Fango heard from Michael Sharpe (pictured), star of the just-wrapped zombie Western flick DEVIL’S CROSSING. The indie film, currently deep in postproduction, was written and directed by Ryan Gary and tells a postapocalyptic tale of survival in a new Wild West.

The story centers on one angry dude, William Shadrach (Sharpe), who sold his soul to the devil some 235 years earlier and has been killing for Satan’s minion ever since. Now Shadrach wants his soul back, and he ain’t foolin’ around. He arrives in the lawless town of Celestial to meet his nemesis—but this is no ordinary community. Everything has been nuked, the only thriving business is prostitution and the locals don’t take kindly to strangers—not to mention there are zombies about! What a mess.

Sharpe lets us know what we can expect as far as DEVIL’S CROSSING’s ghouls are concerned: “The look of the zombies and the way they move is not your basic type,” he tells Fango, and he clearly knows his undead categories. “In 28 DAYS LATER you have your fast zombies, and the George A. Romero ghouls are fairly slow. These zombies twitch. They are not fast but they are constantly twitching, and that kind of gives you the feeling that at any moment, they could become fast. They have their own shuffle that is unique to DEVIL’S CROSSING. And they are all charcoaled and burnt up from nuclear war.”

So did Sharpe, in playing Shadrach, get to kick some zombie ass? “There’s a scene where we barricade ourselves in an old saloon,” he responds, “but it has an upstairs where prostitution takes place, and the zombies end up busting through there to get in. Shadrach goes up himself and pretty much takes out over 35 zombies in a matter of minutes. And it gets a lot more intense that that! There’s a lot of hand-to-hand combat, and I use a samurai sword and a tomahawk, because Shadrach’s been doing this for so long—235 years—it’s like he has become the perfect killer.”

According to Sharpe, director Ryan Gary is an ex-Marine who choreographed all of DEVIL’S CROSSING’s stunts to perfection. “I spent a couple of days with him going over the sword, the tomahawk and fighting in general,” Sharpe recalls. “It was an amazing experience to see how many ways you can kill a person with your bare hands. It was scary when he was showing me this stuff.” Still, if one is going to fight the devil’s minion, a town full of angry postapocalyptic villagers and a horde of zombies, one best know what one is doing…

Sharpe says the producers are hoping to secure distribution and release the film, at least in the Southeast, by summer. Right now, Sharpe is very enthusiastic to see the finished cut. “I think it’ll be a fun ride for horror fans in general. It is a zombie film, but there’s a little bit of something for everyone in this movie.” The movie’s teaser trailer can be seen below, and its official website is here.

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