The Shadow Riders

A great Louis L'Amour film adaptation
"The Shadow Riders" has all the grit, matter-of-fact speech, incredible landscapes and action of a great Louis L'Amour book. Tom Selleck, Sam Elliot and Jeff Osterhage also starred in "The Sacketts" in 1979, and do just as fine a job in this movie as that one.

The part that will surprise you is how strong the female lead role is. Katharine Ross does an excellent job as the fiesty Kate Connery, the love interest of Dal Travern (Sam Elliot). She had as good a character and as much screen time as many of today's heriones -- a highly unusual circumstance in the early 80s and certainly unusual for the genre.

"The Shadow Riders" has a great mix of romance, action, humor and good old fashioned Western elements. This mix makes the film appealing to a much wider audience than just Western fans or Louis L'Amour fans -- although they will come away thrilled.

It's worth it for Tom Selleck alone!
This movie is based on the book by Louis L'Amour by the same name. It doesn't follow the book too closely (which usually bothers me, but they did this very well) but still came up with a very entertaining movie that hangs well together. The story is about 3 brothers and two sisters. Two of the brothers fought on opposite sides of the Civil War, but meet up just as the war has ended when renegades are about to hang one of them. They go home to discover that more renegades have stolen the third brother and both little sisters. This movie has some great actors in it and it's just a good all-around entertainment movie.

Buyer beware
This review is not regarding the actual film itself, but rather the poor quality of this DVD release.

The transfer used on this "25th Anniversary Edition" DVD is of VHS quality. The colors are extremely dull and washed out, and it's clear that the print did not come from a film source.

This is quite surprising considering the transfer used on the Trimark DVD released way back in 1998 did come from a good looking film print! That is still the version to get if you're seeking the best looking transfer available on DVD.

The 5.1 audio mix used is also quite generic. It has no extra depth over the original 2.0 mix, and even sounds "tinny" in a fake sort of way.

They've also shoved all of the bonus material onto a single-layer disc, and thus compression artifacts are often very noticeable.

The bonus features on the disc are interesting, but nothing to scream home about. And you can find all of these features on the previous "Collector's...

Click to Editorial Reviews