Pony Express Rider (1976)

The search for movies can sometimes be tough. The way that most stores are completely ignoring physical releases has made it more difficult to find what you’re looking for. One thing hasn’t changed, though. Especially at Walmart. The discount bins are still there.

I’ve found many movies for Sunday “Bad” Movies in discount bins. There have been movies I’ve looked for. There were also many movies that I had never heard of before. They were little to no budget that people didn’t know of and weren’t buying because of how small they were. There were franchise packs, where an entire series of low budget movies, mainly horror or direct-to-video action movies, were packaged together. Then there were the compilations.

A compilation pack, as I’m going to call it for now, is a simple idea. A distribution company, usually Echo Bridge, puts out a pack of movies that might seem random. They tend to fit a theme, though. There are packs of ten horror movies. There are packs of ten comedies. It could be actor centric. Whatever the case may be, a bunch of movies are thrown together into one pack.

I’ve bought many compilation packs while looking for movies to cover for Sunday “Bad” Movies. Sometimes, I’ll find a hidden gem. A movie slips through that is head and shoulders above the rest of the pack. It might not be better but is for sure more memorable. Other movies are baffling. Few movies have left me questioning things as much as when I saw Pony Express Rider, a movie included in a ten pack of kids’ movies.

The packs of movies I’m writing about have been the source of many bad movies I’ve covered in this blog over the years. In fact, the kids one that Pony Express Rider was a part of included movies like EZ Money, Lil’ Treasure Hunters, and Hollywood Safari. I’ve gone back to this same ten pack of movies a few times and saw some interesting movies because of it. They weren’t good, but they had some elements that I was able to pull for writing.

My thought for this post was that I hadn’t covered a kids’ movie in a while. The last time I covered a children’s movie that wasn’t Christmas or Halloween themed was summer 2022. It was about time for me to do that again. Looking at the pack of ten movies, I went with one that was even more of a niche. I chose a kids’ movie that was also a western. Pony Express Rider was in the pack. That was perfect.

I tossed Pony Express Rider into my PS4, brought it up, and hit play. It wouldn’t take long for me to realize something was wrong. It wasn’t that the DVD wouldn’t play. Everything was going fine on a technical side. It was playing. I was watching it. The audio and video was synched. The video quality wasn’t the greatest, but that’s to be expected from a forgotten 1976 movie being released in a multipack by Echo Bridge. No no no. The problem was something completely different. Pony Express Rider wasn’t a kids’ movie.

That might sound a little strange. It was in a ten pack of kids’ movies. I know. That’s why I chose the movie. But when I turned it on, it only took a few minutes for me to realize that the movie wasn’t geared towards children. It was an adult movie. Not so adult that there was nudity and excessive violence. However, it was a violent story. The plot hinged on violence. Serious violence. It wasn’t cartoonish children’s violence.

Let me explain the plot so you might better understand what I mean. Jimmie D. (Stewart Petersen) was the son of a cattle rancher, Jed (Ken Curtis). Jed didn’t own the ranch his family lived on. It was owned by Trevor Kingman (Henry Wilcoxon), and Jed’s family lived there while Jed worked the ranch. Trevor was offered a political position and left his son Bovey (Buck Taylor) in charge. In a fit of rage while drinking one night, Bovey killed Jed and fled town. Jimmie D. joined the Pony Express because they could travel anywhere. He used that ability to hunt down his father’s killer.

The entire story of Pony Express Rider played out because Jed was shot and killed during a bar brawl. He got in an extended, bloody fist fight when Bovey tried to evict his family from the farm. The fist fight ended with Jed as the victor, until Bovey grabbed a gun and shot him in the back. That entire scene and the revenge story that followed is why I’m left wondering how Pony Express Rider was included in a pack of kids’ movies.

The thing, for me, was the blood and the death. Very few kids’ movies feature any of that in a serious way. There’s almost definitely no blood in kids’ movies. There might be violence, but it doesn’t tend to result in a bloody affair. I’m thinking of a movie like CyberMutt, where the bad guys fired guns at the dog. I don’t remember them hitting the dog or the dog bleeding out. It might have gotten hit by a car, but there was also no death, so it was fine. Pony Express Rider showed blood in the fist fight, and it showed Jed die on screen. That was not kid-friendly.

Then there was the violence. In kids’ movies, the violence usually falls more into the slapstick with bumbling bad guys who can’t do their job properly. The violence that does happen ends up being goofier than you would see in most adult movies. The closest that Pony Express Rider came to the violence being goofy was when Jimmie D. and his girlfriend, Rose of Sharon (Maureen McCormick), were lassoed and dragged behind a horse. I still felt weird about that, though, because it looked like the actual actors were being dragged. Why would Marcia Brady agree to that?

