In 1958, a motorcycle gang terrorize a diner and then kidnap a teenage girl named Josie (Abigail Wolcott) after ripping off her poodle skirt to reveal a sheer black body stocking underneath, which would naturally be the undergarment of choice for all young, virginal girls in the conservative 50s. They then drag Josie to "Lucas Carlyle's Hellgate;" one of those tourist trap mock amusement park reenactments of a 1890s western town. Owner Lucas (Carel Trichardt) sees what they're up to and, since he also happens to be Josie's father, he gets mad and flings a hatchet into the biker leader's head, who then crashes his bike into Josie and then crashes through a brick wall, killing them both. Later, an old guy working at the park finds a chunk of glowing crystal and takes it to Lucas. Blue beams shoot out of it which cause a goldfish to grow, mutate and then explode, a stuffed turtle to spring to life, bite Lucas' face and then explode and finally the old man who found it to melt down and then explode. Since it worked so well the first few times, Lucas then uses it to resurrect his dead daughter.
The above story has gone on to become a local legend in the area and one that's about to become more than just a tall tale for UCLA grad student Matt Coleman (Ron Palillo, of "Welcome Back, Kotter" fame). While running late to meet up with his girlfriend Pam (Petrea Curran) and their friends Chuck (Evan J. Klisser) and Bobby (Joanne Warde), Matt encounters a young woman clad in white wandering the road in a daze. The girl is, of course, Josie, who is now some kind of evil seductress desperate for someone to love her. She takes him to her home and attempts to seduce him before daddy Lucas - who now has pieces of metal bolted onto his face (?!) - chases him off. Now determined to prove the legend is true to his buddies, Matt drags Pam, Chuck and Bobby along to explore a cemetery - where the deaths of those buried are conveniently etched directly onto their tombstones! - and then the ghost town. Ghosts and zombies or ghosts that look like zombies (it's hard to tell) show up, as do Lucas and his daughter.
Inept, absurd, senseless, irritating and moronic are just a few of the adjectives that aptly describe this train wreck of a film. The screenplay from Michael O'Rourke is quite possibly the worst script ever committed to film. Not only does the plot make very little sense, but it contains some of the most mind-numbingly stupid dialogue I've ever heard in my entire life. The cast is also terrible; so terrible that miscast 'name value' star Palillo (who is at least 10 years too old to be convincing as even a graduate student and even less convincing playing the 'stud' every woman in this film lusts after) seems like a master thespian by comparison. No that he's good in this mind you, but he's slightly less awful than most of the others.
The girl who plays the ghost may have the body to play a seductress (and gets naked several times) but she speaks her lines like she just suffered from a massive stroke five minutes prior to filming. Minutes after seeing her boyfriend decapitated, the girl playing Bobby calmly sits in a saloon drinking and smoking and barely registers a change in facial expression when ghostly can-can girls suddenly appear on a stage in front of her and start dancing. Hell, she doesn't even seem all that bothered when someone then sneaks up behind her and starts strangling her with a rope. Another girl finds a severed, talking head in the refrigerator and responds to that by just rolling her eyes and slamming the door shut. And though the girl playing Pam is a better actress than most of the others, she's stuck playing one of the most irritating and insufferable nags ever seen in one of these things and spends half her screen time having insecure jealousy fits over everything 'Horshak' does and says.
Of course, the bad acting and bad everything else falls pretty much into the director's lap since he was in charge of the horrors that went down before the cameras. Considering Mr. Levey is also responsible for such useless gutter trash as BLACKENSTEIN (1973), WHAM BAM! THANK YOU, SPACEMAN! (1975) and several other horrible films, and yet no one even knows who he is, I'd say he's never quite been given his due in bad movie circles.
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