Smoking Guns (1934), by Alan James

How much of this "joke" is predicated on prejudice? How much of my amusement is derived from the simple fact that, even after dedicating a quite a lot of words to talking about them, I'm still not used to B-Westerns completely and utterly blowing me out of the water? 2017 is a year for walking against the wind in many things--so it's healthy for me to go on insisting that these movies have some sort of value. I've encountered few fellow trashsters who have found the same sort of passion I have for digging through the tedious and repetitious tides of old '30s cowboy flicks in search of gold. But I'm gonna do my part to make it a thing, damnit! Why should '80s slashers, '70s roughies, and '60s sexploiters have all the fun? At this point I've cast aside my old superstitions. Smoking Guns cements, now and forever, that Westerns can contain the same levels of perverse oddity that afflict the weirdest movies I've featured on this site.

Ken Masters is a young man who has been accused of the murder of Hank Stone's father Silas--however, Ken knows that Hank himself is the killer. When he confronts Stone with that knowledge, he is driven out of town, and he hides himself out in the Amazon rainforest (as you do). A ranger by the name of Dick Evans tracks Ken out to the jungle and arrests him--Ken is only too happy to return to civilization, as he wanted to stay back in town and face Stone far and square. As Evans takes Ken back through the jungle, however, he contracts malaria, and is forced to let Ken shoot their handcuffs off to go find help after it transpires that he's lost the key. Fortunately, Ken is an honorable man, and not only gives the ranger his gun back, but returns with a canoe as promised. Not so fortunately, their voyage down the Amazon becomes sheer horror when Evans decides to open fire into a horde of crocodiles, which sends them after the two. Evans is bitten on the leg, leading to gangrene; Ken knows how to operate but rather than face the knife, Evans kills himself.

Then the movie gets really weird...yeah, it actually gets weirder. Somehow, Ken gets it in his head that he and the dead ranger are dead ringers for each other, despite the fact that their actors have zero resemblance. He returns to civilization disguised as Evans, and runs into the awkward fact that Evans had a girlfriend, the somewhat improbably-named Alice Adams. It doesn't take long before "Dick" reveals that he's rather ill-suited for impersonating a dead man in front of his loved ones, as he's forgotten Alice's nickname of "Kitten," and praises music the real Dick hated while disliking that which he liked. Still, she takes the truth, when he comes forth with it, surprisingly well. From there on out, Ken uses every advantage he gets to close in on his man.

Much to my dismay, the majority of Smoking Guns' goodness is packed into its first half. The second half of the film is a typical B-Western, and not one of the very good ones...long shots of people creeping around in the dark, broken up by protracted, foot-dragging gunfights--and that's saying nothing of the obligatory square dancing scene. Oh, and the racism. I really don't want to dwell on this, so I'll just say that there is a black butler named "Cinders" who Mantan Morelands the hell out of every scene he's in. And because he's in so many scenes, you'll probably want to skip most of this second half with the assurance that it's a '30s Western, and good triumphs in the end. In-universe. In out-universe terms, good did not triumph, because they forced an actor to completely demean himself for the mild amusement of the white audience. So don't be afraid to ditch the second half if you want.

But man, that first half. Was there really so much demand for movies set in the Amazon in 1934 that they needed to spend a good chunk of the story there? Was it impossible, in the days of the Old West, to contract malaria and gangrene within the confines of the United States? Maybe it's not the Amazon...maybe it's just Florida. But I'm pretty positive it is meant to be somewhere in South America. I am absolutely not complaining about any of this. The South America sequence is entirely contingent on a hilarious amount of improbably bad luck for our characters stacked on top of some of the weirdest passes of the Idiot Ball I've ever seen. Keep in mind, we go straight from Dick Evans confidently arresting Ken to his decline into malaria, with the swiftness of the dissolve implying very little time has passed. Evans spends part of this scene laughing insanely as the disease drives him out of his mind. It's an arresting composition, giving us the impression that he was able to make it all the way out here by himself just fine, but the second he joins up with Ken, he starts going insane. This is built up by the fact that he trusts Ken, a fucking outlaw, enough to hand him his gun! It's not like he really needs much persuading to go all buddy-buddy with Ken, as they speak amiably to each other upon first meeting, and he eats Ken's food, even though Ken could've easily rubbed an Amazonian frog on that meat with the intent of prying the handcuff keys off the ranger's cold corpse. Evans' fate is ultimately his own fault as he shows not a single shred of spine in the face of animals who were gonna leave him alone if he didn't fucking shoot them. It's almost impossible to believe this man was a cop. He must have traveled to the Amazon in a goddamn air-conditioned rickshaw.

