Go back. Watch Shenandoah, and Chisum. How about The Last Hard Men? Throw in Ffolkes. I can't think of any other Andrew V. McLaglen films that I liked to sort of liked to tolerated. Oh, yeah . . . The garbagey Devil's Brigade and the dull-as-dishwater Fool's Parade.
The dude did a lot of movies, some of them really fun. Others were unintentionally funny. The second I saw McLaglen's name on the TV movie from 1982, The Shadow Riders, I knew that the man wasn't getting theatrical work any more. He had to go to the boob tube to pay the bills.
The Shadow Riders is, apparently, based a story written by Louis L'Amour, but I'm thinking it could have been a product of L'Amour's second cousin, twice removed's talented 8th grader in a creative writing class.
Don't think of that as an insult to the 8th grader. Talented kids often excel at creative writing, but the seasoning and maturity of the writing still needs work.
The Shadow Riders is cliched and shallow, a throw-away movie done on TV (because this junk wouldn't get green-lit for a big screen).
But, this is the sort of junk that would pull in viewers, older ones who just wanted something pleasant to watch. Tom Selleck, Sam Elliot, Katherine Ross, and Ben Johnson are the big names that would have had people plunk down in front of their big box TVs back in the day.
The movie's 40 years old, but they still make throw away stuff like this on all sorts of cable networks and streaming channels.
I wish I hadn't watched it on Tubi. Not counting commercials, it was 100 minutes of brainlessness. It did have Geoffrey Lewis, one of my favorite character actors (the lead bad guy in High Plains Drifter), but his costume is soaked in the same dishwater as the story and the dialogue.
Skip it or watch it. I'm ambivalent.
The dude did a lot of movies, some of them really fun. Others were unintentionally funny. The second I saw McLaglen's name on the TV movie from 1982, The Shadow Riders, I knew that the man wasn't getting theatrical work any more. He had to go to the boob tube to pay the bills.
The Shadow Riders is, apparently, based a story written by Louis L'Amour, but I'm thinking it could have been a product of L'Amour's second cousin, twice removed's talented 8th grader in a creative writing class.
Don't think of that as an insult to the 8th grader. Talented kids often excel at creative writing, but the seasoning and maturity of the writing still needs work.
The Shadow Riders is cliched and shallow, a throw-away movie done on TV (because this junk wouldn't get green-lit for a big screen).
But, this is the sort of junk that would pull in viewers, older ones who just wanted something pleasant to watch. Tom Selleck, Sam Elliot, Katherine Ross, and Ben Johnson are the big names that would have had people plunk down in front of their big box TVs back in the day.
The movie's 40 years old, but they still make throw away stuff like this on all sorts of cable networks and streaming channels.
I wish I hadn't watched it on Tubi. Not counting commercials, it was 100 minutes of brainlessness. It did have Geoffrey Lewis, one of my favorite character actors (the lead bad guy in High Plains Drifter), but his costume is soaked in the same dishwater as the story and the dialogue.
Skip it or watch it. I'm ambivalent.