SADDLE MOUNTAIN ROUNDUP (1942) - Dir. S. Roy Luby

Following on from the Tolstoyesque chronicles of Bib and Stiv, I'm going to keep this brief. Monday just gone was the inaugural meeting of the meQal anna's B-movie club. We gathered on a rooftop of Beauty and the Beast in Steelhead City at 7pm SLT. That's 3am GMT, on a schoolnight, so don't expect to see me there week in week out, but I'm glad I made it along for the opening feature.



SADDLE MOUNTAIN ROUNDUP (1941) stars Ray "Crash" Corrigan, John "Dusty" King and Max "Alibi" Terhune as the Range Busters, a trio of cowboys bringing truth, justice and well-pressed shirts to a wild, lawless and crumpled west.

The Range Busters were the brainchild of Corrigan, who had starred alongside Terhune as two of the Three Mesquiteers, the original 'trigger trio' and a hugely successful Republic Pictures series dating from September 1936 onwards. Corrigan and Terhune left Republic in 1939 over salary issues and came together with producer George Weeks and Monogram Pictures to bring no fewer than twenty-four Range Busters movies to the screen between the summer of 1940 and the fall of 1943. That's one film every fifty days. I mean, how good a movie can you really make in fifty days? (Answers in a comment please.)



Of course, it would be churlish to make a twenty-first century critique of SADDLE MOUNTAIN ROUNDUP, but that's precisely what I'm going to do. It's awful. It's an awful film in 2007, and it was an awful film sixty-five years ago. It may have seemed less awful in the context of a world preoccupied with the beginnings of the second world war, but it wasn't. Not when you consider that it's theatrical release was preceded, but a matter of weeks, by that of Orson Welles' CITIZEN KANE; that it has the narrative complexity of an early episode of Scooby Doo; that one of the film's least wooden performances comes from a wise-cracking ventriloquist's dummy called Elmer Sneezeweed.

Like KANE, ROUNDUP centres upon a world-weary old man whose wealth and influence has brought him only worry, misfortune, and, ultimately, a sad and pathetic demise. The figure in question is not an eccentric media magnate in the mould of William Randolph Hearst or Howard Hughes, but Magpie Harper, a geriatric rancher who dies at the hands of a money-grabbing killer known as The Raven. The Range Busters soon arrive to solve the mystery of Harper's death, bring his murderer to justice, and make safe the prospects of his highly eligible young dependent Nancy, not to mention those of Fang Way, Harper's bewildered Chinese manservant.



Nothing in the basic storyline of SADDLE MOUNTAIN ROUNDUP strays into the undergrowth of unpredictability. The film's sublime moments tend to revolve morearound "Dusty" King's musical numbers - he finds time to sing such classics as The Doggone Doggie Got Away and That Little Green Valley of Mine - and the presence of Max "Alibi" Terhune's saddle-bag sidekick, Elmer Sneezeweed.

Max and Elmer's partnership originated from the early thirties, when vaudeville performer Terhune became master of ceremonies of radio's WLS Barn Dance. When Republic Pictures expressed an interest in having Terhune star in one of their earlier westerns he made it a condition of his involvement that Elmer would star with him. Republic, showing what must have seemed to Max like a prosaic fixation with reality, questioned whether or not ventriloquism had in fact existed in the wild west. Terhune in turn, showing a visionary appreciation of the fact that people - audiences and studios alike - will swallow anything if it suits them to do so. He convinced the production execs at Republic not only that ventriloquism was very much a reality in the formative years of modern America, but that it would not seem utterly ludicrous for a hard-talking, gun-toting, cattle-steering vigilante to have a little talking timber chum riding side saddle.

So it is that we are treated to some unlikely moments in the rich tapestry of cinematic history. At one point during a chase on horseback, with the thunderous piano crescendo rising ever higher in the background, Elmer's hair is shot off. Later, shortly after the Raven is unmasked - yes, it's Magpie Harper's scheming lawyer Dan Freeman, and he would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those pesky Range Busters - Elmer, to use the parlance of the time, 'gets the girl'. We are left to imagine the anticlimax she experiences upon discovering the her new beau is but a wooden dummy, with a clothes peg for a cock. It is probably much the same sense of anticlimax as that with which the credits of SADDLE MOUNTAIN ROUNDUP roll, and that with which this review ends.

ALTERED (2006) - Dir. Eduardo Sanchez

If you want to know about the real curse of the Blair Witch, Ed Sanchez is living through it right now. Almost a decade on from the release of directorial debut THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (TBWP), costing $35,000 to produce and grossing over $250,000,000 worldwide, nothing Sanchez touches will escape critical comparison with this defining work.

In fairness to we critics, Sanchez isn't exactly making it difficult for us. ALTERED, his new film, sees a clutch of guys (and a token gal) holed up in some rustic corner of the great American outback, at odds with an unearthly tormentor whose insidious presence turns our protagonists gradually against one another. Sound vaguely familiar? Would it help if I told you that this is where the similarity ends, that ALTERED trades the narrative spontaneity and sinister, suggestive power of TBWP for a deft little script and some nifty special effects? Probably not.

There are other, more superficial distinctions. In ALTERED the villain of the piece is not a witch but a visitor from outer space, an alien who - in a simple and satisfying reversal of roles - is quickly abducted by three gun-toting Florida hicks. We soon learn that this is by way of retribution for some transgression that took place fifteen years ago, resulting in the death of a childhood friend and the ruin of each of their respective backwater lives.


Duke (Brad William Henke), Cody (Paul Boyington-McCarthy Jr) and Otis (Michael C. Williams) whisk the alien off to a lock-up owned by their friend Wyatt (Adam Kaufman) and his girlfriend Hope (Catherine Mangan), and try to lie low on the off-chance that none of its extra terrestrial travelling companions will come looking for it. However, as the night wears on the abductee begins to manipulate its captors, turning them against one another and bending them to its will, we move inexorably towards a spectacular... nerve-shredding... finale?

Ok, ok, so I've only seen the first 57 minutes (see 'My first time at the drive-in' to find out why). And maybe I'm doing Sanchez a terrible injustice, having the temerity to review his movie without watching it in its entirety. Or maybe it's you, my beloved readers, who are being sold short, and ALTERED comes apart in the last half hour in a way that has to be seen to be believed. At least the latter might explain the distributor's decision to send ALTERED it straight-to-DVD. With 57 minutes under my belt I find this decision incomprehensible (as, it would seem, does Sanchez - who, it must be hoped, has watched the film in its entirety).


True, ALTERED has a slightly glossy made-for-TV feel more akin to an uberseries like INVASION, exemplified by the presence of the assured and implausibly attractive Kaufman, a veteran of Steven Spielberg's TAKEN. But far worse movies than this have mustered a theatrical release, however limited, and none of them could boasted of having been brought to you by one of the directors of TBWP.

Make no mistake, ALTERED is a B-movie, but not the C-movie TBWP would have been if Sanchez and his 'crew' hadn't struck improvised gold as they led their bewildered 'cast' a merry dance through Maryland forest. Confined by the strictures of script and special effects budget, ALTERED is the work of a man feeling his way towards something like the normal film-making process. When he arrives, he might bless us with a grade-A feature, something with the power and production values of Ridley Scott's ALIEN or John Carpenter's THE THING, something compact, claustrophic, performance-driven. Failing this, falling victim to his own preposterously front-loaded success, he may come to be regarded as one of cinema's one-trick ponies, albeit one of the cruellest and most brilliant tricks ever played.