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zogstar67 wrote:

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My interest in any old B-Western goes up at least 50% if they have those giant 30s hats.

THE RAWHIDE TERROR (1934, d. Bruce Mitchell and Jack Nelson)

The city fathers of the town of Red Dog are being sadistically menaced by a masked (? -- see screen caps) madman who lives in a hidden cave somewhere on Ghost Mountain. The murderer is mostly called "the Rawhide Killer" (so maybe a more accurate title for the movie would be "THE RAWHIDE KILLER TERROR") because he strangles victims with rawhide cords and leaves strips of rawhide at the scene of his crimes, at least one of which is scrawled with the message "Remember ten years ago." It turns out that, a decade before, these respectable bourgeois gentlemen of Red Dog were a band of violent outlaws who dressed up in bad Mardi Gras Indian drag and attacked, robbed, and murdered pioneer families; the Rawhide Terror was a child who survived such an attack against his family, and he grew up consumed with the need for vengeance against these now-upstanding Red Dog citizens.

This synopsis does nothing to convey the utter incoherence and lapses in logic that perforate this film. Throughout its 51 minutes, a handful of storylines start, stutter, and then disappear; characters drift in and out, some of whom are called by different names by the same characters at different times; the relationships that bind them together are not always clear or consistent. There's a lot of spirited horse-riding with vague purpose and direction by folks whose identities are not clear. Actors whose characters were killed off at the beginning turn up later on with fake mustaches as different characters.

I found this Security Pictures oddity on a Retromedia disc called "Creepy Cowboys." It was independently produced (and "presented") by Victor Adamson, the father of Al Adamson (the guy largely responsible for HORROR OF THE BLOOD MONSTERS; FIVE BLOODY GRAVES; DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN; BRAIN OF BLOOD; and BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR, among other delights), and it's hard to watch this bizarre mess without speculating about how the sins of the father may have been visited upon the son.

I think that I read in Turner & Price that the reason for the delirious continuity problems in THE RAWHIDE TERROR is that the movie was supposed to have been a 13-chapter serial (note the two directors listed in the credit, typical of the chapter-plays), but the money ran out and it was never completed. Adamson is supposed to have gathered up all the existing footage and stitched it together as a feature.

I'm inclined to buy into this hypothesis -- truly, there are edits here that would've stupefied Kuleshov. There are lots of cliffhanger cheats edited as action sequences that don't make a lot of sense in terms of the general flow of the storyline. And there are problems with sound, too -- there's one especially egregious scene where one of the good guys is trussed up in the back of a buckboard wagon that's heading towards the edge of the cliff that calls to mind the post-production sound-syncing problems of THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS or THE CREEPING TERROR.

Despite what would otherwise be the sublime majesty of such an absolute cinematic trainwreck, this movie is stale, dull, and decentered --- it doesn't even come close being a "so bad it's good" ROBOT MONSTER-style curiosity. The next time you hear some blowhard parroting the Medveds' jackassery about how PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE is "the worst movie ever made," grab him by the scruff of the neck and force him to watch THE RAWHIDE TERROR. That'll shut his yapper.

WILD HORSE PHANTOM (1944)

Here's a Neufeld/Newfield PRC pic starring Buster "King of the Wild West" Crabbe and Fuzzy St. John as a couple of do-gooder cowboys trying to recover $50,000 of "ranchers' money" stolen in a bank robbery-- somehow, the bank that got robbed is going to evict everyone from their farms unless the ranchers come up with the money to replace what was stolen (FDIC, anyone?), so Billy Carson (Crabbe) convinces the prison warden to let the convicted robber gang "escape" and lead him to the loot, which has been stashed in the haunted Wild Horse mine. The gang's ringleader, Link Daggett, can't find the money, so there's a lot of running around by good guys and bad guys in the search for the money, inside and outside of the mine, interrupted by Carson's trips to the bank in a bid to forestall the foreclosures.

Fuzzy St. John's irksome shenanigans dominate the show here-- Crabbe looks really awkward being the straight man--, but I'm sure that there are those who think that such things are funny. And the phantom of the Wild Horse Mine is a big letdown.

But it's got the Devil Bat in it! Yes, there's more Devil Bat in WILD HORSE PHANTOM than in THE DEVIL BAT'S DAUGHTER-- the bat lives in one of the mine's tunnels and goes after Fuzzy with a vengeance though it is clear that he is not using aftershave on the delicate part of his neck. This movie is a Western set in the 1940s, so it would be easy for viewers to amuse themselves by letting their minds wander in a way that transmorgifies WILD HORSE PHANTOM into a wacky sequel of the THE DEVIL BAT.

The Devil Bat stirs, eyes a-glow.

Look out!