In the wacky world of American local filmmaking (the guilty state this time: Arizona) not even someone like star reporter Steve (Randy Mulkey) is save from being laid off. Just as he is about to get his big breakthrough in proving the truth of a Native American myth, his editor fires him. The man lost his patience with Steve's obsession with a story that never seems to get written in spite of the reporter spending more than a year on it. (I have to say, some editors are more patient than others).
Persistent Steve is not taken aback too much: close as he is to the truth, not even the unwillingness of his puffy-haired girlfriend Terry (Pat Bolt) to tolerate his weird interests any longer is able to stop him. Really, if he can tolerate her hair, what's so bad about a little obsession about an immortal shaman (109 years old Nino Cochise, as he is billed) who is supposed to show the Chosen One the way to the tower of Natas (hello, Johnny Alucard!) where the devil imprisons the souls of the people who belong in limbo? The Chosen One's job is to prevent the horned one from keeping the souls for a full hundred years, because this would open the gates of hell and let the devil drag those souls down with him.
With the help of a scientist we'll never see again, Steve is able to locate the shaman Smohalla. Smohalla repeats the story of the tower again for us, in case we have forgotten it in the past five minutes, and shows the intrepid reporter the right way, not without giving him a defensive amulet and an oh-so-cryptic "riddle" Steve-o has a disturbingly hard time figuring out.
Off he goes on his Chosen Path and stumbles into a desert ghost town. Steve's not that perturbed when he finds the local saloon populated by flour-faced people in dusty western garb, even though they all speak with silly vocoder voices. He's only getting antsy when the so-called "ghost town zombies" (who are rather generic undead than zombies, whatever the film may say) put him into jail over the weekend to have a nice hanging on Monday.
Fortunately for our hero, the shaman (who is even more patient with the stupid than Steve's editor) comes to his rescue, magics the jail door open and even leaves him a nice magical mirror in the desert.
Steve returns home, with the mirror finally able to prove the truth of his story to Terry (whom I'd like to tell about a bridge I have for sale). She seems to be working in some kind of department for renting out useless killing fodder, so the next day she, Steve-the-not-very-bright and the fodder return to the ghost town to do who knows what.
After having some fun with letting lizards appear out of a can of peaches, Satan (Do you get the difficult riddle? Do you!? Well, then you are not the Chosen One!) decides to turn the movie into a very boring slasher and lets his undead minions loose on the fodder.
Oh Natas, why do you let me down? What begins as a silly, but entertaining fantasy film using local myth to create an off-kilter atmosphere gets terribly bogged down in all the bad slasher clichés in its middle part. Would you believe having sex is not a good idea in a film like this? Well, you wouldn't believe people wanting to have sex (or lying giggling on the ground) just after they found a dead friend either, so it does fit somewhat. What is most irritating about the slasher part of the film is how it wastes a perfectly good ghost town (and there aren't enough films taking place in ghost towns anyway) on some of the most useless excuses for suspense imaginable. That the "zombies" suddenly look like undead muppets instead of the weird shadows of the past they were before doesn't make this part of the film easier to take.
The ending suddenly turns into something as cheap but original as the beginning was, charming with a godawful devil costume and special effects of Godfrey Ho standard. I imagine at this point the less enduring (or stupid) part of the audience has already fallen asleep. I'm not sure if I envy them or not.
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