Then, Ken seriously overestimates his ability to impersonate a man he barely knew. What's more, the deception generally works! People believe that he is Evans, despite having no beard, a different hairstyle, and, let's just face it, a completely different face. And poor Dick Evans, for all the suffering he went through in the course of just doing his job (well, and being an idiot), is completely forgotten, as Ken steals his identity, his horse, and, ultimately, his girlfriend. If there's a theme to Smoking Guns, it's that if you are noble, you will have a good ending, unless your name is Dick Evans. There's such a strange passion and intensity to the direction and action of all these improbabilities that it feels deliberate--almost wholly detached from the absurd cheapness that affected many of the big studios during the Great Depression. This movie was made by Universal, meaning it was one of the better Westerns out there.

And that shows. Contrast that with The Phantom Cowboy or The Irish Gringo and you'll see that there was at least a little money behind Smoking Guns. And yet, the movie had to be on the market fast, damnit. I don't what they were thinking. I just feel, somehow, that they were thinking. Consequentially, Smoking Guns is an essential B-Western, second only to The Phantom Cowboy by the depressing anti-merit of replacing Ptomaine Pete with racism. Fast-forward when you feel like it and keep your eyes peeled for the good bits.

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The Rider of the Skulls (1965), by Alfredo Salazar

This is not a B-Western, I swear! A B-Western, as far as I know, is usually defined as being a Western made between the '20s and '50s which was not an A-feature. And, usually, the B-Western proper is bred only in the United States. The Western market changed after the 1950s to a more Italian focus, but The Rider of the Skulls is a Mexican production. And, like a lot of horror films made in Mexico over the last hundred years (to say nothing of the other movies written and directed by Alfredo Salazar), Rider of the Skulls is stunningly offbeat, being probably one of the weirdest Weird Westerns out there.

A werewolf prowls the Mexican countryside, under the control of a witch. He wears a flannel shirt, as is required by all Mexican werewolves, and his mask is pretty goddamn amazing. Eventually, one of the families subjected to the horror of the werewolf--including Don Luis and his wife, plus their son Perico and cowardly butler Cleofas--encounter the Rider of the Skulls, a masked gunfighter whose parents were killed by bandits. He patrols Mexico in search of supernatural evils to dispatch, such as the witch and the werewolf. The witch reveals to the Rider that the werewolf is Don Luis, after she shows off her abilities to summon a zombie, and the Rider is forced to kill him. (If you think it's a spoiler that I reveal that werewolf's identity, well...let's just say that if you want to hide the fact that your freshly introduced character is a werewolf, don't have their wife introduce them by saying that they recently became mysteriously ornery.) He adopts the now-orphaned Perico, as Don Luis killed his wife whilst werewolfing, and he takes on Cleofas as his comic relief sidekick.

The movie doesn't end with the death of the werewolf. In fact, we're just getting started...because now our heroic trio has to take down a vampire! This vampire has an even more amazing mask, and transforms into the fakest movie bat of all time--faker, even, than The Devil Bat. He seeks a girl named Maria to be his companion, and he nearly succeeds in turning her into another of the undead before he too is dispatched by the Rider.

But even that isn't the end of the movie, as the Rider, Perico, and Cleofas discover in the next town they ride up on is haunted by the goddamn Headless Horseman! (Little south of Tarrytown, isn't it?) And best of all, the Headless Horseman's animate severed head is represented by the most amazing mask we've seen so far. Said head turns up in the hands of a woman, whom it beseeches, "Please return me to my body." Upon having his noggin restored, however, the Horseman makes the mistake of cursing out God Himself...not even his robed skeleton minions are that dumb. And you'd better believe that the fury of the Lord comes through the blade of the Rider of the Skulls!

Anthology films are usually dangerous territory, as a lot of critics will tell you. For some reason there's a propensity for anthologies to always have that one segment that fucks up really, really badly, and as such we critical folk walk into them with trepidation. But I dunno...it seems like I've had a lot of really good luck with anthology films recently. Night Train to Terror was a glorious mess, Alien Zone was better than I expected, and my rewatch of Tales from the Quadead Zone went swimmingly. The Rider of the Skulls is definitely an anthology film, and that works tremendously to its benefit. An anthology film, I've realized, can theoretically pack more trashy goodness into its runtime by merit of having the chance to stack its craziness on top of itself. Just as you catch your breath from what came before, something new comes along and plows over you like a bullet train. This is yet another movie that I can almost review just by summarizing it.

