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