Watch Border Badmen For Free

Fresh and Exciting

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

BORDER BADMEN is a very cheap black and white western with a starring role for former FLASH GORDON Buster Crabbe. He plays one of a cowboy duo who help out a female landowner from the crooks trying to steal her estate. This one clocks in at under an hour in length and has the usual plot ingredients, with a lot of horse riding and a handful of fight scenes. The broad-chested Crabbe makes for a charismatic hero but there's simply not as much to get excited or amused about here as in his science fiction pictures.

It's funny how in a lot of the Buster Crabbe/Fuzzy St. John team-ups, Fuzzy often winds up with more screen time or impact on the story than the nominal hero. In this one, he's one of many heirs who come calling on the estate of Silas Stockton after the man passes away, with partner Billy Carson (Crabbe) on hand to lend some brains and brawn when it's needed to take down the bad guys.That opening scene with the toll-gate seemed a little bizarre to me - a two hundred dollar fee being charged for four legged animals to pass and five hundred for the two legged kind. With the toll taker seemingly asleep (actually dead!), I had to wonder why Billy and Fuzzy didn't just ride on through. It would have saved a lot of hassle with the outlaw henchmen.Well it's never that easy for the good guys before they save the day. Charles King, a ubiquitous presence in these early oaters, is the principal hoodlum in the story. He's calling the shots on eliminating the potential Stockton heirs from ever reaching town so he could split the fortune with selected local accomplices. Even some of them, like mayor Jed Bates (Steve Clark) don't last too long when they start questioning Merritt's (King) game plan.I'm sure matinée fans back in the day got their quarter's worth watching Fuzzy liven things up in the story, head butting bad guys and doing the revolving door gimmick with Carson and later on, one of the henchmen. With Fuzzy, you had to believe him whenever he came up with a line like the one in this story - "Stand aside, there's going to be some action around here".

Border Badmen had the potential to be an pretty decent "B" western. Multiple heirs, secret chambers, and impersonations make the plot a step above the usual. Unfortunately, Fuzzy St. John single handedly brings this down to the level of the ridiculous. I don't have overly high expectations for a "B" western but his antics just made this movie painful to watch. I compare any movie against all others I've seen, not just against their budget equals. That puts this movie up against movies like N by NW, Schindler's List, The Day the Earth Stood Still, etc. With a Gabby Hayes and without St. John's "humor", this might have made it to a 3. As it is, this was pretty excruciating and among the biggest dogs I've watched. 1/10.

This isn't bad for a 40's B-western. One thing I liked was that the villains weren't as cliched as most are in this genre, and the plot (inheritance fraud) was a nice change of pace from the usual revenge/robberies formulas. The comic relief was actually pretty good too, unlike most of its contemporaries (i.e., annoying).For me though, two things let the film down. First, occasionally the script has some really dumb lines (e.g., "I wonder what they want with the identification papers"). Second, the villains give up way too easily after all the trouble they've gone through. Were it not for these shortcomings of the script, this would have been a good film; as it stands, it is only above average.6/10