I'm working on a piece right now for my friend Brian's site -- Rupert Pupkin Speaks -- about my picks for "Underrated Films of 1986". One of my film picks for the article is X: The Unheard Music, a documentary about one of my favorite bands of the '80s (and of all time, actually). But before I wrote about the film, I wanted to give it another watch, mainly so I could listen to X's amazing music again.
Near the end of the film, the full video for the song I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts (off of their More Fun in the New World album) is shown in its entirety. It is a song that I often sing to myself when I go on my walks (if I have not brought the iPod), if only because I sometimes find the mantra in the chorus, "I must not think bad thoughts," helpful when I find those moments when the day or life or whatever has gotten me in a bad place in my mind. Which is quite often these days.
The irony (fully intended) in the mantra is that, when read along with the lyrics, the bad thoughts that the lead singers (John Doe and Exene Cervenka) are reminding themselves not to think are actually thoughts one should be thinking about and using to seek out solutions in our world. Concerns about the harm we are doing in the world with our endless wars and hatred for others ("Both sides are right/But both sides murder/I give up/Why can't they?/I must not think bad thoughts"). Concerns about the poor in our streets. Concerns of guilt in being complicit in the propagation of wars in foreign lands. Concerns about the superficiality of pop culture when faced with social issues that are never corrected ("Woody Guthrie sang about b-e-e-t-s, not b-e-a-t-s. I must not think bad thoughts").
It's a powerful song, and X even works in the lyrics to the theme song from an old forgotten '60s sitcom (It's About Time). If you have never listened to X, do yourself a favor here.
RTJ
The lyrics:
"The facts we hate We'll never meet Walking down the road Everybody yelling, "Hurry up, hurry up!" But I'm waiting for you I must go slow I must not think bad thoughts When is this world coming to? Both sides are right But both sides murder I give up Why can't they? I must not think bad thoughts I must not think bad thoughts I must not think bad thoughts
The civil wars and the uncivilized wars Conflagrations leap out of every poor furnace The food cooks poorly and everyone goes hungry From then on, it's dog eat dog, dog eat body and body eat dog I can't go down there I can't understand it I'm a no good coward An American, too A North American, that is (Not a South or a Central or a Native American) Oh, I must not think bad thoughts I must not think bad thoughts I must not think bad thoughts
I'm guilty of murder of innocent men Innocent women, innocent children, thousands of them My planes, my guns, my money, my soldiers, My blood on my hands, it's all my fault! I must not think bad thoughts I must not think bad thoughts I must not think bad thoughts
The facts we hate You'll never hear us I hear the radio is finally gonna play new music You know, the British invasion But what about the Minutemen, Flesh Eaters, D.O.A., Big Boys, and the Black Flag? Will the last American band to get played on the radio please bring the flag? Please bring the flag! Glitter-disco-synthesizer night school All this noble savage drum drum drum Astronauts go back in time To hang out with the cave people It's about time It's about space It's about some people in the strangest places Woody Guthrie sang about b-e-e-t-s not b-e-a-t-s I must not think bad thoughts I must not think bad thoughts I must not think bad thoughts
The facts we hate We'll never meet Walking down the road Everybody yelling, "Hurry up, hurry up!" But I'm waiting for you I must go slow I must not think bad thoughts When is this world coming to? Both sides are right But both sides murder I give up Why can't they? I must not think bad thoughts I must not think bad thoughts I must not think bad thoughts"
[This is the ninth part of an ongoing (and resurrected) series called The Ballad of Kong. To read the previous parts, start with Pt. 1 from December 2005.]
In once again picking up my multi-part memory slideshow regarding the early years of King Kong's influence in my life, I have encased in amber within my stupid brain a prehistoric notion of Kong that far precedes any viewing of a Kong film or video, or any reading of a book or magazine on monsters, or any sneakily clandestine ogling of Jessica Lange on Topps trading cards. It is a vivid memory of my playing with a King Kong puppet as a small child. Not just a generic, stuffed gorilla that some money-grubbing opportunist says is King Kong, but rather an actual merchandising tie-in to a late 1960s television cartoon that I most certainly have viewed on Saturday morning television when I was a child, but I truly have no actual recollection of the show. I only remember the toy.
But the toy was not played with in Alaska, where we lived for most of my childhood. I remember playing with the puppet, but I did not possess the thing. I am a tad fuzzy on the details from here on out, but I do dredge up a picture of Kong belonging to a cousin, or a friend of a cousin, in Wisconsin in the early '70s. The locale might even be my Granny's house. I do have slight memories of playing at other houses in Wisconsin in that period, but my memory of the Kong puppet incident is set somewhere between the organ and the big stone fireplace setting at Granny's wonderful house. This leads me to believe that the Kong puppet might have belonged to a cousin.
