Given that my two favorite genres are Horror and Western it's only natural that I would seek out the merging of the two, as rare as they are. Some, like "Curse Of The Undead," remain (to date) elusively unreleased while others, like "The Beast Of Hollow Mountain," seem to have employed the horror elements as an afterthought, and still others, such John Wayne's highly entertaining early oater, "Haunted Gold," have a Scooby-Doo type revelation in the climax that feels like a horror cheat. "Haunted Ranch" is somewhat in the league of the latter, though on a much more minimalist scale, i.e. the horror part was a blink and you'll miss it.
On the opening credits themselves it says this is the "20th Range Busters Picture," somewhat astonishing even for a B western series, but then again there is currently a DVD set out that features six vintage B westerns all shot in 29 days! I happen to love B westerns, despite their requisite sameness, but I had never seen anything in the RANGE BUSTERS series prior to this one and am not even sure who played the BUSTERS over the course of the films nor even how many were made in total. Regardless, this particular picture was all pretty conventional stuff and indistinguishable from most B western series.
Although enjoyable and well paced at 57 minutes, the title promised more than it delivered. The only "horror" aspect was the bad guys pretending to be ghosts so that people will stay away from a recently deceased owner's ranch that they are trying to steal. So an outlaw hides in the cellar and makes a lot of ghostly noise and, in the film's only real effective part, plays an accordion that sounds like an organ, which fools the heroes as they see no one sitting at the organ in the parlor. But the ruse merely flusters the good guys who are not prone to fear (of course!) and only really scares the, what else, nervous, bug eyed black cook, played by the ignominiously named actor, "Snowflake."
Frequent comic relief B western actor Max Terhune is in this one, playing his usual character, "Alibi," just as he did in countless installments of the 3 Mesquiteers series at Republic. Terhune's comic shtick was that he was a ventriloquist who always had his dummy, Elmer, with him, dressed exactly like he was and even riding with him on his horse, continually making allegedly funny comments. I have no idea if there were ventriloquists in the old west, but it does seem a bit off whenever I see this cowboy dummy hanging around. At least in this one he had a great scene where he was antagonizing the bad guys in a saloon, leading to the best line in the whole film: "That dummy knows too much."
