Ghost Town (1988)

directed by Richard Governor

USA

85 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I found this in an online discussion about the best movies involving haunted/abandoned towns, and the person who mentioned this title was so emphatic about recommending it that I looked it up and decided to watch it. If nothing else, I knew anything with Charles Band attached to it would usually be good for a laugh. But there's something weirdly compelling about this movie that's hard to put my finger on. It might be one of those things you just have to be in the right mood for.

If you look online, you'll find a lot of cheesy posters for this movie featuring skeletons in chaps and other things like that, and you might assume you know what to expect if you go off of those posters, but I guarantee it's different than you're thinking. There's a vibe to this, I don't know how to explain it. The concept is so strong that it outshines the trappings of a relatively cheap late-80s horror film made by a studio that was winding down after consistently churning out so many horror films, you'd be hard-pressed not to have seen at least one or two. It begins when a woman driving down a desert road alone is accosted by a cloud of dust and the disembodied sounds of stampeding horses, then dragged off by invisible hands and her car left burnt out in the middle of the road. Our heroic deputy is called upon to investigate, but pretty soon he ends up having his car catch fire and he unwittingly follows the missing woman into a bizarre pocket of reality where the residents of a town have been trapped by an evil entity for the past hundred years. Why exactly everyone's car catching fire signaled their entry into this pocket reality was never really explained, but in my opinion it adds to the general weirdness and didn't bother me much.

A single ghostly cowboy or spirit sharpshooter does not itself an interesting horror movie make, but the concept of an entire town trapped in time, cursed to exist just under the skin of reality, always there but never fully visible unless you end up in the wrong place at the wrong time - that's what fascinated me about Ghost Town. The landscape under the landscape, the world beyond sight. The deputy doesn't enter the haunted town all at once; as soon as he's forced to abandon his car, he gradually begins a journey through a scorched and desolate landscape that becomes more and more occupied by the echoes of something not quite dead but not quite living. The people and materials around him solidify as he tries in vain to walk his way out, until - after being accosted by the desperate, pitiful living corpse of the town's sheriff, begging him to end the evil once and for all - he's stuck fast with no way to go home. The townsfolk are now as solid around him as any living person would be, but in short order he finds out that they're nothing more than revenants.

There isn't anything special about the aesthetic here: it's no more than a bunch of white people in cheap generic faux-Western costumes putting on bad accents and pretending not to know what a zipper is. But like I said, it's the story that keeps this movie interesting, not the way it's told. There's just this kind of Westworld-esque uncanniness to it that spoke volumes even when the visuals didn't put in much work.

It's also got a villain who's genuinely terrifying despite being just sort of a cliche evil guy. Like most everything here, the exact mechanics of why the town is stuck in time are never explained, only that it's the fault of this drifter named Devlin who cursed the whole town to remain trapped in a liminal state between life and death for as long as he himself lived - and unfortunately, he seems to be immortal and really, really pissed off. He also has the power to somehow "banish" townspeople who resist his iron fist, turning them into disembodied voices who the rest of the residents listen to in fear, knowing that could be them if they don't obey. In general, Devlin comes off like a deeply disturbing, reality-warping abomination in a loose-fitting human costume - something that might have had the outward appearance of a generic outlaw at some point, but over the years has become so angry and hateful that he's something else now. At one point he claims to have haunted the town for "one thousand years", which could be nothing more than villainous hyperbole, but when he's finally done in and his body splits apart to reveal that he was full of dirt, dust, and writhing black worms, I tended to think he was truly something separate from the miserable half-ghosts the innocent townsfolk had become.

I would almost say that this concept deserves a better vehicle than this movie, but I feel like the fact that Ghost Town is slightly goofy and your experience of it may vary is part and parcel of the film as, like, itself. Maybe it's better because you have to look past the surface level, look past the bad dialogue and corny acting and poor set dressing, to excavate the thought-provoking kernel of story at the center. Or maybe I'm just making too much of a bad film. I'm finding the number of films that I think are objectively bad to be vanishingly small these days, though - all art being up for interpretation means that there really can't be a single, consensus "bad" or "good". It's all what you make of it, and something popularly regarded as "bad" can resonate with you if it strikes the right chord. If nothing else, appreciate Ghost Town for the gorgeous practical effects. Happy Valentine's Day, I'm in love with horror movies.