Starring: Wesley Snipes, Kevin Howarth, Riley Smith
Director: Andrew Goth
Released: 2012
Mood: If someone is in the doghouse and you want to torture them by putting on this movie and pretending to like it so they have to keep watching the whole miserable 90 minutes to make up for what they did to you.
Some movies are like rude guests that bring nothing to the genres in which they exist.
Gallowwalkers is so f*cking bad that not only does it bring no gifts, it also takes a huge dump in the genre’s bathroom, overflows the toilet, walks with poop-covered boots down the hallway carpet, and steals the last beer from the fridge on its way out the door, which it leaves open so the pets run away.
YES, it’s really that awful. It owes apologies to Westerns, Sci-Fi, horror, and to me personally for ruining my night.
Gallowwalkers feels like someone went on a white powder bender, wrote down a bunch of crazy ideas on napkins, and then tried to stitch them together into a movie. You, the viewer, will never once feel like you have a clue what’s happening at any point in the “story.”
Still, it’s my obligation to attempt to give you a synopsis, which I’ll do while I eviscerate this insult to cinema.
Aman (Wesley Snipes) is on a revenge mission to kill a bunch of zombies who raped his girlfriend. Classic Western premise with a horror twist – it had great potential.
Through flashbacks – and a monologue dubbed by someone clearly NOT Snipes – we learn why the bad guys are zombies. Aman shot up the bad guys, someone shot him, then Aman’s mother, who gave him up to an orphanage as a child, somehow showed up exactly as he was dying and sacrificed herself, thus cursing him.
The curse means that Anyone Aman kills will come back from the dead. For some reason this curse applies retroactively to people he killed BEFORE he was cursed, so the bad guys he had just gunned down come back to life. Apparently this undeadness changes the colour of their eyes, but some of them look pretty while others are mutants.
They don’t know why they’re undead, and WE don’t know why their skin falls off, or why their costumes range from Renaissance to Star Trek alien to slutty pirate Hallowe’en costume.
And where the f*ck even are these people?! The movie was filmed in Namibia, so it’s all stunning white desert backgrounds and vast blue skies. It feels like it’s meant to be both dystopian and space-y, although it’s impossible to glean anything from the ridiculous dialogue. Meanwhile the king of the bad guys (Kansa, played by Kevin Howarth) spends most of the movie looking like Mickey Rourke attempting Legolas cosplay.
But at the same time, half of the characters also have varying degrees of terrible Southern accents, and the horses and firearms are 100% Western. There’s even a Leone-style close-up showdown at the end. IT WANTS TO BE SO MANY THINGS, yet it fails at all of them.
Continuing on the revenge Western premise, Aman has to kill these zombie outlaws for good. The method is the standard shot to the head.
A bunch of regular humans are rounded up by the bad mutants, who, by the way, have somehow grown in numbers even though Aman didn’t kill anyone else. Aman chooses one of them to rescue (Riley Smith as Fabulos – I could not make up that name if I tried). But of course, it’s never explained how or why Aman knew where to be, or why he chose this guy to help him defeat the zombies.
Regardless, you won’t give a flying F if they succeed.
The only good performance in Gallowwalkers is by former WWE wrestler Diamond Dallas Page. When DDP is your standout, you might want to think about your choices in life and maybe not release your movie.
But for real, DDP leans into the comedy of playing a towering Ned Kelly/Toxic Avenger hybrid called Skullbucket. You have to wait most of the movie to get to him, but he’s the perfect big brute with immense physical strength and an inability to go down.
Almost all of the other characters, except Aman and including two of the three ‘main’ women, have what look like itchy, Walmart-quality wigs. I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen another movie with such bad wigs.
It’s not ALL bad though.
The gore is really well done. It’s even quite artistic when Wesley Snipes pulls out a man’s entire spine and you see it swinging in slow motion, beautifully backlit. All of the kills are graphic and realistic.
I mean, they do also seem to have added a random woman whose job is butchering and skinning animals just to heighten the gore content, but I’m not mad. More blood, which is what you want when you watch a so-called Western-horror flick.
The scenery is also outstanding. Usually we get the same dusty American deserts (or their Spaghetti Western alternatives), or other familiar North American landscapes. But in Gallowwalkers the landscape is shockingly different, and I would LOVE to see it used with a better script.
Although the camerawork is great in the scenic shots and close-ups, and in the action, we get a huge dose of flashbacks that are bizarre slow-motion, black-and-white, and ‘trippy’ shots. They’re incredibly sub-par and do NOT go with the rest of the movie, which makes them feel incredibly fake. I think they were going for arthouse, but the result is refrigerator art.
And I have to point out that there are a several scenes where there is obvious bad dubbing.
I’ve read online that nobody was happy with the final movie, and that makes sense because Gallowwalkers is really, really f*cking bad. But I forgive Wesley Snipes, because when the movie was shot he was super busy dealing with his tax evasion charges, and also because he was so good in To Wong Foo: Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar and you can never take that away from me.
Is this a horror Western? Only if you find gore to be horror. I didn’t need to hide under a blanket. I wasn’t scared at any point during the movie, other than being afraid it would never cease in its craptacular attack on my brain.
It’s no more brutal or splatterific than movies like The Proposition or Django Unchained. So… go watch those movies instead. Save yourself from this abomination.
