Purely Joyful Movie!

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

'Gunslinger' is strange little western - unique and experimental where 'King of B's' Roger Corman went against usual western rules and the main gunslinger is a woman - town marshal Rose Hood (Beverly Garland) who is as fast with her thinking as with her hands, and as coldblooded as her male counterparts. And her cruel scheming sworn enemy Erica Page (Allisson Hayes) is as evil and dirty as one greedy villain should be. As the director himself said, that he was tired of using same formulas, so he came up with an idea about woman gunslinger and hired Charles B. Griffith and Mark Hanna to write the screenplay.After her husband, the marshal of of Oracle City is murdered, Rose Hood is appointed as new marshal and she plans to take the law into her own hands. With that she starts feud with saloon keeper Erica Page who is ready to use every method to get rid of the new law-woman. She hires gunslinger form out of town (super cool John Ireland whose performance seems even too good for this unpretentious cheap entertainment) to kill Rose. Romance, double games, deceptions and a lot of blood shedding follows. Although unconventional in casting and with many interesting and original twists and turns mixed with lousy clichés, and enough entertainment value, the film is still uneven mess which proves that western wasn't Cormans forte. Not to mention those fast-motioned horse chasing scenes that felt unnecessary and more like self parody.'Gunslinger' might not be up par with Cormans finest works (or even with some of his previous westerns like 'Five Guns West') the film is still worth enough to give it a chance, even for the sake of the inventiveness of it.

I guess this wasn't one of his worst movies, but that really is saying very little. The main problems with this film are that it tries to do too much at the same time. I can't help but think that maybe the reason I couldn't follow it is because I simply didn't care about what was going on. Was this his first color movie? It seemed like some step up for him. I just found it difficult to understand what was going on. There's kind of an interesting romantic story, but it really goes nowhere. At least the Old West isn't a place where you'd have to have a lot of good special effects.This was mostly just boring and uninteresting. Most of the characters are annoying and contribute little to the story. Everything happens too fast, but even then it seems like a slow moving movie. We get to see a cat fight, but they managed to make even that boring. It's probably the worst Western I've ever seen. I'm not even that big a fan of them, but I do realize they've given us lots of great movies. There's a reason John Wayne was the most prolific movie star. He just made these movies and he wasn't here. The dialogue is forced and it just isn't fun because it's confusing to the point where you don't want to understand it. *1/2

When the local sheriff is killed, his wife takes over until and is determined to clean-up the town. Not everyone in town, however, is happy with what she's doing. When the sheriff orders a curfew in town, the local saloon owner (also a woman) hires a killer to take care of the sheriff. There's no way the saloon owner could know that the sheriff and the killer would fall in love.Gunslinger is an example of what happens when you have a fairly interesting concept and combine it with poor execution. There's a good movie here somewhere trying to get out. In more capable hands or with a larger budget, Gunslinger might have been an entertaining look at the role of women in the Old West. As it is, Gunslinger is a sloppy mess of a movie.There are just so many things wrong with the movie: a supporting cast with no acting ability, stilted and unnatural dialogue, and sets that look like sets. But the biggest offender is the editing. I was amazed at how many times a scene would begin with the actors (and horses for that matter) obviously waiting for Corman to yell "Action". The best is the scene of two riders on horseback just standing beside a building. All of a sudden, they take off and come racing around the corner like they had been riding hard for several miles. Or, take the example of people who can seemingly transport themselves across town. We see a man enter a building and a second later emerge across town to mount his horse.It's not as if Corman didn't have a few decent actors to work with. While none were great stars, Beverly Garland, John Ireland, and Allison Hayes were all capable of turning in a good performance. But, in Gunslinger, they're not given much to work with.I have now seen both the MST3K and non-MST3K versions of the movie. I would strongly recommend going the MST3K route.

Beverly garland was born in the wrong time. She was an actress ahead of her time, bringing power and grace to even such lame flicks as the Corman films she starred in. In Gunslinger, she's the town sheriff's wife. He gets offed, so she takes over his job to pursue his killers. She's better than the material she's working with, by far. The movie is gray, stilted, and mostly boring. There's some(unintentional)humor with the tire tracks everywhere, people running behind one building to emerge suddenly in front of another (I've heard of false fronts, but this is ridiculous!), and the truly stupid plot line of the newly widowed sheriff falling in love with the guy hired to kill her. Even if she hadn't loved her husband, it had only been something like a week or two since he'd died! And she ends up shooting the guy to death in the end, anyway. No luck with men, this one.The villain of the piece is another woman, the saloon owner. She's scheming to buy up a bunch of land just in case the railroad goes through and makes her rich. Her plan of action if it doesn't is pretty lame-she'll just steal as much from the town as she can and skedaddle. Hell, it's just her and her hired gun at the end against an entire town. Are you telling me these people aren't armed? Look what happened in real towns of the Old West when bank robbers came in to rob the bank, then were cut down in a hail of bullets by the armed and dangerous town folk.There'a a lot of pointless talking and riding around, interspersed with a few lame shoot outs. The ending is as grim as usual in a Corman flick, although thank goodness it lacks the moral proselytizing at the end that was in It Conquered the World. The sheriff turns over her badge to Sam Bass and rides off into the sunset, although the movie was so gray that you never saw the sun.