Ghost Rock

With a roster like that, you know you're gonna need some serious heroes to carry the day, and we mean the real kind of heroes, not the Deathstalker kind. Sadly we couldn't find any of those, so instead we have this Slaughter asshole, his ghost girlfriend (spoiler alert: she's a fucking ghost), and B-movie veterans Jeff Fahey and Adrienne Barbeau. Adrienne Barbeau plays a hardass saloon matriarch at the burlesquetorium where lap dancing literally gets invented in the middle of the movie^[3]. She did this around the same time as Carnivàle, but we're betting the recurring nightmares from this were way worse, and if you've see Carnivàle that's saying something. Meanwhile, Jeff Fahey mostly plays "grab the check and run off set as fast as you can", but in his few brief, shining moments on camera he leads a posse of occasional special guest lawmen, the Just in the Nick of Time Boys, out of Implausible Convenience Bluffs, Nebraska.

Put all that together and what do you have? A recipe for shit like this:

What other fabulous surprises can you look forward to from the world's first and hopefully last gunkata fake-fu western? How about a soundtrack built around heavily plagiarizing the theme from Mission Impossible*? Or the inscrutable and deeply confusing ancient Chinese wisdom^[4] of John Slaughter's adopted uncle/grandfather/family friend/who the fuck knows?

Okay, that's not a very long list, but then this isn't a very good movie either. The execution here falls just ever so slightly short of "pulse-pounding action" and lands squarely on "overwhelming boredom." And not just for the audience, either: one of the big setpiece saloon fights is so exciting that the actors just sit back down to keep playing cards in the middle of it. The only thing that will keep you from nodding off is racking your brain trying to figure out what any of the sounds coming out of the actors' word-holes could possibly mean:

We don't want to imply that this movie was just a dialogue rewrite away from greatness, mind you. There's no combination of words that can possibly explain the mysterious woman drifter who likes to play poker, have gun battles while completely nude, and take bullets to the chest without flinching, because she's the ghost of John Slaughter's childhood crush, maybe. None of that is really clear. All we know for sure is that Johnny is an embarrassment to the Slaughter family name, because ghost lady and Jeff Fahey kill about 99% of the bad guys between the two of them (which takes a while, since they seem to hit about .00001% of their targets).

Ghost Rock doesn't make a goddamn lick of sense. There might be a coherent plot lodged somewhere in there between all of the terrible gunplay choreography and nebulous ghost vengeance bullshit, but we sure as hell can't find it. Not that any of this would - or did - stop Gary Busey and Jeff Fahey from signing up for yet another tour of crappy-movie duty. And so it comes to pass that our movie-watching fate is inextricably tied to the endless purgatorio of Gary Busey and Jeff Fahey's illustrious careers, forever and ever. Goddamn it.

[3] We're not kidding, one of the strippers in this podunk one-Busey shithole comes up with an amazing new idea called "the lap dance", and in the end of the movie she takes it to San Francisco to strike it rich. Put that in your peace pipe and smoke it.

[4] http://youtu.be/uA4hjgjfKDI

– Garrett "Hydrogen" Neil and Sean "Trillaphon" Neil (@trillaphon)