User Reviews

GHOST OF HIDDEN VALLEY is another stock B-western for square-jawed star Buster Crabbe and his bearded sidekick Fuzzy. This one's about a gang of cattle rustlers who masquerade as spirits in a haunted valley in order to keep people away from their shady business. Inevitably Crabbe soon gets wind of all this and takes the fight to them. Some light romance is mixed along with plenty of fight action and a fast pace, making it a likable watch.

The title here is a bit of a misnomer because the picture never really delves into a ghostly theme or make use of the comic relief character, in this case Al 'Fuzzy' St. John, to go through the haunted house theatrics you might expect in a story with a title like this. It's just that local ranchers are spooked based on a belief that the Hidden Valley Ranch might be responsible for people going missing from time to time. Instead, the ranch is being used as a staging area for rustled cattle, with rival bandits Dawson (Charles King) and Arnold (Zon Murray) competing for top spot in the outlaw enterprise, and only too willing to keep the haunted hoax working in their favor.

A young English immigrant, Henry Trenton (John Meredith) enters the picture having inherited the ranch from a former acquaintance of Billy Carson (Buster Crabbe). This was a little curious to me, as the ranch's former owner was Trenton's father, and I had to wonder how an Englishman came to acquire it in the first place. Trenton arrives in an English tailor's version of Western cowboy attire and sets the local tongues wagging, along with a butler who seems to get in the way more often than not.

There's a puzzler of a scene in the latter part of the story when Dawson and Arnold chase Henry on horseback out to Hidden Valley, where Billy and Fuzzy are waiting for him to show up. The baddies are shooting away at Trenton, yet when they get to the ranch, there are already four more of Dawson's henchmen crouched behind scrub cover firing upon the Trenton house. How did they manage to get there without instructions from the boss?

Well, at least one of the bad guys got his due here. When Arnold finally had enough of putting up with Dawson, he plugs him to take over the gang! Turns out he was an outlaw by the name of Jim Slade who was run out of Cheyenne for cattle rustling there too. He was branded with an 'R' on his back, making it easy for Carson to identify him.

So the story comes and goes without any spooky sightings or ghostly apparitions, which Fuzzy managed to rectify the following year in 1947's "Ghost Town Renegades", teaming up with another screen cowboy, Lash LaRue. In that one, Fuzzy pulls out all the stops doing some acrobatic stunt work while trying to make a grab of a 'haunted' hat at an abandoned mining cabin.