Hannah Hague plays Eryn Cates, who returns home from a New York finishing school with a broken heart and finds that her father Everett is in danger of losing his ranch to a banker named Mortimer.
Oh, Mortimer might extend the debt payments if she’s nice to him. He might even forgive them if she marries him.
But in the meantime, he has his men steal the horses Everett planned to sell to make his loan payment.
Seeing no other way out, Eryn’s brother Bowie dons a mask and tries to rob a mine payroll wagon.
He winds up wounded and Eryn slips into his outlaw getup to divert the posse.
Then a handsome young ranger named Flint (Adam Hagenbuch) rides into town to investigate the payroll robbery, with a sidekick named Sagebrush Johnson (Richard L. Olsen).
They immediately suspect Mortimer, who indeed has started having his men dress as bandits and rob the payroll wagons now that he can point the blame elsewhere.
Oh, my. When all of the bad guys are about 50 years old and 50 pounds overweight, you know you’re in for a long ride, and this is straight Grade Z stuff right from the opening scene in which a stagecoach runs over a branch and breaks a wheel.
The shotgun guard is sent to town to fetch a part to fix the wheel. Hannah, showing she hasn’t lost her Western know-how while living in the East, trims down another twig to fix the wagon wheel.
In another dandy of a scene, Hannah is trapped by the posse, but outshoots, outrides and outwits all the men, without seriously hurting anyone, of course. At one point she shoots a bee’s nest out of a tree and right into the hands of one member of the posse.
Ron Harris makes as lame an evil banker as you’re ever likely to find, and the film even falls flat when it goes for laughs. Oh, and Hannah knows some karate, too, thanks to a dead Chinese man who shows up in one flashback scene.
Give it one star because Hannah is sorta cute and Olsen (in the role of Sagebrush) seems to know how to act, unlike most of the rest of the cast.
Directed by:
Alan Chan
Cast:
Hannah Hague … Eryn Cates
Adam Hagenbuch … Flint
Ron E. Harris … Mortimer
Richard L. Olsen … Sagebrush Johnson
Hank Sinatra … Everett Cates
John V. Lewis … Lamar Cates
Zachary Scott Young … Bowie Cates
Tze Yep … Master Chin
Jamie Lail … Chasity
aka:
Reach of the Sky (original title)
Runtime: 90 min.
Memorable lines:
Chasity, the saloon girl: “I was at a deacon’s convention in San Antonio. I was plum tuckered.”
Mortimer: “I can imagine.”
Chasity: “You know what the problem with Baptists is?”
Mortimer: “They don’t hold them under long enough.”
Chasity: “No. They talk too much. Most of them talk so much, they were finished before they started.”
Mortimer: “Maybe they thought it was oral sex.”