Since I still possess a great many of the toys that I owned in my youth, I find it hard to believe that it belonged to my brother Mark or I, though that is not out of the question. Perhaps it was a toy purchased but left behind in the trip before we headed back to Alaska? It's sad if it is so, because that puppet is worth a mint now.
The King Kong Talking Hand Puppet, sold by Mattel, was bright blue and yellow in color, while his face was made of a hard rubber. Why he was blue and yellow doesn't make sense to me since in every picture that I see from the TV series, Kong is clearly black or blackish brown in coloration, with a lighter tannish color on his underside. The puppet had a string imbedded in the cloth comprising the sleeve for one's hand. A steady, long tug of this string (using what the box calls a "Chatty-Ring," would cause Kong to say many assorted phrases -- such as "I'll swat that airplane! or "Hang on! Here we go!" or "Let's leapfrog over a mountain!" Bobby's squeaky kid voice (far squeakier than in the cartoon, where he seems a bit older) also comes out of the puppet, which is a big strange sounding if Bobby is no longer attached to the toy (he comes buttoned on Kong's arm, but can be easily removed). For Kong himself, a thunderous voice emanates from deep within the bowels of the plush simian, a sound which must have passed for crystalline clarity in those days but has that slight echo that seems to come with most pull-string toys. [Note: What Kong spoke, or rather, roared is beyond my memory, and is entirely unimportant to that memory. I have relied on the internet for that information.] The Kong that I actually grew to love did not speak somewhat like a human, and it is proper that my earliest memory of the creature is similarly bound in a lack of English.
The show that the puppet was based on was called The King Kong Show, and ran for three seasons starting in fall of 1966. I would have just turned two when it came on the air, and five when it went off, so I fell into the target audience of the show eventually in that span. If indeed I had seen the show as a child, I am not sure if I would have made the connection between the show and the puppet, since the colors of the different Kongs are so different from each other. And yet, the puppet did come with a boy character named Bobby Bond, whom I do not recollect in my memories of the puppet, and he is the same boy who has adventures with Kong in the cartoon show. The other confusing thing about the talking puppet is that Kong doesnot actually talk in the show (at least the few episodes I have found online). He grunts and makes other sounds back to Bobby and the other humans who converse with him, but does not actually talk as we do.
If I would have remembered anything about this cartoon from my childhood, it would have been the theme song. But even here, my memory is negligent. I was able to find people singing the song on Youtube, and even a clip or two of the song with its cartoon opening, and it is pretty catchy. Here are the lyrics...
"King Kong! You know the name of King Kong! You know the fame of King Kong! Ten times as big as a man!
Throughout the land, you've heard about this wonder! Listen closely and you will hear the thunder of this mighty ape, and he's a friend of man! So goes the legend... the legend of..
King Kong! You know the name of King Kong! You know the fame of King Kong! Ten times as big as a man!
One day, a boy too young to know the danger, Made a friend of this giant fearsome creature, and the life they led on their island home became a legend... the legend of . . .
King Kong! You know the name of King Kong! You know the fame of King Kong! Ten times as big as a man!"
One other note... The King Kong Show was produced by Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass, whom you may know better as the creators of such stop-motion animated specials as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, and The Year without a Santa Claus. They co-produced a feature film with Toho (the studio of Godzilla and his pals) in 1967 called King Kong Escapes [Kingu Kongu no Gyakushū]. The film had its roots in this show, which does have an episode featuring a battle between Kong and a mechanized double, a plotline directly used in the film version. I saw King Kong Escapes as a teenager, but had no idea of the connection with the older cartoon show. I just thought it was a direct sequel to 1962's King Kong vs. Godzilla, also co-produced by Toho. From the beginning, though, it was easy even then to tell the similarities in design between the robot Kong in the film and many other characters designed for Rankin-Bass productions, of which I was a fanatic since a wee child.
Getting back to the King Kong Talking Hand Puppet, this memory may explain why I have been so drawn to puppets over my lifetime, even becoming a puppeteer for many, many years within the Moorish circus my friends and I performed in annually at our local renaissance faire. I still own many, many puppets in my personal toy collection, retain a perfectly happy relationship with all things Muppet even nearing middle age, and am fascinated anytime that I find old puppets in antique stores and even new ones in toy shops. If I had indeed owned the King Kong Talking Hand Puppet when I was a kid vacationing in Wisconsin, then it is a very sad thing that it didn't survive the transition back to Alaska.
So it had to be an accident if it was mine. I would have never parted with it willingly. Not King Kong. A boy and his gorilla need to be together.
RTJ
*****
To see an episode from The King Kong Show for yourself, check this out...
And to see the King Kong Talking Hand Puppet talk, watch this video...
