- Director: Aaron B. Koontz
- Writers: Cameron Burns, Aaron B. Koontz
- Stars: Melora Walters, Zachary Knighton, Bill Sage
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 36 Minutes
- Link: https://amzn.to/34zmtLS
Synopsis
It was a dark and stormy night. Two young brothers are awakened by their father, who is carrying a shotgun. Someone is outside coming for them. The little brother runs away, but the men outside kill both parents and burn down the house. Credits roll.
Time passes, and the boys are now much older. Duncan is a bandit and Jake works at the saloon. There’s a gunfight outside, and both men wind up dead. The gang needed one of the dead men, so Jake offers to step in tomorrow for the big job. There’s a lot of talk about Duncan not wanting Jake to get into that kind fo a life, but there’s no dissuading him.
So the next night, the gang robs a train. They kill a bunch of people. They find a chest with someone knocking inside. Inside, is a woman wearing a Hannibal-Lector style mask; her name is Pearl. There’s a last-minute shootout, and Duncan gets a belly shot. The gang heads to a town to look for a doctor; they ride all day. They stop outside of town in a deserted cabin.
Against their better judgment, they all follow Pearl to the town, where the women of the brother take Duncan inside to help him. Many of the men pair off with the women of the brothel. We get a glimpse of someone or something crawling on the ceiling of the place.
There’s a lot of talk, and when Jake mentions that he’s never killed anyone all the girls perk up, as if they now smell a “murder-virgin.” Maria gives Jake a flashback to the day Pearl was born; the preacher, Cotton Mather says her baby was a devil. He’s a witch hunter, and Maria is said to be a witch. They burned her, yet she is now sitting across from Jake. They were all burned exactly 200 years ago today; all these women are undead witches.
Things fall apart very quickly after that, as the women revert to their true burned forms and attack the men. There’s lots of shooting and lots of witches. The witches say that Jake’s innocent blood can sustain them for decades.
The four men lock themselves in the church and talk for what seems like an hour and a half. A crow breaks out of Lester, killing him. Wylie acts weirdly possessed and then kills himself. Finally, Jake and Dodd decide to leave the church and make a break for it, but Dodd doesn’t last long.
Jake confronts Maria and Pearl. They say he can see Duncan if he agrees to stay with them, and sure enough, Duncan is still alive. Jake puts Duncan on a horse wand watches as he rides out of town. Jake stays behind.
Later, we see Duncan on the family farm, which he has bought back somehow. He’s now married and has a baby named Jacob.
Commentary
The cast contains no big names, but they all did a good job with it. There’s something weird about watching a western film done in digital HD rather than film; it makes the whole thing look very low budget and amateur, which it really isn’t.
The makeup effects are very good; the monsters look like they were based on the same design as “The Witches (1990).” This is very talky and ponderous. There’s a lot of slow-paced drama and argument and discussion, and it gets to be a little much. Stuff does happen, but it’s so incredibly slow-paced and talky that it’s just way over the line into the territory of “nap-worthy snoozefest.”