Originally slated to come out before star Wesley Snipes went
to prison for tax evasion, director Andrew Goth’s GallowWalkers
has finally found its way to your DVD players courtesy of Lionsgate. If
Django Unchained was a distant ancestor of Shaft
then it’s easy to think of this vampire horror western as a half-assed
predecessor to Blade, if Blade was
terrible.
The first words Snipes’ character Aman—get it, because he’s
a man—utters are, “Do you remember me?” It feels like he’s asking you the
audience, not the undead gun-slinging priest with his mouth stitched shut. For
most, this question is met with resounding indifference, but I’ve certainly
been awaiting your triumphant return, Mr. Snipes. Too bad GallowWalkers
isn’t a better movie. We’re not even talking about a terrible movie, it’s just
completely bland, which is even more of a disappointment, because the story
verges on total, absolute insanity.
GallowWalkers looks and feels like a much
older movie, almost as if it’s a relic of the mid 1980s that someone found
gathering dust in the backroom of a forgotten low-budget production company.
The sets and costumes are cheap and thrown together, there’s a weird new-wave
vampire woman, a plastic man with no skin, and at one point an old west version
of a Lord Humungous’ post-apocalyptic gang from The Road
Warrior, complete with a guy (professional wrestler Diamond Dallas
Page) wearing a spike covered iron helmet. You also get a wealth of amazing
lines, like when a vampire tells a wayward priest, “Forgive me father for I
have skinned,” and a guy who has multiple lizard tails sewn
onto his skull. You stare at this movie and the only rational response is,
“Huh?”
All of this inspired lunacy could very easily have added up
to some kind of fantastic bizarre madness, but the craziness is squandered at
every turn. Even with gunmen popping out of blood wells and Wesley Snipes
whipping marauders in the middle of a dust storm, GallowWalkers
is never more than a bunch of ridiculous moments. And this includes Snipes wandering
the desert doing his best impression of Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse
Now.
It doesn’t help matters that it takes a full 40 minutes
before you have any idea what the hell is going on. You finally learn that the
story is all about revenge, but up until then, it’s all needlessly obtuse,
obscure, and meandering. Turns gang of bad men raped Aman’s lady friend,
sending him on a tirade of retribution. After you finally have some clue, you
can’t help but think, what the hell does this have to do with vampires? Here’s
what: since this place just happens to be located at the gates of hell, all of
the guys Aman kills come back from the dead, so he has to get some re-revenge
in addition to his first revenge.
If it wasn’t so directionless, so mired in a needlessly
convoluted story, we could be talking about GallowWalkers as
goofy, genre mashup classic. But the editing is a mess, and the film is full of
pointless subplots. For example, his mother is a prostitute and he was raised
in a slaughterhouse; he has a randomly acquired sidekick named Fabulous (Riley
Smith), who adds nothing; and there’s another prostitute (Tanit Phoenix), who
is in the movie for no other reason you can discern than to add some cleavage.
She does practically nothing. And there are more of these asides, but each is
even more pointless than what I’ve already listed.
Even the tone is inconsistent at best, nonexistent at worst.
GallowWalkers wants to be a grim western and a gory horror
flick. Aman does pull off a number of heads, complete with
spinal cords still attached, but the CGI is abysmal. But then you get wacky
one-liners and a score that, at times, sounds like the music from a sweeping
romance. This is the kind of movie where characters don’t have real names
beyond a description of what they do like Madame and Apprentice Boy.
There is so much mad potential in
GallowWalkers, but the finished product never becomes more
than a bunch of crazy nonsense thrown into a blender, poured into a movie
script, and strung together through the most tenuous causal links. Great in a
theoretical sense, the film is a let down start to finish. But remember, “Dead
ain’t what it used to be.”
As slipshod as the movie itself is, you don’t really expect
the DVD of GallowWalkers to arrive with the greatest
collection of bonus features, and it doesn’t. Aside from a collection of
trailers for other Lionsgate movies, the only extra is a ten-minute behind the
scenes feature. Comprised mostly of interviews with the key cast members trying
to make the film sound more important than it actually is, spliced together
with footage from the film, like the movie itself, never amounts to much.
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