[Editor's Note: The pictures in this piece were found on a French King Kong fan forum -- http://king-kong.fansforum.info/t193-THE-KING-KONG-SHOW.htm -- and also on Ebay, where a King Kong Talking Hand Puppet (or even the stuffed doll that looks very similar) in fine condition will run you a few hundred dollars. So it is very doubtful I will ever get one of my own. But if I ever win any size portion of the lottery, that puppet is mine.]
I turned on the TV yesterday afternoon to watch a little old school Match Game '78 on BUZZR (which plays reruns of old game shows) while I had my lunch with our cat, the Blueberry. When Match Game was over, the next show on was Child's Play. The contestants were announced by Bill Cullen, and the first one was a lady named Andy Dufresne.
It took me a second before I flashed on The Shawshank Redemption and realized that she had the same exact name as Tim Robbins' character in that movie. The name is the same in Stephen King's original novella, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. Knowing that the book in which the novella was published, Different Seasons, came out in the early '80s, I started to wonder if perhaps Stephen King had been watching daytime TV back then and happened upon this episode and said, "What a great name for my lead character!" and then used Andy Dufresne for his story.
Looking up Different Seasons, I found out it was published in hardcover in August 1982, which triggered memories of the summer where my pals Wayne, Shane, Tony, and I putzed around much of the time while only semi-seriously looking for gainful employment (Tony, of course, was employed). When Different Seasons came out, we were all reading it at various points at the end of that summer. (For the uninitiated, Different Seasons is the same collection that has the story, The Body, that was turned into the Rob Reiner classic Stand By Me, and Apt Pupil, turned into a Bryan Singer movie with the same title.) I seem to recall we had some pretty good, deep arguments about Apt Pupil.
The next step was looking up that game show, Child's Play. The info button on the cable remote told me that the show was from 1982, and this made me wonder if, indeed, I was correct in my King theory. However, a search at a couple of different sources online revealed that Child's Play only ran for a single full season, and that was from September 1982 through early September 1983. Ratings killed it, and CBS replaced it with the much more famous Press Your Luck. No whammies!
Since it is likely that King finished Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption well before that August 1982 publishing date, probably even before the start of 1982, that definitely killed my theory before it had time to even breathe. Still, it was exciting for a few short afternoon minutes. King is known for being more of a regular Joe than many writers equal to his fame, so it wouldn't surprise me if he did get inspiration from a failed game show.
Why begin this new feature on the Cinema 4 Pylon, intended to spotlight a particular monster -- famous or otherwise -- with a mere (mostly) stop-motion dinosaur? And especially when I normally I steer clear of calling a dinosaur "monster" in the first place. Dinosaurs -- including the species somewhat represented in The Beast of Hollow Mountain as a member of the Allosaurus genus -- are catalogued scientifically. They are recognized by the immensely overwhelming majority of legitimate scientists as having once possessed life (in the natural sense) and roamed upon our planet in the past (and millions of years before man came along, not at the same time). Monsters, in the vein that I am using them here, are made up of entirely fictional creatures of some mysterious origin either supernatural or unnaturally scientific (such as laboratory or nuclear experimentation gone awry), or they may be part of the group called "cryptids", described by the Oxford Dictionary as creatures "whose existence or survival is disputed or unsubstantiated, such as the yeti." (It is my choice on my own website to determine the parameters of the term for my own purposes, and I choose to agree with the Oxford definition.) So, I am somewhat rubbing myself the wrong way intentionally by proclaiming movie dinosaurs to be "monsters" when, in fact, they were merely animals, albeit of enormous size (in many, but not all, cases). But what else is a dinosaur somehow transplanted to modern times that runs amok among the populace but a monster? There is no way around it this time, because this particular allosaurus -- the one brought to life via filmed animation and puppetry in The Beast of Hollow Mountain -- was indeed my first true movie monster. I certainly may have had monstrous influence already in my young life at the time that I first saw this film at the age of five (Sesame Street and its assorted Jim Henson Muppet monsters had most likely not yet premiered -- the exact date of my viewing of this film is unknown -- but I did love Puff the Magic Dragon at that age), but this was the film that probably brought to life the earliest stirrings within me of one of the primary obsessions of my life. In piecing together my youth through the films that I saw, I can find no other horror or science fiction film that I saw at such a young age that stuck in my memory like The Beast from Hollow Mountain. This 1956 film itself is pretty slight (less than 80 minutes) and really doesn't seem to have much dinosaur action in it when measured against the majority of the time that is spent in the film on the usual old west cowboy drama. That's right... The Beast of Hollow Mountain, which promises so much with just its title, starts out as just another western. About six years before I would see a late night viewing of Ray Harryhausen's The Valley of Gwangi that would blow my mind wide open (more on Gwangi later), I was introduced to the concept of "cowboys vs. dinosaurs" by an unplanned viewing of The Beast of Hollow Mountain on an afternoon matinee show on a local television station. (Unlike most movies over the years to follow, I am unable to pinpoint which station or matinee show. Those details were not important to me yet.) At five, I was pretty much just happy knowing there was a magical box in our living room that would show me cartoons on Saturday mornings or throw up video of the occasional rocket taking off on the news. But a memory that stays locked in my head from around the same time (1969) was my family's viewing of the footage from the Apollo 11 moon landing on our (now) diminutive television screen. This is mainly because everyone in the world made such a big thing about the moon landing at the time -- it was hard to escape the constant talk -- but I am also certain that I saw it myself because, as a kid of the exact right age to be influenced by such matters, astronauts were my earliest role models (besides Batman, of course).
