In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Blistering performances.

The lower end westerns are not known for cerebral plot and character development. This one scrapes the bottom with a hero hardly anybody recognizes because he's wearing a mask, a black hat, and a black cape. His voice (same flat drone--is he reading his lines?) never changes, his horse never changes, and the tack his horse wears never changes.Horse people NOTICE individual horses. I notice individual horses in these movies being used in ways that defy continuity. I also notice their bridles, especially the ornate ones. Surely in the setting of the movies such things would be noticed as well? While this is annoying on one level, on another it is so bad that it is entertaining. Obviously, this was produced for an audience that was none too picky, but even so, the target is set absurdly low. I liked the dismount/unsaddling maneuver, with Tarzan leaping into his own paddock.Ya gotta see it to believe it.

Spoilers below:I assume that Ken Maynard's horse Tarzan has some Jedi mind control tricks, because no one ever recognizes the fact that the "Phantom Rider" and one of the main characters ride the same horse. At one point, Tarzan rolls in the mud, to become a horse of a different color, and feigns lameness. Then, the next scene, Tarzan appears without mud and not lame. Good thing that cowboys don't pay any attention to anything besides the color of horses!That is only one of a number of deeply implausible aspects of "The Phantom Rider". In its favor, the title character is likable and the plot a little different than the standard -- the writer plays a little with whitehat/blackhat conventions. While he doesn't break the cardinal rule of westerns of this era that it has to culminate in a fight on a rock outcropping, at least the lead doesn't ever break into song. His telepathic horse, though, is worth at least three stars.

When Ken Maynard's uncle is murdered, he finds out that the old man was apparently a ruthless land baron and moneylender, who cheated and/or destroyed the other landowners in the area. Ken tries to make amends by pretending to go along with the gang that held sway over his uncle and by highlighting as the Phantom Rancher in order to help the put-upon farmers and thwart the bad guys.As far as Saturday matinée westerns go, Phantom Rancher is okay entertainment, but not really very action packed in it's first half. When Ken puts on the mask though, things pick up and the climax is pretty good.At this point in his career, Maynard was noticeably older and a bit heavier. However, he still had presence enough to pull off a decent performance, though he may have benefited from wearing a duster over his tight-fitted shirt.

I've seen about a half dozen of the low budget poverty row B westerns that Ken Maynard made in the 1930s, and I am consistently amazed at how poor an actor he was. How did he ever get to be a leading cowboy actor? They say that he could ride pretty well back in the silents, but he doesn't do anything particularly impressive in these later sound films. Still, maybe he got the leads because he was big and could ride.Phantom Rancher isn't as bad as some of the other Ken Maynard films I've seen, but it still isn't much. Some of the other characters refer to him a couple of times as a "young fella," where it appears to me that he's just as old as the other older actors.And if that's not silly enough, there's a rather significant script problem in this film. At one point, one of the characters makes a remark about how the phantom had prevented the poisoning of a well, something that hadn't happened yet. Just a couple of minutes later, we then see that particular scene. No, it wasn't a flashback. At first I thought perhaps that when Treeline Films was doing the DVD transfer, they might have reversed two of the reels. But in those days film reels contained approximately 11 minutes of film, and the whole reversal only took about 3 or 4 minutes tops. Everything else was in a logical order. So, it looks like that was a genuine continuity problem in the original film. Maybe that's one reason why Colony Pictures didn't last very long.