If I had to say anything about it to give, y'know, an actual critical opinion, it would be that I really appreciate how it plays with the sort of stories it's dealing with. I can't say that I have ever seen a werewolf, for example, who transforms by first turning into a skeleton, and then being built back up into wolf form. Also, it's really nice to see a werewolf movie that remembers that there usually aren't thirty full moons in a row. The vampire meanwhile has that mask, which makes him look like a bat/human hybrid, but he also spends a lot of his screentime trying to defeat his foes by punching them. And as I mentioned before, the Headless Horseman has his two skeleton sidekicks, which is an interesting addition to the Headless Horseman story. It makes him feel more portentous, and I'm always happy to see skeletons in movies.

Probably cut from episodes of a kid's TV show, or maybe three other movies, The Rider of the Skulls is a three-headed nightmare of a Western, feeling like what would happen if the Blue Demon or El Santo started riding a horse and carrying a six-shooter. Deconstructing its own tropes, but only accidentally, the movie shows the power of low-budget Mexican horror, being one of the best examples of such that I've seen. Make it yours.

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Mystery Ranch (1932) and Mystery Ranch (1934), by David Howard and Bernard B. Ray

This review exists out of spite, in a way. One of the films I wanted to look into before this weird B-Western craze I've been having burnt itself out was listed in my records simply as "Mystery Ranch (1932)." I also memorized a brief plot description I'd stumbled across, which was that it was some sort of Gothic Western with an evil piano player, and that it starred George O'Brien. Curious, then, that every version of the film I found online credited the star as Tom Tyler, each featuring a plot which in no way had an evil piano player, much less Gothic elements. Then I spotted my error: this was the Mystery Ranch from 1934, a completely different film. It sure sucked, then, that there were several online editions of the movie that listed the details of the 1932 film in the description, a fault replicated as well on several movie databases. I love and hate dealing with movies made within a few years of each other with the same title--it can be rough spending a long time searching for a movie, especially if you thought that you already found it...and especially if finding that first wrong film was a challenge to begin with. But then again, I also get to do double reviews like this one.

Mystery Ranch ('32) is ultimately the story of Jane Emory, a wealthy heiress being held hostage at her own ranch by Henry Steele, her late father's deranged business partner. He intends not only to hang onto the ranch by any means necessary but to marry Jane whether she wants it or not. He spends a lot of time brooding and playing ominous piano pieces, because he is Charles "Ming the Merciless" Middleton. In his employ is a deadly mute Apache whose name, of all things, is Muto...because of course it is. Enter Bob Sanborn, an undercover Texas Ranger who learns about Steele's plot and intends to stop it. He is confronted with peril along the way, including the kidnapping of Jane's English comic relief butler Artie, who is sentenced to death by bucking bronco. This all leads to Bob putting a posse together and leading a siege on the ranch in a scene which makes the entire film.

This Mystery Ranch is vastly different from its 1934 counterpart, but it is an exceptional B-Western in its own right because one simple detail: it's actually a really good movie. There isn't deep characterization, but it has a more expansive world than most B-Westerns. That is to say that the world it presents feels alive, and not like a movie set loaded up with matte paintings. For one thing, the movie actually uses locations, as far as I can tell, so it's made in the authentic American Southwest. Y'know, like A-Westerns! There are a lot of clever twists and turns, and the dialogue and camerawork are snappy enough to keep you engaged. Even ignoring the 55 minute runtime, it'll be done before you know it. I don't know how well you could really describe it as a "Gothic" film, though, because while it does have an emphasis on shadow, and the villains have their creepy moments, it's much more focused on traditional Western action. This doesn't spoil it at all, I should say. I will avoid giving away any more on it--definitely check it out if you get a chance, though you'll probably have to track down a bootleg.

Mystery Ranch ('34) opens with one of the most bizarre scenes I've ever seen put to film. It's this weird over the top melodramatic parody of Western tropes, where the cowboy has to rescue a lady from a bad marriage. "Marry muh!" insists the big-mustachioed villain. "Marry muh, or I'll tear yuh limb from pieces!" It turns out this is just a scene or representation thereof from one of the Western pulps of writer Bob Morris, whose father disapproves of his profession. Bob gets a letter from a town out West which claims to be the real Wild West--they're fans of his novels but think he could improve on his accuracy, so they want him to come out and walk the walk as it were, as a real cowboy. It turns out the whole thing is a gag: the town is just as modern as anywhere else, but they intend to fake exciting Western scenes to give their favorite writer some more inspiration. As it turns out, Bob can handle his dukes, by reining in some wild horses and socking the crap out of some toughs sent to haze him. (This town doesn't care about his assaulting their citizens, I should say.) That'll be useful when at last it turns out an old-style hold-up Bob witnesses is for real. Bob tries to trick the tricksters, so everyone gets mixed up when the real theft is revealed. As in all Westerns, there's only way for Bob to clear his name: bring in the bad guys.