Someday, I will own this again...
Though I am saddened to recall that I no longer possess it, my first metal lunchbox (one that I would proudly take with me to kindergarten that fall) was The Astronauts one that Aladdin released in that year of 1969, creating an easy money tie-in with the moon landing. I have very few memories of the brief couple of months that I attended kindergarten at Sand Lake Elementary (we moved from "big city" Anchorage to the much more woodsy Eagle River early on in the 1969-70 school year), but another memory from those days that did stick is my jealousy over another student's Lost in Space lunchbox. Of course, he was equally covetous of my Astronauts lunchbox as well, so everything evened out, I guess. (I suppose we could have traded lunchboxes, but it didn't turn out that way.) I also remember we got along pretty well after that, for the short time that I knew him. But back to that first magic box I mentioned, the one that showed me cartoons and moon landings. Another memory seared into my brain is one of my mother engaged in household chores, including a bunch of ironing, while I killed the afternoon hiding under a chair, with a blanket draped over it so it created a safety fort for me. The fort was necessary, because I needed to hide under one every time things got too scary, and I definitely had need of the improvised fortress while I found myself immersed in the quick bursts of dinosaur rampage scenes in The Beast of Hollow Mountain. It's not hard to see why I would have watched the film, dinosaurs or not. I also liked cowboy shows when I was young, and my parents, not surprisingly, liked to watch a lot of westerns. Television was rife with westerns in those days, and in the eyes of my family, a western was a western was a western. If one was going to spring up on one of the three local channels at that time, it was likely that someone would turn it on at least as background noise. I am not sure if it was because of this that The Beast of Hollow Mountain was even on our TV that day. It may have just been blind luck that allowed that movie to show up on our screen. I was definitely too young to read the TV guide in the newspaper (the actual TV Guide was not sold in Alaska in those days) or even care about such listings quite yet (that would change relatively soon). So I certainly didn't read about it or have knowledge enough to know the movie would be on that day. It is also unknown whether, knowing that there was a fearsome beast lurking somewhere within the film, my mother would have turned it on for me to watch. I was certainly not a stranger to televised dramas of any stripe, but I have no way to know how "television cowardly" I was in those days (as opposed to being cowardly in real life, which I probably was at the time). And if she was worried about it, she needn't have. I believe that the movie permanently dug its way into my head for a reason. I recall being completely transfixed by The Beast of Hollow Mountain, ducking my head underneath the curtains created by my blanket fort to peer through the crack to watch the hero (Guy Madison) do battle with "the beast" that was tormenting a small Mexican border town. I had seen other movies by that age and loved everything that I saw, but in the pre-video era, the number of films that I got to see were far less than kids of today. There was no copy of Frozen to watch 47 times in a week and there were no DVRs to record programs instantly. You either caught whatever was shown on TV when it was aired, or you went to see new movies or re-releases in the movie theatres... or you read books. (And in the phrasing of Dana Carvey as his Grumpy Old Man character, "And we liked it... we liked it fine!")
Also unknown to me is if I watched the film from its start as a child or if I sat down in the middle of it. Since there is little in the way of actual dinosaur action until much later in the film, the promise held at the beginning of the film may have hooked me from the get-go. After some darkly dramatic music over the credits -- far more threatening than the usual western intro -- a narrator tells of a local peak named Hollow Mountain, so called for the legend that it is hollow. We are also told that the mountain's supposedly hollow interior has never been explored because of the thick jungle swamp that surrounds it.
