Cidade Fantasma

A bus load of college students & staff end up in an Old West ghost town inhabited by the wicked specters of outlaws. Will anyone survive?

Released to TV in 2009, "Ghost Town" is part Old West Western and part modern horror, mostly the latter. It's similar to 1999's "Purgatory" in that they're both TV Westerns with supernatural elements, except this one is decidedly horror-oriented. The "hip" youths hanging out in an abandoned Western town is reminiscent of the biker flick "Angels Hard as They Come" (1971). The difference here being that this group is trapped and fending off wicked apparitions.

I liked how the group dwindles down to little more than a handful and they have to rise to the challenge of surviving or dying. Joey Ansah stands out as Bonesera, aka "Bone," a bully football player who may or may not redeem himself. It's also nice to see Gil Gerard ("Buck Rogers") again in a peripheral role.

As for the female cast, the movie scores pretty well: Israeli Shelly Varod (Katie) looks like she has a smidgen of Far East Asian in her. She's cute, but I prefer Annabelle Wallis (Serena), Jessica Rose (Chloe) and even the outlaw babe (Cvetelina Teneva), looks-wise anyway.

As long as you can handle the limitations of low-budget productions, like the other two flicks noted above, I give this a marginal recommendation.

The film runs 1 hour, 25 minutes and was shot in Old Tucson, Arizona.

GRADE: C+/B-