Great Wacky Western
Comedies (BFS/AHT)
Picture: C-
Sound: C- Extras: D Films:
Terror of Tiny Town (1938) C-
Fair Play (1970) D
Wackiest Wagon Train in the West (1973)
D
How bad can films get?
A set of three justly forgotten films trying to pass for comedies can be
found on the Great Wacky Western Comedies DVD. The latter two, Fair Play and Wackiest Wagon Train in
the West, are two of the worst comedies you may ever see. Another way to think of them is as two films
that were not Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles. If Brooks’ classic had happened sooner, these two duds likely
would not have.
Fair Play is a pointless film where
family ties gets messed with, and the response includes situations that make
you hope they all shoot each other so it will end. Unfortunately, this is a comedy, so the torture will continue
until the last frame. Wackiest Wagon
Train in the West is a really, really, really bad TV movie that brings
together Bob Denver from Gilligan’s Island and Forrest Tucker from F
Troop, neither TV series Westerns, to make a comic one. Both films want so badly to cash in on The
Beverly Hillbillies and all of its spin-offs, but neither have the faintest
idea of how to do so.
That leaves gimmick film Terror of Tiny Town, produced
by desperate Columbia Pictures, which is simply a bad Western (with Music and
Comedy, it thinks) that supplants its cast of regular B-actors with
midgets. Though the idea is to mock the
cast, they may have gotten the last laugh without knowing it. What it shows instead is how bad most
Westerns, especially prior to John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) really
were. It can even be seen as a sign a
change was overdue. This film could
have never happened after The Western finally became a full-fledged genre after
Ford’s classic. The other two films try
too hard to follow genre when they know what it is, but have confusion in also
doing Comedy, which equally two big messes.
The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono and full-screen picture are
awful and almost a total disaster themselves, though the few brief facts of the
West and some bio/filmography text pieces are better than nothing. That’s good, because almost nothing is what
is on this DVD. Remember, do not be
misled by the Ray Steven’s Greatest Hits wanna-be cover. This is lame.
- Nicholas Sheffo