The ending of Pony Express Rider didn’t help alleviate the feeling that this was a kids’ movie, either. When Jimmie D. caught up to Bovey (it was actually Bovey catching up to Jimmie D. because, somehow, Jimmie D. was chasing someone who was behind him), Bovey was arrested and sentenced to be hanged. Kids’ movies don’t have hangings. They have people being tied up for the police. They have the evil guy from Up fall from a very high blimp. The endings for bad guys are done in a way where children wouldn’t immediately think the character died (the Up character definitely died). Bovey was for sure going to die. I think children know what a hanging is. That’s a little too much for kids.

When I chose Pony Express Rider as the next movie for Sunday “Bad” Movies, I expected a children’s western. I know there are some out there. I may have even covered one at some point. What I didn’t expect was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I didn’t expect an adult western with the quality of a television movie, about death and revenge, to be included in a ten pack of movies about and geared towards kids.

I have a bunch of the compilation packs that Echo Bridge released throughout the years. Most of them have the same sort of generic pack labelling. Some of them are Horror Collection. Some are Kids Collection. There’s a Western Collection and a War Collection. Fantasy, Holiday, and Animal movies, too. I don’t think too many of the movies have caused the same sort of existential crisis as Pony Express Rider. It was decidedly not a kids’ movie, yet it was included in a pack of kids’ movies. Will I find the same in the other packs? I won’t know until I get around to watching more movies from them.

It's that time again. Let’s get a few notes in here:

• I mentioned some movies I’d covered before for Sunday “Bad” Movies. They were EZ Money, ‘Lil Treasure Hunters, and Hollywood Safari.
• Pony Express Rider featured Cliff Brand. He was also in Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland, and he showed up in archive footage in Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor.
• Slim Pickens returned from The Swarm for Pony Express Rider.
• Both Pony Express Rider and Wild Wild West featured Buck Taylor.
• Finally, Pony Express Rider saw the return of Bleu McKenzie to Sunday “Bad” Movies, after recently appearing in Loose Shoes.
• Have you seen Pony Express Rider? Have you heard of Pony Express Rider? Have you bought any of the compilation packs from discount bins? Share your thoughts in the comments or get a hold of me on Bluesky or Threads.
• Bluesky, Threads, and the comments are also good places to get a hold of me if there’s a movie you think I should check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies.
• I’m on a roll with posts right now. Not so much from the timing side of things. I still don’t know when any are going to be released. But I’ve seen a couple more movies for the blog and started on some more posts. Up next, I’ll be returning to a franchise I started watching for the 100^th official post. The post will be about Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle. I hope you come back to check that one out. See you then.

Terror at Blood Fart Lake (2009)

One of the things that changed about Sunday “Bad” Movies since I cut back on how often I write has been the way I find movies. I used to schedule out the posts. I had a whole Word file made with a schedule of what movie would be what week. I planned out the spooky movies for October, the Christmas movies for December, a New Year’s movie, a Valentine’s movie, an Easter movie, and movies that tied into things coming out around those times. It was decent work, but worth it for the way I was writing at the time.

Things are a little freer now. I don’t write these posts quite as often as I used to. I didn’t even hit twenty Sunday “Bad” Movies posts in 2023. That opened up the scheduling. There is no set time for when any given post will go up. Therefore, I don’t need to closely schedule what I’m going to watch. I can’t put four posts between Halloween and December if I don’t know that I’ll get them up in time before I switching to Christmas movies. I kind of just choose movies as I go now.

That’s how I ended up writing this post, about a little movie called Terror at Blood Fart Lake. I didn’t know it existed until I turned it on. You know the nights. You’re scrolling through a streaming service. It could be Netflix, Paramount+, Disney+, or Tubi. For me, it was Amazon Prime, though I know now that the movie is also on Tubi. You’re going from movie to movie to movie, trying to find something that speaks to you. Then one of the pictures or titles pops up. Something clicks. You know that’s the right choice. You throw it on. That’s why I watched Terror at Blood Fart Lake, and now I’m writing about it because it was a perfect fit for this blog.

Terror at Blood Fart Lake was a minimal budget slasher movie. When I say minimal budget, I mean the budget was so low the movie was produced by Low Budget Pictures. That isn’t a joke. That was a production company on the movie. There were six friends who travelled to a lakeside cabin for a fun weekend, only to have that weekend end in death and mayhem. With maybe a fart or two, including a shart and a blood fart. The name was accurate.

Two things tend to stand out when watching a horror movie that doesn’t have a budget. One is the effects work. Minimal budget horror movies sometimes try harder with the effects. The filmmaker might know someone with a practical effects background. They might have that background themselves. The movie then becomes a vehicle to highlight the effects work they do, in the hopes of somehow getting recognized for their talents. The other thing is a reliance, maybe even over-reliance, on jokes. The filmmaker might recognize their own deficiencies in movie making talent. It might be the budget that holds them back. It might be a lack of experience. They infuse the script with extra jokes to try and make the movie a little more fun, since what happens on screen might not be of the highest quality.

