I've seen quite a few B-series westerns in recent months--and several starring Tim McCoy. Well, up until this film I liked the McCoy films and assumed his films were all pretty good. Not so fast, however,...after seeing "Ghost Patrol" I realized he COULD make a bad film...a very bad film.
In his book "The 50 Worst Movies of All Time and How They Got to Be That Way", Harry Medved picks an obscure Gene Autry film as the worst B-series western. Well, I saw this film ("Twilight on the Rio Grande") and thing "Ghost Patrol" is a lot worse--and for many of the same reasons why Medved disliked the Autry film. Both were the oddest sort of westerns--ones set in modern times and featuring modern problems. In "Ghost Patrol", the cowboy McCoy investigates a ray gun that is able to knock down airplanes!! And, naturally, the government sends in a single dandy cowboy (in his prettiest cowboy clothes)---not an army of Secret Service men or soldiers!!! Who thought any of this made sense?! While there is more to the story than this, seeing airplanes, telephones, cars and death rays just make the story seem like a jumbled mess.
I think if the film had been rewritten without all the cowboy references and having McCoy wearing normal clothes when he investigated the plane crashes, the film might have been worth seeing. Or, conversely, if they'd just made a western, it might have been a decent film. But this amalgam was just a silly mess....and might just make your brain hurt! Bad acting and a limp plot didn't help any!