Starring: Tony Todd, Michael Eklund, Lance Henriksen, June Laporte

Director: Michael Steves
Released: 2018

Mood: If for some twisted reason you’re craving a torture movie where the torture isn’t in the plot or the cinematography it’s just the actual watching of the movie.

I don’t know how you could be a person who has watched other Westerns, and other horror movies, and then still went ahead and made West of Hell.

WTF were you thinking? Why did you attach your name to this?!

The concept is okay. The execution is just abysmal.

It seems like the budget was mostly spent on getting a couple of big names in horror – Lance Henriksen and Tony Todd – and there wasn’t much left for production. Or the script.

West of Hell is so forgettable that after I turned it off to take a phone call, which is a clear sign that I do not give a shit about a movie because I loathe phone calls more than anything… and I had to rewatch almost the entire thing to remember what it was about. After only two days had passed. And I still wanted to turn it off.

West of Hell takes place entirely on, and next to, a train. There’s clear tension between the passengers.

• Jericho Whitfield (Tony Todd) is a freed slave-turned-bounty-hunter
• Roland Bursley (Michael Eklund) is a gunman protecting the Victorian gown-clad young Annie Hargraves (June Laporte)
• Grace McDowell (Jill Hoiles) is a wealthy white plantation heiress
• Father Locke (Yousef Abu-Taleb, a co-writer on this dung heap) is a priest
• Desdemona Lark (Jeryl Prescott ) is a freed slave

Clearly they are a recipe for disaster, but it tries to go deeper than that.

Jericho is hunting down Grace to get revenge for wrongs her family committed. Roland just wants his paycheque. Grace hates Black people. Father Locke broke his vows in a terrible way. And Jeryl has a dark secret.

Some of this comes up while the characters squabble with each other. But then a creepy voice that sounds like it’s announcing Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion ride lets them know that they’re on their way to Hell. They’ll have to complete challenges IN Hell to survive.

Then the truth really shines. Unsurprisingly, the white people are REALLY bad, Jericho and Desdemona are good people who had to do bad things to survive, and one white guy (Michael Eklund as Roland Bursley) did bad things in the name of a strong moral compass.

We’ve seen this played out so many times, and so much better. We know that white people were atrocious when America was colonized. Give us a character who did something exceptionally grizzly or creative, or has at least some original nuance! And we also know that Black people were horribly wronged and deserve vengeance. Jericho does get one act of violent revenge, but it’s kind of buried in other useless plot points. He could have been like, Django Unchained level of violence.

Here are the pros, because we should be kind to artists in this dark climate.

• Lance Henriksen is strong in his limited screentime as the devil – special shoutouts to him in Aliens, Super Mario Bros., Dead Man, Appaloosa, and The Quick and the Dead – I’m obsessed with him
• Tony Todd was the OG Candyman and although one IMDb reviewer called his portfolio “utter pants” – which sent me – he does feel above this script
• Michael Eklund seems like he’s in another movie, working with a backstory to evoke a range of emotions that bounce helplessly off of his young ward
• Richard Riehle is like a sinister Richard Farnsworth and really fun, he’s just stuck in a role that feels like a PG-version of the Crypt Keeper

But I don’t get the cinematography choices at all, like switching between black and white and colour, or slowing down shots that are just not that interesting. Everything from costumes to effects is so clean and un-gritty and just lacking in budget or effort.

The challenges feel too much like reality show tasks, or season finale episodes we’ve seen in powerful good-versus-evil stories like The Good Place. Most of the acting feels painfully fake, and you can’t tell if it’s because the acting is bad or the script is just really f*cking bad. Or in most cases, both. Same goes for the accents.

Everyone accepts everything way too quickly and without enough fanfare. Like you just found out you’re on a train to HELL, and you don’t take any time to react to that? You just quickly team up with former enemies, or make deals, or lie to save people you just met? It makes zero sense.

There’s some gore, some action, and there are some really gross scenes. I’ll give it that. But it’s never enough to merit being a good Western, or a good horror movie. It’s just lipstick on a pig.

I was so completely bored by this movie from start to finish. I didn’t feel like I got a lesson in morality. I didn’t even feel like I cared about morality. I just wanted to un-save it from my watch list and move on.