Route 666 (2001)
Lou Diamond Phillips and a band of other none-too-bright federal agents hauling mob informer Steven Williams to Los Angeles take a shortcut through the desert on a “condemned” road — Route 666, which is haunted by… well, sometimes they’re ghosts, and sometimes they’re zombies (with gray skin that looks like cracked mudpacks)… and you can’t kill them, although they do react when you shoot them (never mind that the feds learn early that guns don’t work against the zombie-ghosts; they shoot and shoot and shoot at them throughout the entire movie) …
Anyway, the ghost-zombies are the “restless spirits” of a chain gang of prisoners who, in 1967, were shot to death on the orders of the gang boss — who today is the local sheriff (L.Q. Jones) — and buried under the road they were working on. (Why? Who knows?)
Throughout the trip, Lou keeps having visions of the chain-gang massacre. (Why? Is he psychic? Who knows?) One of the ghost-zombies is his father, so maybe that has something to do with it.
To make a long story (and a really stupid movie) short, everybody except Phillips, Williams, and Lori Petty is either jackhammered to death by the ghost-zombies or shot to death by the sheriff (or by one of his two deputy-sons).
At the end, when Lou’s zombie-ghost-dad recognizes Lou as his son, he — Zombie-Ghost-Dad — kills all the rest of the zombie-ghosts in order to save Sonny-Boy. (Zombie-Ghost-Dad has trouble killing the last one, so Lou cuts his own hand and grasps Daddy-O’s to “feed” his strength. M’kay?) Finally, Zombie-Ghost-Dad stumbles off into the desert and disappears.
But we’re not done yet (sorry!). A scuffle amongst the remaining feds and the crooked cops has left only the sheriff alive — so Phillips, Petty, and Williams shoot him full of holes. Then the sheriff has a vision of a steamroller running over him, and the sheriff shoots and shoots and shoots at the ghost-steamroller, until he dies.
Phillips, Petty, and Williams walk off into the sunset together. And you realize that’s an hour and a half of your life you’re never going to get back.
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