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Ride a Wild Stud
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Dark Force Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (29th August 2025). |
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The Film
 Union officer Lt. Dan McDermott (Hale Williams) decides to pose as an outlaw in order to discover how ex-Confederate colonel-turned-bandit William Quantrill (Bill Ferrill) has been smuggling and selling government-owned Spencer repeating rifles. He establishes himself by fighting Bill "The Stud" Doolin (Frenchy Le Boyd) – Quantrill's chief cohort and proprietor of the colonel's desert brothel – over virginal Marsha (Josie Kirk) whose father (Voodoo Heartbeat's Chuck Alford) refused to pay Quantrill's gang protection money and was murdered along with his other daughter (Helga Hanshue) who tried to escape being raped by Doolin and his men. McDermott gathers intelligence from the brothel's madam Irene (C.C. Chase) who also tries to protect Marsha. Operating in Qunatrill's absence, Doolin forces himself on Marsha and conspires to have McDermott killed after he has served his purpose in a raid on a U.S. Army gold transport. While the western was getting reinvented in Italy and the United States into a grittier, more violent genre than the studio oaters in the earlier half of the twentieth century, the genre also did not go unexploited by sexploitation filmmakers; indeed, it was perhaps the cost-effective desert locations and excess of both aging studio costume and prop six-shooter rentals gathering dust – along with a goodly amount of out-of-work former studio/network contract character actors – along with the potentials of the lawless setting for sexual violence that established the western as a subset of roughie cinema with films like The Scavengers, Hot Spur, and Brand of Shame by the likes of jobbing sexploitation filmmakers Lee Frost (Love Camp 7) and Byron Mabe (She Freak). Although helmed by an actual western TV and film writer and director of the thirties through the early sixties in Oliver Drake (Colt .45), Ride a Wild Stud feels more like a Poverty Row quickie with lengthy sex and rape scenes dropped in – indeed, McDermott is a fighter not a lover so he just turns up around these sequences in scenes that feel otherwise disconnected – to what could be a half-hour television episode without them; indeed, with its lifeless direction and staging (we have not seen any of Drake's other western work but he makes William "One Shot" Beaudine look like a visual stylist) combined with the unpleasant sexual violence, the film has less in common with the aforementioned examples and more with the equally-turgid early Cannon Films release The Wicked Die Slow (scripted by Revenge of the Nerds' Jeff Kanew after editing several softcore sex films along with a trailer for Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly early on in his careers). Williams' McDermott is not particularly agile while Ferrill's Quantrill is absent from much of the film, first turning up as lout who rapes and strangles a girl in the desert in an interminable fifteen minute sequence where we only know he is Quantrill by the use of the terrible theme song and then during the climax where even then his fight with McDermott and death are overshadowed by the scenes involving Le Boyd's Doolin whose nickname suggests that he is actually supposed to be the main heavy even though it is flattery at best (Kirk's Marsha seems like a scrappy heroine but is done the disservice of being raped and discovering she likes it until she learns of her assailant's part in the murder of her family). The film features an early bit part for Richard Smedley who would go on to play leads and secondary roles in seventies sexploitation films like The Suckers – an X-rated variation on "The Most Dangerous Game" – and The Abductors among others. Ride a Wild Stud was one of three films Drake helmed for the Las Vegas-based production company Vega International along with the horror film The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals and his final film Angelica, the Young Vixen. The film's few interior sets were shot at the Los Angeles studio of credited editor Ewing Miles Brown from which the surviving materials for all three films were recovered (along with those of the Bigfoot sex film The Beast and the Vixens as discussed in the commentary on that Blu-ray release). 
Video
Released theatrically in 1969, Ride a Wild Stud was hard to see in the video era with a rare rental tape and a gray market edition in the mail-order days of the nineties. Dark Force Entertainment's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.33:1 pillarboxed fullscreen transfer is pretty horrendous. The bulk of the film is faded but relatively clean and watchable; however, the aforementioned fifteen minute sequence involving Quntrill and the desert rape victim is afflicted by heavy crush and solarization in the harsh shadows combined with day-for-night tinting – a couple close-ups within the sequence are free of these defects suggesting that this entire sequence was not inserted from an inferior source but may be a matter of combination of the original photography, the original day-for-night grading, and some digital attempts to pump up the colors a bit. The later caravan ambush has a few shots with similarly flat and solarized blacks but nowhere near as severe. 
Audio
The sole audio option is a clean DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track in which the intelligibility of the dialogue is subject to the original recording – none of the dialogue appears to have been post-dubbed – while the mix of the music including the theme song is rather lifeless. 
Extras
There are no extras. 
Overall
In terms of action (sexual or otherwise), the title Ride a Wild Stud writes checks it can't cash.
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