Tommyknockers

Tons of micro-budget westerns flood the DTV space yearly, most best left unseen, but sometimes worthwhile fare emerges. The itch for more horror-westerns led me to Night of the Tommyknockers. Not good but not a disaster; it's under 90 minutes and doesn't shy away from monster gore once the bandits-vs-lawmen first half leaves its outlaws in a gold-rush ghost town besieged by gnarled Descent rejects.

If you can accept the meager production values this kind of film must scrounge up today, then this is an overly-talky obviously-cheap yet still enjoyable creature feature. Just mind the acting; although even that in regard, the actual character dynamics were fun in spite of the bad-to-average performances but I got to grade on a curve considering how rare horror-westerns are, let alone ones as relatively focused and action-filled as this.

A nice addition to the western/horror genre. The Mahal Brothers make great looking Indie films when compared to most, and they are usually a fun watch. "Night..." continues that trend. An interesting story, quality sound, and great looking creatures. I'm sure people will have issues with the lighting consistency, but for me it wasn't an issue because we can actually see what is happening as opposed to the usual pitch black screen in most horror movies. The acting performances were hit or miss which is par for the course in Indie films. Again, not an issue for me. Angela Cole owns this movie hands down. She's fantastic. Richard Grieco, Denny Nolan, and Shawn C Phillips were standouts for me as well. If you dig Indie Horror, give it a try.

So I like catching bloopers in movies! This movie of course is set in the 1800's. There's a scene where they're in the dark and use a Dietz oil lantern WITH the Dietz decal on it!!! Ok oil lanterns didn't exist until 1935 and vinyl decals didn't exist until 1943! Their lines were poorly spoken and I mean poorly! I didn't care about the tommy knockers costumes also stupid looking! I only watched because I thought it might be related to Steven King's Tommy knockers like a prequel, boy was I wrong! I wonder if this is plagiarism? It is a b rated movie after all. It only cost about $4 to watch....

The movie opens with the Dirk Gang robbing a bank somewhere. One of them guts the bank manager because he's a psycho and likes to stab people I guess. They get away with the loot but a bounty hunter is on their trail and the brother of the murdered bank manager vows revenge. They decide to head to the town of...(Google)...the generically named town of Deer Creek because there's supposed to be gold there. They arrive in town to find it apparently deserted. Their plan to rob the bank fails because there's no one there to open the safe. They soon find some survivors holed up in the saloon and some monsters attack. They are supposed to be Tommyknockers but they bear pretty much no resemblance to the Tommyknockers of folklore.

This movie is all over the place. Some of the cast are veteran actors like Robert LaSordo while others seem like friends of the filmmakers that were given small parts. Some of the gore effects are passable and some are laughable. The monster costumes are not bad for a low budget movie but they aren't very good either. The story is really disjointed. There are little Western movie vignettes that don't really have much to do with anything. Characters appear only to get killed off almost immediately. Things just happen without a lot of rhyme or reason. At one point, a character has a revelation about the monsters that isn't really based on anything and makes no sense considering what they have been doing but is, of course, entirely correct. Things happen that leave you wondering why that didn't happen a while ago. The ending is really rushed.

The movie isn't terrible. I have certainly seen much worse Western horror movies. It's just kind of disjointed and meandering. There's a lot of stuff that seems to have been just thrown in to pad the run time or because Western movies have this.

Watched this film since the same team made another film with an actress I adore. She wasn't in this one, unfortunately. SHE would have elevated it, no doubt.

Man, was this worse than expected.

Script was all over the place. Lighting who? DAY/NIGHT? Light poured through windows when it was night outside.

Costumes were straight out of a high school performance of Oklahoma, along with the acting performances. Aside from the plethora of non-actors all whom paid for their few lines, the leads were all over the place. No one seemed to be in the same movie- tone ranged from over the top stage musical-like theatrics to barely-there performing. Tough to find any real substance in the muck.