There are some cinematic disasters that live on despite their failure, achieving a dubious kind of legend that actually serves them better than if they had succeeded. The Legend of the Lone Ranger is not one of them. In fact, it’s a film few people remember and even fewer ever talk about. When it flopped, it skipped right past infamy and went directly to oblivion instead.

The only reason I’ve remembered it over the years is because of a sweet childhood memory involving my parents waking me up to watch the Betamax copy they’d rented while coming home from a night on the town. I’ve come to assume that they were probably slightly tipsy when they did this, since they never did anything like that ever again, but I still find the recollection of it moving nonetheless.

Returning to the movie three decades later, I feared the worst, especially knowing its star discovery — the improbably named Klinton Spilsbury — was a male model who never acted again after having all of his dialogue replaced by James Keach (who occasionally sounds recorded in an echo chamber), so I was pleasantly surprised by how entertaining the experience of watching it turned out to be.

That’s not to say it’s a good movie, but rather that I found much amusement in its inelegant attempt to marry the charming innocence of the classic Lone Ranger iconography with the graphic brutality of the post-Peckenpah/Leone Western landscape. Imagine The Apple Dumpling Gang with gaping bloody bullet wounds and you can almost picture it. Does The Legend of the Lone Ranger deserve its obscurity? Probably, but that won’t stop me from returning to it again. —Allan Mott

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Before he became the Greater of Cheese, William Castle was an all-purpose director of schlock B movies at Columbia — Serpent of the Nile, Slaves of Babylon and The Saracen Blade, anyone? Even when these movies show up on TV, no one pays much attention to them because they’re not horror, the genre in which Castle made his reputation for goofiness and gimmickry.

But the truth is that the pictures are not half bad for what they are: B-level, Saturday-matinee kiddie-fodder. Take, for example, The Law vs. Billy the Kid with Scott Brady as The Kid; that terrific character actor James Griffith as Pat Garrett; and The Skipper himself, Alan Hale, Jr. as the bullying Bob Olinger.

The script even sticks, with some slight degree of stickiness, to the outline of the Lincoln County War. Kid and Garrett are saddle pals — Kid goes off the rails to avenge the murder of his boss; Garrett is recruited to become Sheriff and track the Kid down. Kid busts out of jail; Kid is killed by Garrett at Pete Maxwell’s ranch near Roswell, N.M.

Brady, who was Lawrence Tierney’s kid brother, was too old at 31 to play the Kid, but Griffith is just right. The action moves along quickly, the romance isn’t too romancy, the drama of two buddies on opposite sides isn’t too dramatic, the Technicolor is sharp, and the pic lasts only 72 minutes.

You may not be able to put faces to the names of the two leads, but you’ll know them when you see them. Brady’s last role was Sheriff Frank in Gremlins. You know he was a B actor if Joe Dante gave him a cameo. —Doug Bentin

Despite its title, Ghost Rock is not a spook-filled musical. It’s a kung-fu western! Hey, great idea … when it was Jackie Chan’s Shanghai Noon. But starring Gary Busey? Not so much.

Perpetually carrying that kicked-by-a-horse look and what looks like a bellyful of sausage patties, Busey plays the corrupt mayor of Ghost Rock, a dusty old backlot, er, town run by crooks and outlaws. Michael Worth (Acapulco H.E.A.T.) and lovely Jenya Lano (Stealing Candy) return there after being absent for many years to settle an old score.

Adrienne Barbeau is the madam of the local whorehouse, Jeff Fahey makes a cameo and … I’m not making this sound any more inviting, am I? Some of Busey’s set-ups are shot in an entirely different film stock, so they don’t match other shot within the same scene.

Amateurish and inept, Ghost Rock has as many clichés as it does bullets fired, with all the predictability of a staged theme-park gunfight (Guy falls from second-story railing? Check!), acted with local theater types who think they’re making art. They aren’t. —Rod Lott

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