It goes without saying that this Mystery Ranch's uniqueness arises from how meta it is for a film this early. I'm sure that the Western parody is nearly as old as the Western genre itself--after all, there have been stories about the American West ever since a bunch of German started writing adventure books about it back in the 1840s. (Yes, the first famous Westerns were written by Germans, many of whom never visited the Americas. It's a pretty remarkable history, actually, if you have the time to read about it.) But that opening scene is pretty brutal in its satire, exposing how hollow and false a lot of the stuff the masses consumed could be. There's an interplay between how comic and soapy these hack writers make the West, contrasted with how the West was in real life--a brutal place, but also sometimes an ordinary place. A boring place. In a sense, these Westerners want to make fun of Morris and other writers exoticizing the West, and reducing it to a series of tropes, while also not taking themselves overly seriously. What makes this stuff good is that it's played lightly. There's a lot to be learned with how this film deals with layers of fiction.

Pretentiousness aside, it's also pretty good at giving us characters who we can like. The acting isn't nearly as good as it was in Mystery Ranch ('32), but this does contain the miraculous reappearance of Jimmy Aubrey, aka Ptomaine Pete. In the prologue set in Bob's story, he plays Pigsty Pete, and in "real life" he's the guy on the end of the noose when Bob stumbles across a lynching the town stages for him. His presence adds to the tongue-in-cheek nature of the whole thing, and in fact, it muddles the odd performance Aubrey gives in The Phantom Cowboy even further. I didn't even think such a thing was possible.

In the end, both Mystery Ranches are treats, and that they are such in vastly different ways is a treat in itself. One of them is a seriously well-done affair with progressive cinematography and clever performances. The other is a baffling, amusing, and deeply charming exploration of the tropes of a genre only then in the middle of its adolescence. This month has been a fun adventure for me in the world of the low-budget Western, and what sad is that there were still some I had to leave out. Maybe someday we'll saddle up again and visit the debauched worlds of Smoking Guns or Rawhide Terror. Now those are tales to tell...

The Irish Gringo (1935), by William C. Thompson and Pat Carlyle

While Sinister Cinema calls The Phantom Cowboy the worst B-Western in their collection, they call this one the best worst B-Western they have. Well, after the travesty that was The Phantom Cowboy,  I wanted more, and I'm glad that The Irish Gringo delivers the goods. I still can't get over how weird these B-Westerns could turn out to be, when not long ago I viewed this entire genre with nothing but disgust and fear. The Irish Gringo is not nearly as weird or entertaining as Phantom Cowboy, but its raw, uncut cheapness will provide enough belly laughs for you and your whole family for minutes on end. It epitomizes the soul of what cheapness meant to the mid-1930s, but there's also a weird heart lent to the project, even if that heart doesn't always manifest onscreen.

A gang run by the slimy Ace Lewis is running around torturing and killing people who know the location of the Lost Dutchman Mine. Eventually, it turns out that the map is written on a shirt belonging to an old man who has a creeeepy relationship with his granddaughter Sally. When Sally goes on the run with the shirt after her granddad is gunned down, she runs into the Irish Gringo and his two sidekicks, Pancho and Buffalo. By coincidence, the Gringo is already involved with Ace Lewis, as Lewis wants to get a piece of the Gringo's crush Anita. Never mind that Anita is already engaged to a man named Jimmy, and that the lovely Carlotta pines for the Gringo, even if he just views her as a sister. Only by his wit and his reflexes can the Gringo lead us to one of the most hilariously anticlimatic resolutions of all time.

The first thing that strikes you about The Irish Gringo is the idiosyncracies of the script. This is pretty pulpy as far as B-Westerns go, and that means it's a good thing for me. An example of some of the gangster banter: "He's dead! Which one of you bumped him off?" "Me, boss--aw, gee, I just couldn't help it!" This sort of proto-camp carries on into Pancho teasing Buffalo for becoming "a mother," since Buffalo's the one who ends up taking care of Sally the most (thus making him the most likeable character). But the best dialogue emerges as a result of the awkward exchanges Anita and the Gringo shares about the Gringo's heritage. A big deal is made out of the fact that he's half-Mexican, half-Irish, though nothing story-wise emerges from it. I think it's meant to make the movie more romantic--the Gringo talks about how romantic both Mexico and Ireland are--but to modern audiences it's more likely to come across as much ado about nothing. The amount of time the film dedicates to this sort of talk starts to become surrealist humor after a point.

