Gallowwalkers Movie Review

When one thinks back on legendarily cursed movie productions, a silly little Wesley Snipes cowboys vs zombies movie from 2012 isn't one that initially springs to mind. And yet 2012's Gallowwalkers is about as cursed as they come.

First mooted in 2005 (with Chow Yun Fat set to star) before being handed over to Wesley Snipes, filming was disrupted when the actor was jailed for tax evasion in 2006. Finally completed in 2010, it wouldn't see the light of day until FrightFest 2012 and a subsequent USA DVD release in 2013. Phew. And Terry Gilliam thought he had it hard with his Don Quixote.

Sadly, the most interesting thing about Gallowwalkers is its troubled production history. As for the film itself, it's a mess – a far cry from Snipes's Blade glory days. The big man plays mysterious gunsliger Aman (a man, geddit); a vengeance-fuelled slayer, cursed to see everyone he kills return from the dead, to be killed again and again. While director Andrew Goth's supernatural Western slash horror film certainly looks the part (thanks mostly to the Namibian desert where it was filmed), it's more Waterworld than Westworld.

Gone is the charismatic, cool Wesley Snipes of Blade and Demolition Man, replaced with the bored, phoning-it-in Wesley Snipes of Blade: Trinity. The action man wears the hell out of a leather coat and cowboy boots, but he looks bored, and presumably only in it for the money (money which was hopefully taxed correctly, if lessons were learned). Still, even bored Wesley Snipes knows his way around an action sequence, and Gallowwalkers's action is competent enough, if let down by the overreliance upon CGI blood and gore.

The rest of the story is equal parts boring to incoherent, packed full of the same shoehorned supernatural nonsense and quasi-religious leanings as its peers Jonah Hex and Constantine. This was bad in 2012, and it's even worse now; funny and boring in all of the wrong places. Eat your hearts out Sandler and McFarlane, it's effortlessly goofier than The Ridiculous Six and A Million Ways to Die in the West. Bad movie fans should have a riot with it, squeezing it in between snotty screenings of The Room or Troll 2.

For everyone else, Gallowwalkers is tolerable enough. It's bad, but not quite unwatchable. Wesley Snipes can't help but look cool, and the action is reasonably well done. If it had come out back when it was first supposed to, chances are this one would have simply faded away and been forgotten about, along with all of those Steven Seagal movies that were everywhere at the time. As it is, it keeps on coming back and, given the story, that's kind of appropriate.