‘Ghost Town’ (1988) - Richard McCarthy.

Sharpshooting Sheriff Langley's (Frank Luz) quest to locate absconding bride, Kate (Catherine Hickland) terminally Twilight-Zones our immaculately stubble-faced, metal-headed hunk into the doomy Ghost Town of ‘Cruz Del Diablo’. An especially grim locale wherein despotic zombie Outlaw, Devlin (Jimmie F. Skaggs) reigns absolutely over his equally malicious, foully worm-eaten cronies. Devlin Devilishly maintaining a murderous vigil over all the wretched souls in Devlin's purgatorial enclave! Once our quick-draw hero finds, Kate, Langley's travails begin in deadly earnest, since the murderous Devlin has taken a sick-headed shine to the greatly beleaguered, blonde haired beauty! Langley must stoically ‘High Noon’ his dangerously gun-smoke’d, corpse-strewn odyssey into Devlin’s Dantean underworld of cruelty, gruesome outlaw justice and bullet-blasted revenge!

Evocatively shot by frequent Empire Pictures collaborator, Mac Ahlberg, the off-grid ‘Ghost Town’ has an appealingly hallucinatory aesthetic, part mythological Rod Serling'd phantasmagoria, and spooky, generously red-sauced Spaghetti western. These heady ingredients imbuing this uniquely hybridized horror film a bespoke, dust-blown B-movie savour all of its very own! The performances are exemplary, lanky Luz is an engagingly heroic, squint-eyed goodie, scurvy Skaggs makes a memorably malefic nemesis, and quirky character actor Bruce Glover is sinisterly sepulchral as the ambivalent ‘Dealer’. ‘Ghost Town’ was an unusual concept way back in ’88, and the dreary dearth of imagination in recycled contemporary horror gives McCarthy's underappreciated Six Gun shocker ‘Ghost Town’ some additional lustre.