The Ramrodder

A cowboy sympathetic to the plight of a nearby Indian tribe is wrongly accused in the rape and murder of the chief's daughter, leading to much hate and violence.

This crackpot nudie feature is fun to look at, though thoroughly impossible to defend on any artistic level. The terrible costumes and the fact that all the Indians are obviously white, makes this look more like a live action cartoon than the serious production that it's press materials pretends it to be.

In short, the plentiful nudity (the real reason for watching this) is good. Everything else is not. There's definitely better examples of both genres.

More interesting is that The Ramrodder was filmed at the infamous Spahn Movie Ranch and features not one, but two members of the Manson family, Catherine Share and Bobby Beausoleil, who was probably already in the can for murder at the time this hit the soda-stained screens of the Pussycat Theater!

Budget? What budget? The producer probably gave the prop master a couple of bucks and sent him down to the local Western apparel shop for some cowboy outfits, and told him to pick up some leather bootstraps and chamois cloths for Indian garb on his way back. A couple of tepees, a house, some cute actresses, and they were ready to make a movie.

Don't watch this film for the story line or plot twists. Don't watch it for the stilted dialogue. Watch it for Marsha Jordan, who has a pretty good body even by today's standards, and some of the soft porn scenes. There's some topless female wrestling, a striptease around a campfire, and a few other examples of female exploitation. At one point Ms. Jordan even gets tied to a tree, stripped naked, and whipped in order to prove her love for her husband and to prove the innocence of a cowboy charged with rape (you'll have to see the movie to understand). This scene is actually pretty well done considering the budget and that it was made in 1969. They even included some fake blood for dramatic effect, and the hits are shown onscreen (really cheap movies show such things offscreen so that they don't have to pay for special effects).

The title refers to a type of black-powder gun, but it was obviously chosen for its double-meaning. Still, it's better than "Brand of Shame".

The Ramrodder is a pretty awful movie except it has Kathy Williams in it. It is Kathy who is stripped and whipped, dances around the camp, and has Marsha Jordan prove her maiden loyalty. Her best scene, though, is in the lake with Jim Gentry. Ole Jim seems rather passive in his love making, but sweet Kathy with a goregous face and a Playboy Playmate's body, gets into the swing of things and uses her tongue continually in her kissing of Gentry. Besides Kathy's fluttering tongue she moans quite a bit. Be sure to check her out in Love Camp 7!

Not the greatest western ever made (or even the greatest low budget film ever made), Ramrodder is still watchable, though there is little to recommend it. The Indians in the film quite obviously are not Native Americans from their appearance, and it is mistakes like this that make the movie unintentionally funny. Very good looking girls in the movie make up for a lot of faults in the plot and acting, however. Ramrodder is also noteworthy for having Charles Manson associate Bobby Beausoleil in it; apparently it was filmed several months before he was arrested. Ramrodder is worth watching maybe once, but only one time.

Should have been called "Dance of the Bouncing Boobs"! If you are looking for a good romance or western (like the video box made it sound), look elsewhere. If you want to watch naked women dance around for an hour, this is your movie. The plot takes up about ten minutes of the movie and the remaining eighty minutes are dedicated to naked women bouncing around and rolling around with their men. Not that there is anything wrong with that, just not exactly what my girlfriend and I had in mind! (Watching it, that is!) OK so I didn't mind TOO much!

Anyway, as much as I like watching good looking women's boobs bounce around, after about a half an hour it started to get old. Really. There is a whipping scene if your into that, though I could think of much better ways to treat a nice looking woman than that. And what about how the Indians test their women to see if they are still virgins? How can I get that job? Maybe that is where they got the original "Ramrodder" title from!

Speaking of the Indians, they look more like outcast's from the Partridge Family and the Brady Bunch than Indians! I guess WASP people can ACT like Indians even if they don't LOOK like Indians. Unfortunately these people don't even ACT like Indians either!

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that if you rent this flick you will: 1) see lots of nudity, the ONLY reason to rent this pic, 2) fast forward though all of the non-nude parts, 3) actually end up being bored with the nudity, unless you are really hard up (no pun intended)! and 4) have already have spent more money than the producer did on the entire film!!!!!!!!

As Mick says "Dance, Dance Little Sister, Dance!!!"