Director and FX man John Carl Buechler doesn't have to do much in order to terrify me; the sight of his name in the credits alone is enough to strike fear into my heart.<br /><br />His lamentable straight-to-video output in the 80s sat on the bottom shelf of the horror section at my local rental shop; twenty years later, and his DVDs occupy the same space. It seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same. You can rely on old JCB to serve up dreck, whatever the format and regardless of advances in movie-making technology.<br /><br />In this contemptible offering, a bunch of friends travel to a remote town where they discover the secret treasure hoard of Jeremiah Stone, AKA the forty-niner—an evil, claim-jumping, cannibalistic miner who caused havoc in the mid-1800s. Before his death, Jeremiah cursed anyone who should find his gold, and it's not long before the pick-axe wielding killer is back, bumping off the hapless treasure seekers.<br /><br />With its dreadful script, unimpressive make-up effects and Scooby-Doo style villain, 'The Curse of the Forty-Niner' is par for the course for Buechler. Only genre stalwarts Keren Black, Richard Lynch and John Phillip Law lend this movie any credibility whatsoever, with the rest of the cast giving performances ranging from bad to awful (although I'll forgive Alexandra Ford, who is a complete hottie).<br /><br />Even fans of bad schlock horror will be disappointed since most of the women keep their clothes on, and a lot of the deaths occur off-screen (which is probably not such a bad thing since the on-screen deaths are pathetic).<br /><br />'The Curse of the Forty-Niner' is another in a long list of duds for John Carl.