubts the outcomes, what could have been reasonably creative is so ordinarily handled. It fails as a western because there are no thrills, interesting characters, excitement and there is too much emphasis on the horror element.

Summing, awful. 1/10 Bethany Cox

Interesting premise, but let down but high school level editing. It's so bad it's distracting. Some decent performances