A trio of caballeros ride into view, at the head of which rides Jimmy Ryan (played by Madison), the co-owner of a ranch who has seen a disproportionate amount of his cattle go missing in recent weeks. He thinks rustlers are the primary cause, but his sombrero-wearing ranch hands talk of the mysterious mountain and the ominous swamp surrounding it. To be sure, a cattle skull is seen on its banks, but Ryan thinks that it can't explain all of the cattle. While they search, the camera shows a set of large footprints embedded in the thick mud, but these are unremarked upon by the caballeros. The film ambles on from this point in decidedly non-monster movie fashion for a good while. We meet Ryan's rival, Felipe Sanchez, who owns another ranch and wants to buy out Ryan to run him out of the territory. We meet Pancho, a well-meaning but generally drunken sort, and his really stubborn son, Panchito. (No, really... his stubborn streak fairly sets up the monster action in the second half of the film.) We also meet the love interest, pretty Sarita (Patricia Medina), engaged to marry Sanchez, but slowly falling in love more and more with Ryan with each meeting. We get a lengthy street fight between Ryan and Sanchez, much talk of cattle buying, more searching for missing cattle, plotting by Sanchez to rid himself of Ryan's presence, and a scene where Ryan has to rescue Pancho after the latter's horse is scared by firecrackers. Western business as usual, and not much difference from a thousand other B-grade oaters of the period.
Just accept your death, Pancho! Why live when your child is so annoying?
But there is always the threat of that swamp and the mysterious creature that lurks around the mountain. Every trip back to the mountain brings us that same ominous, thumping music. And when Pancho gets it into his head that he really must head out to the swamp to find a pathway through it that he just knows must be there, we know something bad is about to happen to him. I say "we know something," but at the age of five and very unused to the beats of horror films, I probably didn't. At around the 43-minute mark in the film, well past the halfway point, Pancho finds himself mucking around the swamp looking for his path, when there is a huge roar. He looks up and screams in terror at something huge off camera. He pulls his gun and fires several rounds, but to no avail. He screams again and a dark shape advances upon him until we no longer see Pancho at all, just his sombrero laying in the muck. When Pancho doesn't return as he promised to his son, Panchito totally loses his shit. While a lesser person such as myself would just "take Panchito to the swamp" and then come back without him, Ryan is made of sterner stuff and is able to ignore the kid's incessant whining. Ryan rushes out to the swamp and finds Pancho's sombrero, and pretty much knows the score. (Well, except for the "getting eaten by a dinosaur" part...)
Well, the film goes back to the western stuff: Ryan's cattle are set to be sold and shipped away, Sanchez wants to buy Ryan out but not after the cattle are sold, Sarita and Sanchez's big wedding day arrives, and Sanchez sends his men out to stampede Ryan's cattle before they can make it to the train station. Fireworks are shot off in celebration of the wedding and the whole town is partying. It seems like a big disaster is brewing, but it is not the one that the town expects. That's right... there is more stubborn screeching on the part of little Panchito, who is obsessed with finding his papa in the swamp and wants to set out on his own to do so. This makes Sarita take to her own horse to find him. If ever there was a time for the monster to make his big entrance, this is the opportunity...
...and does he ever! Back at the swamps, where a pair of Ryan's caballeros are playing dice instead of watching over the numerous head of cattle surrounding them, we see the first non-shadowy glimpse of the creature. While this film mainly employs stop-motion animation for its creature effects, other puppetry methods are used, including the first shot of the monster's feat. The effect is not removed at all from the Godzilla style of "suit-mation" and looks rather comical when matched against the stop-motion action to come. There is much tooting of dramatic fanfare as the beast's feet march across the ground and then come to a stop in front of the caballeros, who have to this point not noticed the monster's advance. That is, until the beast lets loose with a snarl and a roar. The caballeros look up and are stunned with terror.
I just knew he was on the Paleo Diet...
We get a close-up of the beast and see that the main character trait of this particular creature is a tendency to not only curl its lip into a sneer, but also has a very long, almost snakelike tongue that whips out several inches from its mouth. The caballeros make a break for it, but the monster's appearance has already frightened the cattle, and the men are crushed to death beneath their hooves. The allosaurus decides that a snack is in order, and we get a neat shot of the beast tracking one of the cattle across the landscape and picking it up in its mouth. So, at about the 59-minute mark, we finally get some major dinosaur action. And we will get exactly that for the remaining eighteen minutes of film.
The stampeding cattle start running in the direction of the town. Other caballeros hear the noise and do what they can to stop the stampede. The townsfolk dance in the streets, unaware of the impending doom. Panchito is caught in between, and veers off the road to head towards the swamp. The cattle sweep through the town sending the citizens scurrying for safety. Ryan is told that Sarita has gone after the annoying Panchito, and then Sanchez is told that Ryan has headed after Sarita who has headed after Panchito.
Khaaaaaaaannnnnnnn!!!
As for that insufferable little snot, Panchito is making his way along the swamp's edge, when just like his father before him, he hears the snarling entrance of the Beast of Hollow Mountain. Sure, he's not going to get eaten, which is a sad thing for anyone with ears and/or a modicum of taste, but kids were usually safe in monster movies at the time.
