The Miracle Rider (1935) review: Tom Mix's goofy, exhausting final ride

If you have five hours to spare and a high tolerance for cardboard props, The Miracle Rider is actually a lot of fun. But if you hate repetitive cliffhangers where a guy gets knocked out every ten minutes, you should probably skip this one. 🤠

This was the legendary Tom Mix’s final movie role. He looks pretty tired here, honestly, but his giant white cowboy hat is still impossibly clean throughout the whole ordeal.

He plays a Texas Ranger trying to protect a Native American reservation from a greedy villain named Zaroff. Zaroff is played by Charles Middleton, who you might know as Ming the Merciless, and he is just delightfully evil here.

Zaroff wants a super-explosive element called X-90 that is hidden on the reservation. To get it, he uses a fake legend about a "Firebird" to scare the Indians away.

The Firebird is actually a remote-controlled glider. It looks like a giant wooden kite some kid built in his backyard, and the way it wobbles in the air is hilarious.

The sound effects in this thing are so loud. Every single punch sounds like someone hitting a wet leather couch with a baseball bat. 💥

You can tell they were running out of budget by chapter six. They keep using the exact same rocky hill for three different locations, and I swear the same extra dies about four times.

If you have seen older silent stuff like Wolves of Kultur, you know how these serials love their endless chases. But here, the addition of sound just makes everyone yell their lines like they are trying to be heard over a lawnmower.

There is this one stunt where Tom’s horse, Tony Jr., supposedly jumps over a massive ravine. It is so obviously a dummy horse being swung on a wire, and I had to pause the video because I was laughing so hard.

The female lead is played by Joan Gale, but she does not get much to do. She mostly just stands around looking worried in a very nice outfit that somehow never gets dusty.

Like The Desert Flower, it tries to capture that classic frontier romance, but it gets bogged down by the sci-fi gadgets. Zaroff has this secret lab with flashing lightbulbs that looks like a cheap Halloween display.

The middle chapters are a real test of patience. You could probably skip chapters seven through ten and not miss a single plot point, because it is just people getting captured and escaping again.

But there is a charm to how sincere it all is. They really thought they were making the most exciting thriller of 1935.

It is definitely not a masterpiece. But for fans of weird old cinema, it is a pretty great time-waster.