Terror at Blood Fart Lake fell into that second camp a little more than it did the first. There were a few effects, to be sure, but none of them were all that amazing to look at. The only one that really stuck with me was a cob of corn being shoved up a guy’s butt and coming out his front like a hard penis. But that was just a cob of corn with red food dye on it or something. It wasn’t anything special. The comedy was where the movie dug in. It was going to rely heavily on the jokes between the characters. Or the comedy of corn penises.

That makes sense. Look at the name. Terror at Blood Fart Lake. If you didn’t go in expecting crude humour, I don’t know how that got past you. The title was exactly that sense of humour. It wasn’t hiding anything. In fact, it was spelling it out for you. A weekend away at the lake, and there was a major blood fart. The movie was the title. The title was the movie.

The humour in Terror at Blood Fart Lake wasn’t all that good, though. It ended up hurting the overall quality of the film. The characters became caricatures, rather than real people. They weren’t even standard slasher archetypes that played well off each other. The character types were odd, making it difficult to fully connect with them. One character was a larger woman who continuously spoke about how wet her vagina was. Another character was a woman who acted like a star system actress of the early talkies era. There was a ridiculous redneck type, and the guy who was awkward with any woman he came across. Oh, and there was the guy who spoke like the most stereotypical Italian from Jersey who wanted nothing more than to say “gabagool.” All the characters had heightened personalities, which felt like it might have been fun on set but didn’t fully come through as fun on screen.

None of this means I disliked Terror at Blood Fart Lake. It definitely had problems in the humour department. Yet there was still some sort of quality that made it watchable. The fun that everyone clearly had making the movie made me care about what was going on. I cared despite the quality of the script. I cared despite the quality of their possible and probable improv on set. I cared because the people making it had a good time making it. Terror at Blood Fart Lake never lost me. And, as soon as I discovered there was a sequel, I knew it would go onto my list of movies to watch. Not for this blog, but because I wanted to see it.

I’m going to get a little more… Honest wouldn’t be the right word because I always try to be honest in my posts… Transparent might be better. The last year or two of weekly posts had me burned out. I was going through the motions, week after week after week. I felt like my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I needed a break. That’s why I stopped posting on a weekly basis. That’s why it can sometimes be a month, maybe two months between posts now. It wasn’t necessarily the quality of the movies. I still adore bad movies and still stand by the fact that you can learn more from mistakes than perfection. Everyone makes mistakes and growth involves using those mistakes to improve the next time. But something had disappeared. That spark.

You might have seen that when I was writing about things like Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever, Rapture-Palooza, or Cold Vengeance. Maybe you couldn’t. I don’t know how well I hid my waning interest. All I know is that writing these posts felt more like a chore than fun. It felt like I was doing it to do it, instead of doing it because I enjoyed it. I had to change things to get rid of that feeling.

I started another blog. I wrote about some different things. I wrote about television. I wrote about hockey. I wrote about Bubly sparkling water. And I wrote about me. I wrote about myself in a way that I hadn’t done in forever. It wasn’t even that deep. I shifted things from “what does this mean” to “what does this mean to me.” I gave myself time to write. Not everything had to be immediate. Not everything was confined to one topic. I gave myself some freedom.

That freedom translated over to Sunday “Bad” Movies when I started making these posts again. It might not have been as much of the “how do I feel about this?” as it was back to the normal posts for this blog. However, I had the freedom of watching whatever movie I felt like watching. I started going with the flow. I don’t post every Sunday. Things are calmer. Things are less regimented. It feels fun to write for this blog again.

Terror at Blood Fart Lake is a perfect encapsulation of that. I didn’t have the movie scheduled. I didn’t know about it until mere minutes before watching it. It wasn’t even on my radar. I’ve been working on this post for a while now. I’m going at a pace that feels comfortable with me. It’s freeing.

I don’t really have a proper way to end this post. I got into that last little tangent without a real idea of how to end things. This is going to feel jarring, no matter how things end now. So, let me just say, if you enjoy something, do whatever it takes to keep enjoying it. Unless it’s illegal. Don’t do illegal stuff that could harm yourself or others. That’s not cool.

I have a few quick notes before this post is wrapped up:

• Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever, Rapture-Palooza, and Cold Vengeance were all mentioned in this post.
• Nichole LaRoche was in Terror at Blood Fart Lake. She had a bit role in Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. She was the only returning performer.
• Have you seen Terror at Blood Fart Lake? Have you heard of Terror at Blood Fart Lake? Would you ever watch a movie called Terror at Blood Fart Lake? Let me know in the comments, or contact me on Bluesky or Threads.
• If there’s a movie you think I should check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies, drop it on Bluesky, Threads, or in the comments.
• The next post shouldn’t take too long to get posted. I haven’t really written it yet, but I know exactly what I’m going to write about the movie. What movie? I checked out something called Pony Express Rider. You’ll have to read the post to find out what it was. See you soon.