But we can delight in his torture, and when the creature does a full roar and lunges at him, Panchito loses his shit a second time, like a kid who has finally been told the truth about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and exactly how he was conceived -- all at the same time. (Of course, what he would find out was that he was the result of a totally unplanned and drunken haystack ravaging.)
Pop its top!! Pop its top!
Unfortunately for the audience and the allosaurus, the lovely and brave Sarita arrives in the nick of time to lead Panchito to a ramshackle cabin. The monster chases the pair around the building briefly, but when they finally go inside, the beast attempts to get at them through the roof, which already has a sizable hole in it. While he thrusts his arms inside trying to grab them, Sarita grabs a pole to try to ward him off. Panchito? He's got no game. Practically crying in the corner, that kid.
Finally, Ryan arrives and fires a couple of shots at the monster's face. One connects and causes a lot of damage, painful enough to make the beast swing his smallish arms at his snout. Ryan's tactic works well enough that the dinosaur forgets about the cabin and runs after Ryan. But Felipe Sanchez is arrives as well, meaning to do Ryan in for good. He takes aim at the American, but a sudden appearance of the beast frightens his horse. Sanchez takes a rough tumble into the dirt, and it is up to Ryan to rescue him.
He should really get some hydrogen peroxide on that wound...
Riding off with Sanchez hanging on behind him on the horse, Ryan cuts across the plain, and we get the first shot of the dinosaur running, a nice composite with both the horse and the dinosaur in full flight.
The next couple of minutes are of the monster in pursuit of Ryan and Sanchez. The beast goes up the mountain, and then down the mountain, and eventually up again. Finally, Ryan's rides his horse sideways down a steep incline, thinking that there is no way that the dinosaur could possibly pursue them. But when they hit the bottom, Ryan's horse takes a spill (the stunt looks very unplanned), and the two cattlemen are sent sprawling on the ground. At the top of the incline, the dinosaur roars wildly and waves his arms. With his carrying on, the mountainside gives way underneath his massive weight, and the allosaurus slides down the mountainside, also taking a small tumble himself. In what is perhaps my favorite shot of the entire film, we see the allosaurus pick himself up from his fall, and then sprint across the field in the direction of Ryan, who is continuing to fire bullets at the creature.
Ryan and Sanchez make it to a cavern opening that Freud could have written volumes about, and hide inside hoping that the dinosaur will pass them by. They are not so lucky, and after sizing up the entrance for a moment, the monster tries to use his right arm to grab one of them. His first attempt is in vain, but he readjusts and tries again. This time, Ryan uses his knife to stab the creature in the hand, and the beast recoils briefly in pain. The third time, the allosaurus gets his hand around the neck of the villainous Sanchez, who collects his just deserts by being strangled and then thrown roughly against the wall of the mountain. A posse from the town arrives just as it seems that Ryan will be caught next, and then they distract the allosaurus just enough to allow Ryan to escape.
Ryan tells the group that bullets do no harm to the beast, which is an outright lie, because we have already seen one nearly take out his eye. There have been other moments where he acts annoyed by the bullets, so they can clearly harm him. You just have to concentrate enough firepower on it at once to have real effectiveness. However, Ryan has a plan, and it is one so crazy it just might work. He decides to lead the dinosaur to the deadly swamp and trap the creature in the muck.
Ryan grabs a rope and runs into the waters of the swamp and wades across to a large tree a short distance from the short. Forming a lasso, he throws the rope upward to a high branch on the tree. Believe it or not, he actually manages to get it around the branch on the first throw (he really does it too), and then he creates a loop in the other end so that he can swing on it. With his foot in the loop, he starts to do the Tarzan routine, swinging back and forth, slowing taunting the allosaurus forward to the edge of the swamp. The dinosaur snaps menacingly at Ryan, but the cowboy manages to stay just out of the grasp of the beast. In a surprising moment, the dinosaur lashes at Ryan with his claws on one swing and tears off a piece of Ryan's shirt. At last, the dino steps ahead just a little too much and slides off the bank into the swamp. His ponderous weight does not allow him to escape, and the beast of Hollow Mountain slowly sinks in the quicksand until he disappears from view. The hero embraces Sarita, and all is well in the town again. The End.
