Aman Wesley Snipes is a ruthless gunslinger who stalks a desolate desert frontier, where a group of disfigured people have gathered near a railroad. He moves with cold precision, and in a brutal moment, he kills one of the dead and rips out the head and spine from the corpse, a grisly display of power that foreshadows the film’s eerie rules about life, death, and vengeance.
Not far away, another grim tableau unfolds: a band of criminals waiting to be transported. Aman arrives and cuts through the guards with ease, freeing one inmate named Fabulos Riley Smith while the rest of the gang is hustled toward a distant settlement where they are slated to hang. Their journey, however, is interrupted when a bizarre group led by a skinless man named Kansa [Kevin Howarth] erupts the settlement in a brutal raid, slaughtering many of its inhabitants and leaving a trail of carnage in the desert heat.
The story unfolds through stark flashbacks that reveal a shared, brutal history: the same outlaw gang had once raped Aman’s lover. Aman hunted them down and killed them while they were imprisoned and powerless. As he fled, his mother, a nun, broke her covenant with God by sacrificing herself to save him, a choice that curses Aman for life. That curse manifests in a terrifying way: anyone killed by Aman returns from the dead as undead, except for the death of Kansa’s son, who remains truly gone. The undead shed their skin after a week, stripping it from the living to wear as replacements, and the only sure way to end them is to destroy their brains.
Aman and Fabulos, while visiting a woman and child, narrowly survive an undead assault. Four attackers are slain, but Fabulos is badly wounded, and Aman makes the heartbreaking decision to kill him so that he may return as undead and continue the fight.
Kansa, having donned a fresh skin, arrives at a secret temple with his two undead followers, taking hostage the beautiful Angel [Tanit Phoenix], whom they captured earlier. Kansa clings to a dangerous belief that the temple holds a method to resurrect his dead son, but that hope proves to be a false trail. The pursuit continues as Aman and the undead Fabulos close in, culminating in Aman’s decisive strike that ends Kansa and his followers. He departs, bearing Kansa’s head in his grasp, while Angel’s pale, seductive presence lingers, as she nonchalantly moves toward Fabulos.
