Highly Overrated But Still Good

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Does anyone know how to tell a story anymore? So much of what comes out of Hollywood is filled with so much CGI that the story is often relegated to second place. Unfortunately Ghost Town does not even have this flimsy excuse. What should be a straight forward no nonsense western tale of vengeance becomes a confusing mish mash of bits and parts at the hands of someone known as Dean Teaster. Clearly there is basic lack of understanding about story structure, plot, and character development. It is as if each scene was put together without thought, and then each scene was placed one after another with a similar lack of thought. This is the movie equivalent of throwing everything on the wall to see what sticks. What stuck was a big mess.

After checking out the previous comments I see that I am not alone in my views of this movie. On the first watching I was confused and disappointed. So after watching it a second time I took some time and tried to figure out what was wrong. The comments here only helped to confirm my conclusions. Have you ever bought a plastic model of a car, opened the box and visualized what it would look like completed? Now imagine giving that model to a five year old and let them put it together unsupervised. When it's done you will have a fairly good idea what Ghost Town looks like. Each scene seemed to have all of the basic requirements to create tension, build the story, and advance the character arc. I could see all of the individual small parts just like looking at a plastic model straight out of the box. And just like that model I could envision the final product fully assembled. But for Ghost Town that is where everything falls apart. You can "see" the whole story, which is not overly complicated or deep. But it looks like it was assembled by a five year old. That creates a great deal of frustration on the part of the viewer. It is one thing to watch a bad movie. It is quite another to watch what appears to be a good movie put together with little understanding of plot, timing, or character development. Watching each scene you can "feel" where it is supposed to go, but each time the editing sends it way off track. Like a previous comment I suggest that you never let the editor near another movie again. At least not until he goers back to school and learns how a movie should be assembled. Otherwise you end up with a plastic model that doesn't quite match the box cover art!

Call out the editor at high noon and put a bullet through his heart. This is the most confusing movie I have ever watched.. I had to watch it five times before I was able to put things together; who was who, and what was going on. The scenes seem to be placed in a confusing manner on purpose. The line between past events and present is crossed far too often and at very inopportune times. The constant image of Suzie pops up in a random way that never furthers the story. The individual scenes are fine in and of themselves. They make sense internally. But when you put them together in this crazy quilt way you end up with a mosaic of images that when you step back to take in as a whole, becomes quite incomprehensible. My advice would be to download this on your laptop and edit it yourself. I figure a couple of hours and you would have a fairly descent story that would be easy to follow.

This feature is about as exciting as a plate of tripe. Overall I'd say even though an edit could possibly fix some of the incredibly draggy and droopy-dog scenes, on other hand if a film drags and drags and droops and drags and droops and droop-drags, then the director either did not direct according to the script, or there was no script, or the script is as bad as the film.Perhaps if this was sliced to tiny bits, if each 20 minute scene is cut down to the actual 2 minutes or less of actual informational footage, then maybe we'll have a story that interests me. Now that I read a few of the oher reviews, I see I am not alone in this, and the long scenes with no cuts just does not work here.Hitchcock tried it in Rope, but Hitchcock is Hitchcock and Rope has some astounding things in it. But as this film stands, I am not interested.The first thing I watch, if a film has extras, are those extras. Well, the extras in this film seem to be a bunch of self absorbed people patting each other on their self-absorbed backs and making jokes which exclusively exclude the viewer.As Viewers, we are alienated, even from the "Making Of" featurettes on the DVD release I found. One featurette was a very long clip of two guys talking to each other and we have no idea what they are discussing except that they use a few cursewords here and there.The inclusion of greats Rance Howard (Ronny Howard's Pop) and Renee O'Conner (Gabriella from Xena Warrior Princess) does not help matters any. We really don't have any idea what is going on at all. I'd say, before editing this, first write a script and then decide on a way of filming it, because this attempt seems to be a struggle and the struggle fails. I got about 15 minutes into the film and was forced to shut it off- To quote Dennis Weaver from the 1958 Orson Welles film "Touch of Evil"It's a Mess! It's a stinkin Mess!"so I must say: "It's a Mess! It's a stinkin Mess!"Independent Film is one of my interests... I would be interested in this, but for the fact that there is practically nothing there that is interesting. Nothing validates the effort I made in obtaining this film.When I obtain a film to view, I expect it to be worth the rental fee at Blockbuster. That said, I did not rent it from there. This film may be found at Amazon.com, and I do not feel that the $18.00 price tag matches the value of the film contained in the DVD.(Edit) Ahhh- I see at least 1 person does not agree with me. Your perogative, but that does not change the fact that this film is wanting in several hundred ways.