While it does take just under an hour for the dinosaur action to really begin, the last twenty minutes seem to be non-stop action, broken up only by quick town scenes. The beast seems to be a constant menace for the remainder of the picture, and this may be exactly why it lodged itself in my memory from age five onward. One key note about this film. The plot is based on a story written by the great Willis O'Brien, the genius animator who not only brought King Kong to life, but really jump-started stop-motion dinosaur action in cinema with several short silent films that eventually culminated in the creation of the original version of The Lost World in 1925. In 1949, O'Brien teamed up with his apprentice, Ray Harryhausen, to make Mighty Joe Young. Ray became the king of stop-motion once The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms caught fire a couple of years later, but while "Obie" (as he was known to friends) continued to work sporadically throughout the '50s during the resurgence of giant monster movies (The Giant Behemoth, The Black Scorpion), he never got the financing he needed to do another project on the level of King Kong.
The same story by O'Brien was reworked by Harryhausen in the late '60s into one of my personal obsessions, the aforementioned The Valley of Gwangi, directed by James O'Connolly. In this film, the dinosaurs vs. cowboys theme is taken to greater heights of imagination, and naturally, given Harryhausen's involvement, the animation is far more inspired and intricate. This is not to say that I don't enjoy the animation in The Beast of Hollow Mountain. Produced by William and Edward Nassour, the latter of whom served as co-director with Ismael Rodriguez and also oversaw the visual effects work, Beast is filmed in the Nassours' patented "Regiscope" animation process. Sure, the seams show a little more than in a bigger budget film, but there is some excellent imagery in TBoHM. My favorite detail is getting to see the dinosaur run after the cowboys following the cabin attack scene, and then seeing him run once again after he picks himself up after his spill down the mountainside. Yes, the titular dinosaur is a tail-dragger -- just like many other carnivores dinosaurs of the film variety -- and thus seemingly slow through much of the picture, but then the moments where he picks up his speed really adds an extra, and quite surprising -- thrill to the action. And for the five-year-old who watched this way back when, it was believable enough to never leave my mind. I didn't see the film until many years later, and had in fact, never really known the title when I was five. (It didn't matter then.) But those swamp sequences and the fight between the cowboy and the allosaurus (including his eventual sinking into the muck) triggered enough memories for me to be able to locate the film eventually. I had a VHS copy off of cable (I think Cinemax) for many, many years, but it never got a proper release until recently, when it was put out on Blu-ray as a double feature with a far lesser film, The Neanderthal Man. Myself, I have not purchased a copy as of yet (being out of work does that to you), but it is definitely on my wish list. It seems only right that "my first monster" should live on in my movie collection next to all of my other influences. RTJ
[I began this piece a couple of days before Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice hit theatres on the evening of Thursday, May 24th, and finished it well after seeing the film twice already. When I began writing this, the film was already hitting crazy lows on critical mass sites like Rotten Tomatoes due to the accumulation of generally poor to middling reviews from movie critics, and even before the film was going to be seen for the first time by the public, the so-called "fan"-boys and the appropriately named trolls had already pretty much taken the film apart without seeing a frame outside of the trailers. While none of this was going to sway me from my impulse to see the film at my earliest possible convenience -- the reasons why are the thrust of this piece -- seeing that a couple of my long-time friends were not only proclaiming in advance they were not going to see the film, but were ferociously adamant about it, set me to muse upon the situation.] There is a viral video going about lately that you can find by searching for "The Avengers 1978," though I have seen several different variations under alternate titles. In this video, we are presented with many clips of Lou Ferrigno and Bill Bixby from their portrayals of The Incredible Hulk and David (not specifically Bruce) Banner from the popular TV show on the late '70s and early '80s. We also see Reb Brown in his star-spangled garb and ridiculous motorcycle helmet as Captain America, featured in a pair of television movies (also from the late '70s). All well and good up to this point.
The year "1978" in the title gets thrown off the track greatly then by the appearance of a fur-laden but still mighty Thor; while he does come straight from an appearance with the Ferrigno/Bixby Incredible Hulk, the clips are from the 1988 TV movie titled The Incredible Hulk Returns (a full decade after 1978). The Iron Man used in The Avengers 1978 gets us closer to the stated year, although it is nowhere close to being the Marvel Comics hero. It is actually David Ackroyd as Exo-Man, the titular hero of a 1977 NBC television movie about a paralyzed scientist who builds an armored suit that allows him to walk again and eventually fight the mob on the streets of his city.
As for the rest of the "Avengers" in this comedic trailer, we get:
The Black Widow: short clips of a red-haired female in a red outfit (hardly the real Natasha Romanova's fashion choice) doing some clumsy martial arts combat against an assailant. Origin unknown to me at the moment.
Loki: various shots of Paul Lynde doing his trademark "sneer and snicker" schtick, sadly without audio of one of his usual catty comments. (Great casting idea though...)
Hawkeye: Alan Alda from M*A*S*H (who else could it possibly be?)
Tony Stark: a large mustachioed gentlemen of '70s vintage fills in for Iron Man's alter ego and woos women at a cocktail party (or two).
