Jennifer (LadySailor1975) Normally, cable TV movies are lousy and too predictable. I will be honest, I originally watched this solely because Billy Drago is in my Top Five list of absolute favorite actors. I love him! In this movie, a busload of college students on the way home from a sports event and a debate match is suddenly on a dirt road and leads into a ghost town from the Wild West. They at first believe it is one of these life-size museums that teaches tourists and field trip kids about how people lived then OR one of these haunted-house theme parks. However, they soon realize it is not either of these places and find that there are ghosts of five outlaws (four men and one woman) who had killed the entire population back in the Wild West era. Now they return every thirteen years to kill anyone who gets trapped. The more they kill people, the stronger they become. The students die off, one-by-one, until the last few figure out what to do and are able to break the curse. As the last three leave the town, one of the totems that broke the curse burns away. This may be insinuating a sequel, but this has not happened.I found this a good movie, especially for those who scare easily since this is not a "super-scary" one. It is moderately scary, but it's one that I can watch right before going to sleep with no nightmares. I recorded it on my DVD recorder and watch it at times and always on Halloween. (I have several movies for Halloween watching).I do wish SyFy would put this on DVD. They did with that awful Sharknado movie, but not this much-better than that movie.The actors were mixed; some were good actors and some were awful actors. The special effects were quite good. Despite a few plot holes, it can be enjoyable. It is a good Saturday night "there-is-nothing-on-TV-to-watch" movie. Or it can be a good one to watch on Halloween or on a night you want a little chill in your spine.Even if this were a lousy and bad movie, Billy Drago makes anything watchable.

Uriah43 I happened to catch a portion of this movie on the Sy-Fy channel about a year ago and since it looked pretty good at the time I decided to procure a copy recently. Having now seen this movie in its entirety I can honestly say that it wasn't too bad. Essentially, "Reb Halland" (Billy Drago) is the leader of an outlaw gang back in the days of the old west who has made a deal with the Devil for immortality. "Preacher McCready" (Gil Gerard) is a mystic who comes to the town of Hope Springs to protect it from Reb Halland's gang by erecting 5 Wiccan totems in various places. His plan works to perfection until a man comes along and pulls one out of the ground. When that happens all hell breaks loose as Reb's gang kills everyone in town—on a Friday the 13th no less. They then commit suicide and wait for an opportunity to kill again. Fast forward to the present when a bus carrying students from Carmel College find themselves in this same town—and it just happens to be on a Friday the 13th. Now rather than reveal any more of the film and risk ruining it for those who haven't seen it I will just say that for a made-for-television movie it had decent special effects and enough suspense to keep things somewhat interesting for the most part. Likewise it didn't hurt to have two attractive actresses in Jessica Rose (as "Jenna") and Annabelle Wallis ("Serena"). Again, while it certainly wasn't the best horror movie ever made I found it to be enjoyable enough and I rate it as about average.

Spikeopath After their bus mysteriously gets lost, a bunch of college kids find themselves trapped in a Wild West Ghost Town inhabited by evil spirits.Not awful by any means, as these budgeted TV productions go, it has some inventive death scenes (death by gasoline vomit a personal favourite here), Billy Drago as a venomous Cowboy spirit and some canted angles used for good atmospheric impact. Hell! The blending of maths stars and jocks, which while not original, makes for an interesting group dynamic and lets the writer (Andy Briggs) set up a decent finale as the remaining youngsters try to work out a way out of hell by using brain and brawn.Unfortunately director Todor Chapkanov seems to think that jitterycam is the way to go at every given opportunity, something which really hinders the atmosphere trying to get out. Then there is the MTV "R" US musical score/soundtrack that booms out inappropriately like proof was needed that noise does indeed annoy. While the town itself looks like some left over mock up from an American Adventure Theme Park.Filmed in Sofia, Bulgaria, it ultimately comes down to a bunch of pretty looking college kids (one of whom looks like Vin Diesel) getting killed amid angst, bullying and sexual yearnings. But like the characters in the story, the film seems stuck in a filmic purgatory, not really sure if it wants to slash, spook or yeehaw its way into our conscious. But as Syfy Channel time wasters go it just about passes muster. 4/10

aesgaard41 Remember the good old days when SyFy Channel was something special. It was an entire channel devoted to the science fiction, horror and fantasy genres, but then somewhere along the way, it stopped running classic TV shows like "Dark Shadows" and "Friday The 13th The Series" and movies with the Classic Universal Monsters, and instead became notorious for becoming a springboard for the worse freaking Indy flicks to ever rise out of the minds of former fan fiction writers. Some of their TV shows have been awesome, but the majority of their films are movies so bad that you have to wonder what was going on through their minds when they approved them. The special effects are always cheap, the actors are frequently inexperienced, and the plots are constantly far-fetched and unbelievable to the point that one can't help but think SyFy no longer has any respect for its fan base. Case in point: "Ghost Town" starring Gil Gerard and Billy Drago, two very well liked and respected actors no longer at the prime of their careers getting stuck making these low-budget flicks. Gil Gerard plays Preacher MacReady, the new pastor of a church in the small Texas settlement of Hope Springs. Immediately, you think, hey, a ghost story set in the Old West, that's a novel idea no one has done before, but then there's talk about markers to block out a great evil, and you start thinking, "Uh, say what?" It turns out Billy Drago is Reb Halland, the local devil-worshipping outlaw that's been annoying or cursing the town recently. How these markers are supposed to work against a flesh and blood outlaw is never explained, but it gets even more ridiculous. Halland's band shoot and kill everyone in town as some form of sacrifice for eternal life, but then they kill each other, which conveniently nullifies that eternal life promise, and now, they're ghosts. They could have become ghosts without shooting up the town, but wait, it gets even more stupid. Shoot forward to the present and a bus full of hockey jocks and debate team geeks who end up in town and become stranded because it's not a bad horror movie if they're not trapped in an unholy place. Cue Halland's band to begin slaughtering and killing everyone all over again for no reason whatsoever. Now, I can't stress this often enough; ghost movies should not be turned into splatter and gore flicks; the two genres together just never work together. It's bad enough there's too much opening exposition, but now, there's no attempt or effort made for the movie to be scary as long as it resorts for the cheap thrills and hokey special effects. Students and teachers are getting picked off left and right, and somehow, someway, it's deduced that the students have to replace a lost marker to finish what MacReady started decades earlier. I got to admit the visual effects look good despite being cheap, but the entire movie is just one huge waste of time with preposterous moments, unbelievable dialogue and a far-fetched setting that just gets more and more outlandish. Why couldn't they have just ditched the entire premise and just did a straight ghost story? The reason is that this movie was not made for a generic audience; it was actually aimed directly for the five-second attention span of the Digital Generation. These are the kids who have never cracked open a book in their life and would not know a decent horror movie even if they were trapped in one. Today's teenagers will never know the talents of Edgar Allen Poe or Bram Stoker or even realize the long-lasting immortality of the Universal horror movies of the Thirties and the Forties. "Ghost Town" like all SyFy movies is nothing but pure kitsch and camp. The reason it looks so cheap is because it was rushed to be a TV-movie. However, at one time, there were decent horror TV movies when networks paid high amounts for talented writers to create movies like "The Night Stalker" and "The Bermuda Depths," movies that today have huge cults of fans. Movies like "Ghost Town," "House Of Bones" and "Sharknado" are meant for a more jaded, less cerebral audience that won't appreciate the movies of a generation or two earlier. So, is "Ghost Town" a bad movie? Yes, yes, it is, but it's also a victim of its time when less effort is put into substance and more into production. It could have been made so much better, but then, it would not have appealed to its target audience.