Helmer of numerous B-westerns back in the '40s and '50s, director Oliver Drake hops into the saddle one last time for RIDE A WILD STUD, a rickety C-western that plays exactly like one of his oaters from the '40s, albeit with copious amounts of sex and nudity.
Script here, credited to Rachel and William Edwards, is inscrutable, something about a cowboy or the Feds rescuing one guy's kidnapped girlfriend from the "pleasure house" of Confederate bandit William Quantrill. In Old Hollywood fashion, the film even comes with a theme song explaining the story, though I still wasn't able to make out much more than A) Quantrill is bad, B) he will be defeated, and C) the song rhymes "dead" with "dead."
The problem is the script hasn't the faintest idea how to introduce anyone. It opens with eight minutes of cowboy action, looking like it was plucked straight out of a vintage poverty row Western, before flatlining into a long sequence of women being groped and molested at Quantrill's. Some lady is kidnapped at the end of the first scene and taken here, but we're given no idea who she is, and the other women (with the exception of the house's brassy grande dame) don't fare much better. It doesn't help that the film's two modes seem utterly at odds: either it's dishing up flatly-shot action and dialogue scenes in the manner of a Monogram picture, or it's indulging in random sequences of sex that seem like they're from another movie entirely. The film has no idea how to actually integrate sex into its plot, a la the dirty westerns of Dave Friedman - it just tosses in random porn breaks every now and then.
It also doesn't help that Quantrill is largely absent from his own story, with his pleasure house (we can't call it a brothel because the service is free) managed instead by one of his henchmen. This means the main villain essentially becomes a side-character in his movie, and while there are films that have used such absences to create an air of mystery, it will surely surprise no one that RIDE A WILD STUD is not among them. By the time the conclusion rolls around, with the heretofore-almost-unseen Quantrill battling a couple guys whose identity is largely unclear, the movie has collapsed into outright confusion. It really is little more than a recreation of '40s Western set-ups with some random nudity and rape tossed in.
As bad as this is, I probably should've hated it more, but there's also a certain charm to the sense it's been helmed by a group of old timers giving things one last go - while being utterly clueless how to update their schtick to the changing standards of the era. At least for Drake, this would be his last Western, if not quite his swan song. His few final credits saw further pivots into exploitation, with oddball titles like THE MUMMY & THE CURSE OF THE JACKALS and ANGELICA - THE YOUNG VIXEN providing a weird and pitiable capper to a career that largely seemed to long for the plains (or at least the studio backlot).