Now, the hero of this film is supposed to be the Gringo, but honestly, I think it's Sally. Sally endures a lot of shit, starting with the creepy grandpa I mentioned above. The old man spends a lot of time saying the same things over and over again to his granddaughter, usually while gripping her shoulders a little too hard. He also undresses her a lot, and never seems to give her adequate clothing. After she escapes him his killers, she spends most of the rest of her screentime being carried around like a sack of potatoes by the Gringo and his crew, who ignore her screams of terror. I know that kids have always gotten the short end of the stick as far as having their wishes respected, but both the Gringo and Pancho seem like cold sociopaths after her screaming reaches its fifth minute. Buffalo is different, because he is competent and has a soul. Note that Buffalo has little to do with that cheapout ending that so throws the honor and integrity of our heroes even further into question; Buffalo is an honest man, even if his coworkers aren't.

But like I said, this movie does have heart. Pat Carlyle, who also the plays the Gringo, technically made this movie twice before, as Call of the Coyote and The Tia Juana Kid. He must have seen something in the story, or at least in the character of the Gringo, aka Don Adios and El Capitan. I don't know what exactly, and I may never know, but for Carlyle's sake I hope he was satisfied with this version. I'd definitely like to track down the other two if it's possible, 'cause Hell, maybe they're even worse! Overall, if you want to see what is the goofiest of the bad B-Westerns I've seen so far, this is the way to go. There are plenty of little bad movie notes I didn't touch on all throughout the runtime, like the weird closeups of faces, or the letter that's written in a Southern accent. Saddle up!

Big Calibre (1935), by Robert N. Bradbury

Good words to live by: "Produced by Sam Katzman." In the Golden Age of Hollywood, the Poverty Row studios were factories of raw creativity. Sure, they clipped, borrowed, and ransacked ideas and cliches from much better films, and were not unafraid of dipping their toes into exploitation, but when your goal is to crank out films fast you're willing to put anything in a movie. Sam Katzman, who produced through Monogram, the most famous of the Poverty Row studios, brought us Bela Lugosi's Monogram Nine, and consequently I have faith that there's gold to be found in many of the other movies he put his name to. Big Calibre is one of Katzman's Westerns, and while it was not a Monogram movie, it has the feel of one to an amusing extent. I suddenly now have a strong desire to start digging through the B-Westerns of the '30s and '40s to see if there's anything else like this. God fucking help me.

Mr. Neal of the Triple N Ranch is killed in a gas attack. Admittedly, it is partially his own fault, since he does all he can to stick his head as far into the gas cloud as possible. His son Bob learns that the local chemist, Otto Zenz, is the murderer, but Zenz escapes Bob before the younger man can capture him. Admittedly, Bob isn't much of an angel of justice, being rather scrawny and unobstrusive, so the hunched, lean scientist's escape isn't that impressive. However, Bob doesn't give up, and he and his requisite Elderly Comic Sidekick eventually find themselves in a small town where a woman named June Bowers lives. June and her father are deep in debt to a fellow with huge glasses and Richard Kiel teeth named Gadski, and in order to keep her property June robs a truck and frames Bob for it. Around this time, however, June's father is kidnapped and seemingly murdered, and naturally Bob is blamed for this as well. The twist ending will surprise no one (it's one of the most transparent "twists" I've seen in a long while), but the final fight is worth it.

This movie gradually gains its weirdness, starting with its fusion of the Western with the Lugosi-esque horror mystery. Mr. Gadski's appearance is jarring and astonishingly fake, and so when he enters the screen any seriousness the film had quickly dissipates. Then we get the scene where Rusty is reunited with Arrabella, June's cook, who was apparently his "childhood sweetheart." Arrabella has been pining over him all this time, and given the ages the characters are supposed to be, this has been a period of anywhere from thirty to forty years. The other characters gleefully leave Rusty alone with her, as if she isn't about to kill him with an axe for spurning her.

But then we get to the weirdest scene in the film, the hoedown--a sequence which goes on for a disturbingly long time and only gets more nightmarish the more time goes on. It's chaperoned by a particularly ugly fellow in a top hat, who has an assistant named Elmer, who may be a zombie. As in, he looks and acts like a living corpse. So much is unexplained in this scene and it gets even worse when Bob and Rusty show up in disguise. Both are wearing masks: Bob has some sort of Phantom of the Opera/Michael Myers number, while Rusty wears something that makes him look like Ortega from The Incredible Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies! There's so much to look for in this scene, and really, so much to look for in the movie as a whole.

It does manage to drag a little bit, even at 58 minutes, but for my first adventure into Golden Age B-westerns, I found this to be a fun ride. Here's to more of the same sometime soon!