cult film freak: PHILIP CAREY WITH AARON SPELLING IN 'WYOMING RENEGADES'

Philip Carey and Martha Hyer in WYOMING RENEGADES Year: 1956 Rating; ***

It's impossible to hear about Butch Cassidy and Sundance without thinking of Paul Newman and Robert Redford... but a decade earlier, more regular-looking Gene Evans and William Bishop played the cowboy outlaws but are secondary to Philip Carey's Brady Sutton, one of their fictional gang members who splits early on...

The main problem with so many low-budget western-potboilers is expository dialogue explaining what could have been compelling/entertaining actual content as, three years later, Carey, having been imprisoned, turns up completely unwelcome in the small town he had come from...

Aaron Spelling in WYOMING RENEGADES

So we have to take the written word for almost the entire set-up of WYOMING RENEGADES, a completely cliche yet downright bizarre B-Western featuring future TV-producer Aaron Spelling as the ratty wimp of the outlaw gang, who eventually makes Carey seem like the town's bank robber, providing a wrong-man device more familiar in present-time film-noir melodramas...

And the strangest element is the rushed kinship between Carey and his new blacksmith-partner Douglas Kennedy, secretly a Pinkerton Detective going after the Cassidy gang...

Philip Carey and William Bishop in WYOMING RENEGADES

This right after randomly admitting that he's a wannabe outlaw that desperately wants to join Cassidy's gang... which would have been a far more adventurously-intriguing premise...

Featuring beautiful blonde Martha Hyer as Carey's fiance, with a token romance between rowdy arguments between the bickering crooks... planning to finish-off the town they'd already robbed... WYOMING is too complicated for its own good: an unnecessarily awkward attempt to hybrid the Western genre with mazy espionage.