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.