Crossroad Avenger (1953)
* 1/2 (out of 4)
This Western short (or possibly TV pilot) features a familiar, veteran cast but it's best remembered today for being an early work of the legendary Ed Wood. The story is pretty simple as the Tucson Kid (Tom Keene) is delivering some insurance money to a man whose bar burned down but along the way Bart Miller (Lyle Talbot) tries to get his hung for the killing of a sheriff. It turns out the deputy (Tom Tyler) wants to go along with the plan but Tucson gets clear and goes to correct the wrong. CROSSROAD AVENGER isn't a very good movie and those coming into it expecting certain Wood-isms (is that a word?) are going to be disappointed. Wood wrote the screenplay and usually no matter what the movie is like, his dialogue at least gets a few laughs but that's really not the case here. The zany words are missing and in fact they seem to be coming from someone else simply because you expect to hear the crazy dialogue that never really adds up due to too many wrong words being used. I was surprised to see that the dialogue was fairly well-written but the problem is that it's just too dry to be entertaining. It also doesn't help that the budget of this thing appears to be just a couple bucks and this is overly obvious with the sets, which look just as cheap as stuff we'd see years later in PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. I think what really hurts them here is that this thing was shot in color and this really shows you how poor they are. Many will enjoy seeing Keene, Tyler and Talbot together but they all pretty much sleepwalk through their roles, although Keene appears to be having fun as he's constantly smiling. Wood, the director, doesn't really impress either as he doesn't bring any life to the material and in the end this is just too bland to be entertaining.
