The Master Gunfighter

| | 
As ponderous and deeply silly as The Master Gunfighter is, it’s a gently graded foothill in the foreboding Bad Movie mountain range churned up by the tectonic ego of by ‘70s schlock auteur Tom Laughlin. The tallest, and deadliest of these cinematic peaks is surely The Trial of Billy Jack. Sadly, I will shortly be attempting to scale that K2 of the motion picture world. Whether I conquer itor instead am myself destroyed in the effort, time will tell.
The Master Gunfighter was, presumably, an attempt to broaden Mr. Laughlin’s commercial appeal. Mr. Laughlin had had, by this point in time, success with three earlier films built around the character of Billy Jack, an ex-Green Beret, half-Indian, ass-kicking pacifist. Think what you will of Mr. Laughlin’s oevre, there’s little doubtthat he managed to tap deeply into the anti-Establishment zeitgeist of the times. Moreover, he not only wrote, directed and starred in the Billy Jack films, but also personally took over their distribution when he felt the second movie, Billy Jack, had been badly handled by Warner Brothers. After reacquiring the rights to the picture, Mr. Laughlin tailored a distribution strategy for its re-release,including the use of saturation TV advertising, that proved years ahead of its time.
With the millions he pocketed from this experiment, Mr. Laughlin personally funded the third picture in the series, The Trial of Billy Jack. The result remains one of the most notorious cinematic turkeys ever.  It’s a film that I feel can only be described as literally insane. Astoundingly, however, it too provedhugely successful at the box office. At that point, perhaps feeling his oats, Mr. Laughlin made the subject of today’s inquiry.
Following the comparatively lackluster showing for this picture, Mr. Laughlin attempted to retrench with a fourth Billy Jack epic. A remake of Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (!!), Billy Jack Goes to Washington followed the misadventures of the pacifistass-kicker in the highest Halls of Power. Sadly, the film—largely financed by Mr. Laughlin himself, as was his habit—went massively over budget. Moreover, with the war in Viet Nam concluded and the evil Nixon driven from the White House, much of the hot air had leaked out of the revolutionary balloon. (And believe me, hot air was pretty much what drove it.)
In any case, the resultant film was somisbegotten that it was barely released. Mr. Laughlin, a conspiracy buff of the highest order, has long maintained that the Government suppressed the film, lest it inspire a Hippie Power revolution. In any event, Mr. Laughlin never made another film, although he would occasionally continue to act in other's works. 
The script for our current subject supposedly isn’t credited to Mr. Laughlin. However, hewas known for assuming pseudonyms, and the credited screenwriter, Mr. Harold Lapland, has no other credits listed on the IMDB. In any case, he must have influenced the end result, as it bears many of his cinematic trademarks. The two most evident of these are an nearly unmatched level of pomposity, and a manifest self-regard for his own deep thinking. These are the traits, or so On Deadly Groundwould lead us to believe, that made an acolyte of well-known Billy Jack rip-offer, Steven Seagal.
|[pic] |

The pomposity is immediately evident, as we watch a sunrise slowly occur over a distant horizon. This visual is accompanied by narration uttered by infamous hambone and highly decorated bad movie veteran BurgessMeredith.
"All history is part fact, part fiction and mostly interpretation. The picture you are about to see based on the never substantiated legend of a remarkable six-chambered, double action pistol that fired twelve repeating bullets, and which was brought from the East by the son of one of the last of the great landowning Spanish Dons.
Educated along with his sister in England and the Orient,...