Ghost Town

A futile attempt – even the most imaginative premise loses its appeal when it’s handled in an entirely routine manner. Ghost Town is exemplary video trash from the second half of the 1980s in that it has a perfect poster and a promising concept, but the film itself doesn’t contain anything memorable. After all, the concept of a zombie western may seem like a great idea, but in the late ’80s, when zombies had become a dominant element of pop culture (as had been confirmed and reinforced by the video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”), there were dozens of films in which the living dead take on countless bizarre forms (see crazy genre mish-mashes like Return of the Living Dead, Dead Heat, Night of the Creeps, The Video Dead, The Boneyard and The Vineyard). In other words, a concept alone is not enough, as it is necessary to also think about how it’s going to be executed. In the case of Ghost Town, this remains on the level of a formulaic genre flick, albeit a solidly crafted one. The inner meaning of the film thus appears to be much more interesting than the whole storyline with zombies and the mystery of the titular ghost town. The story of a small-town cop who, when on the trail of a marriage scammer in the desert, falls into some sort of parallel dimension in which he has to take on the role of the sheriff who will definitively eliminate the living dead in the cursed town, basically and literally represents the dream of every redneck cop who in his everyday boredom fantasises about a grand western adventure in the style of the movies that inspired him to be a cop in the first place. (01.05.2014)