CurseoftheHeadlessHorseman

Curse of the Headless Horseman (1974)

So there is a doctor that hangs out with a bunch of hippies. He inherits a ranch from his uncle and with his fiancée and hippy friends heads out to check it out. Though we never see a ranch we do get treated to a terrible roadside attraction that is supposed to be on old west town. They meet a creepy caretaker and decide to live there and make a go of it. Only for no reason there is a headless horseman that rides around scaring people. He scares on girl enough that she runs in front of a truck and dies. As a group they figure out that one of them has been trying to scare the others off because there is gold on the property. But then they figure some more out and it ends up the doctor was trying to scare off his friends so that the roadside attraction would fail and he would lose the property that he knows is full of gold. Wait a minute that doesn’t make any sense.

And neither does the rest of this movie. I loved going to the drive-in as a kid, and I love many of the regional movies that were spawned by the need to fill the screens with cheap films. But for every fun cheesy drive-in movie there is a film like Curse of the Headless Horseman. Curse is a complete mess of a movie with little to no plot that has the feel of a bunch of random scenes spliced together until it was long enough to fill the required runtime. Seriously I don’t even know where to start when it comes to my complaints about the plot, so I won’t. Just trust me when I say it is confusing, boring, and devoid of any cohesive narrative at all. The acting isn’t much better. As far as I can tell this is the only credit for most of the cast. Though since the director of the movie, Leonard Kirtman, spent most of his career shooting adult films they might have some credits elsewhere that I can’t find. The acting is wooden and just painful to watch. Though part of that might be the god-awful dialogue, which is clunky enough to get the better of even the most talented of actors.

The production values of the movie would embarrass even the worst of the adult film industry from the 70s. The scenes are poorly light, and the sound is awful. This second might be a blessing with the before mentioned dialogue. There isn’t even any continuity with scenes alternating from night to day back to night as characters are walking down a path! This is one of the most obvious signs of a movie that was made with little to no attention to detail, which is just lazy.

I’m done talking about this movie. It is available from Mill Creek Entertainment on several of their budget DVD collections. But if you want to watch it after reading this review I suggest therapy instead as you must be self-destructive. Check out the website for more details about this or some of their other much better movies at http://www.millcreekent.com/

0 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer