West of Hell

Well gosh. A napkin-faced demon transports one dimensional characters through an underworld riddled by cliches and stunningly bad dialogue? Best i can figure. Im pretty sure scenes were filmed months apart. Lost count of how many times the young lady's hair style was different between each scene, sometimes between shots even. It always bothers me when movies use the issue of US slavery as a device but dont have anything remotely enlightening or interesting to say. Its simply fisted in for conflict. And not once did i feel like anyone was on a train. Incredibly bad camera work. Many times it felt like actors had to duck under the camera to cross the room. And all the while you feel super cramped. People could do an entire book on all the weirdness in the movie.

This starts off well enough. There are some choppy edits, but the production, set predominantly on a train, looks good, with attention to period detail, and some fine performances.

Sadly despite all this, it soon becomes a confusing, rather dull mess. I'm sorry to say this, because there are some good moments, and things definitely liven up when Lance Henrikson arrives. The effects are decent, and it seems there is a message amidst everything that is going on, although I'm beggered if I know what it is. My score is 5 out of 10.

I really REALLY wanted to like this, even after reading the reviews I read here... It is a really good concept with so many possibilities. Unfortunately it didn't just fall flat... It fell through the floor, the basement and eventually landed somewhere (maybe) at the bottom of the bottomless pit (yes, ik its bottomless. That was the point) ... You get the idea. If I couldn't even make it a half hour in then its beyond bad. I have made it through some pretty bad movies and it takes I lot for me to just turn something off.

That being said if you have a big day ahead of you and are having trouble sleeping give this movie a try!! Works better than watching a muted golf game after eating thanksgiving dinner when everyone else has already gone nappy-bye.

Having gained his freedom due to the Civil War, an angry black man named "Jericho Whitfield" (Tony Todd) is determined to avenge the cruel death of his young daughter by subsequently scalping and killing the daughter of his former master. To that effect, when he discovers that "Annie Hargraves" (June Laporte) has just booked passage on a train to Atlanta, he also boards it in order to carry out his evil scheme. Unfortunately for him, he soon discovers that she is being protected by an extremely skilled bodyguard named "Roland Bursey" (Michael Eklund) who has no intention of allowing him to harm her. Even worse than that, however, is the fact that there is a sinister presence aboard this train and it has its own plans for not just him--but everyone else on board this train as well. Now rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this film had an interesting plot but it seemed to get derailed somewhere down the line. Not only were some scenes a bit confusing but the ending could also have used significant improvement too. In any case, while I don't consider this to be a bad film necessarily, it clearly needed a bit more work in some areas and for that reason I have rated it accordingly.

This was so baffling. You have MAJOR talent like Tony Todd and Lance Henriksen and you completely waste them and you choose to FILTER Lance Henriksen's voice? One of the most iconic voices in film? He's literally only in the last 20 minutes of the movie too, first appearance at 1:02:35, he lucked out by staying out of this as much as possible, though it was probably lack of budget or writing creativity to have him throughout.

The lead actress was so bad. Everyone was doing the most nasal-y modern voices and accents and the costumes were sloppy at best. There was no cohesive indication of what year it was supposed to be. The pathetic attempts to add "realism" via 1950's era racism will just make your skin crawl. Not to mention the humanization and attempts to make the slave owner and her confederate bodyguard cute and likeable. Don't waste your time.