If you ask me, anyone who makes a gory horror zombie western in the 21st century has their heart in the right place. The movie’s gotta be REALLY bad for me to hate it. Jack Black has to play the lead. Green Day has to do the opening song. It’s got to be rated PG-13. This is a movie with none of those problems. The star is Wesley Snipes, who made this while he was being indicted for tax evasion. None of that seems to effect Snipes’s acting, though—mostly because he’s barely required to act. He’s more an expressionless presence than anything else, a gunfighter who lets his six-shooters do his talking. It’s the Blade performance all over again, but with spurs and chaps. All Snipes has to do is brood while the tips of his dreadlocks sizzle in the sun and the wind blows against the brim of his hat just right. The story they’ve cooked up for him is pretty original, too.
Get a load of this: Snipes is a killer of the undead, BUT these are not flesh-eaters, nor are they vampires. They’re not mindless dimwits. They’re living, intelligent, speaking, rotting corpses who kill people so they can WEAR their flesh. Temporarily, at least, because that flesh rots, too. So they have to keep killing. Otherwise, they walk around looking like uncooked ground beef. And you can’t go into a saloon and order whiskey looking like that in 1850.
AND that’s not the only twist! Nope. Where do these undead people come from? It all goes back to a magic spell that Wesley’s mother cast years ago in order to save his life. One of the side effects of it is that anyone HE, personally, kills comes back to life. And Wesley’s the kind of guy who needs to occasionally kill a motherfucker. So, he makes the zombies happen, but he also takes responsibility for cleaning it up, too (the classic bullet to the brain or head removal does the trick). He’s a considerate guy beneath the stone face.
I’m not saying that it makes any sense, but I like it. I’ll take this over another Romero rip-off.
One thing that helps a lot is that while co-writer/director Andrew Goth (I hope that’s his real name) marinates this film in Cult Movie Cool, his influences seem to go beyond Quentin Tarantino. It’s a real problem in B-movies today. We’ve got these low-budget directors now whose ENTIRE film education seems to start with Reservoir Dogs and end with QT’s latest confection (see Nude Nuns With Big Guns, see Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman). Goth reaches a little deeper, though. His sweaty, dirt-caked and cruel widescreen vistas show some first-hand familiarity with spaghetti westerns and maybe even El Topo. He pays a little homage here and there, but brings plenty ugliness of his own to the table. Enough to sustain ninety minutes, at least.