The Destroyer: Not sure if they are meant to imply Drax the Destroyer of Guardians of the Galaxy fame, but what we get here is Gene Simmons of KISS fame playing his fire-breathing Demon character from KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park. We also get a couple of quick shots of KISS with Paul Lynde himself on Lynde's amazing 1976 Halloween special.
Nick Fury: In at least one version of this video meme, clips of David Hasselhoff playing Fury in an early '90s television movie have been inserted.
The trailer is displayed to the viewer as a "CBS Late Movie" complete with the attendant fanfare music and graphics expected in such a presentation. The joke is obvious, and admittedly, humorous on a first glance. Of course, my geekiness gets the better of me, and I can't but help to point out where they have erred in their attempt, a futile effort on my part that nevertheless becomes emboldened when reading too many comments on Youtube for the different visions of this meme where it becomes clear that the bulk of the millennials viewing these clips are mainly taking the videos at face value, and thinking that The Avengers 1978 was a real show. My guess is that even the Hawkeye Pierce joke is also totally lost on the majority of them. Le sigh...
But The Avengers 1978 fake trailer is not why I am here today. It certainly makes up a small portion of the kindling for this fire o' mine, but it is not the real reason. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is the reason. Or, specifically, the perception of the critical lambasting of the film in advance of the film even coming out is the real reason.
I get that everyone has their take on why or why not they want to see a film. While I might believe that someone's particular stance is grounded in obstinacy or sheer bullshit, I also cannot denounce any opinion they may hold as invalid (at least not publicly). Conversely, I don't want someone to discount my opinion in the same manner. We all have our likes and dislikes, and we use them to color our decisions throughout our existences, both in matters important and trivial. And so I am not going to pick out a particular instance or two that might have riled me recently, nor am I going to do battle against the critical establishment, for in stating what I already have thus far, I must by all means consider each of their opinions in this matter as equally valid in viewpoint and execution.
What I am going to tell you is why there is not a chance in any imaginary hellscape that I would even think of missing out on seeing Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice in a movie theatre.
And The Avengers 1978 fake trailer is one of the reasons why.
The silly little fake trailer is nothing more than simple fluff, meant to entertain while gathering pageviews and comments on whatever social media page chooses to host or post it. But for certain members of its audience -- namely, me -- The Avengers 1978 hit home in an unexpected way.
An actual Avengers comic from 1978
During the year of 1978, I jumped from thirteen to fourteen years of age, and I was a big comic book geek. While I read comics for much of my young life at that point, I didn't really start collecting them until early in 1977. From the start, my favorite Marvel comic was The Avengers and my favorite DC books, naturally, were the Batman titles. Throughout 1978, not only was I beginning to amass what would turn out to be a huge comic collection, but I was also fully immersed in Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, Ray Harryhausen stop-motion, Hammer horror films (but monster films of all stripes really), Topps baseball cards for all of the major sports (and even the non-sport varieties), and reruns of older TV shows such as Star Trek, The Wild Wild West, Dr. Who, Get Smart, Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and my all-time fave and obsession since I was a toddler (quite literally), the Adam West version of Batman. And then there was the prime time television of the day...
As a tried and true comic and also science-fiction fan, my TV obsessions that year definitely included such fare as The Incredible Hulk, Wonder Woman, Mork and Mindy, The Amazing Spider-Man, Battlestar Galactica, Logan's Run, The Bionic Woman, and especially The Six Million Dollar Man (which ended its run early in that year). I also partook of non-genre shows like Fantasy Island, Starsky and Hutch, Baretta, The Love Boat, WKRP in Cincinnati, M*A*S*H, Family, Eight is Enough, Soap, Three's Company, and Charlie's Angels. There were also Saturday morning cartoon shows like The All-New Super Friends Hour/Challenge of the Super Friends, The Krofft Supershow, The Fantastic Four, Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels, The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour,Jason of Star Command, Space Sentinels, The Godzilla Power Hour, Space Academy, and The Batman/Tarzan Adventure Hour/Tarzan and the Super 7 (amongst far too many others). What it comes down to is... I watched a lot of damn television as a kid. And scraping away the non-genre junk (from all the other junk), it became clear that wherever super-heroes, super-villains, monsters, or aliens of all stripes might appear -- and no matter which format or time of day or night -- I would find them. Sure, even at that tender age, I wished that some of the animation in the cartoon shows was better. I was always angry that none of the animated shows had a design half as good as the much older (but still often in reruns) Jonny Quest, then and now one of my fave shows of all time. And I was always frustrated that the live-action shows were always so stunted in showing off the powers of its heroes and villains, or in the rather limited scope of special effects (at least until Battlestar came along).
But we took what we could get. When a TV movie featuring Dr. Strange came on, my fellow comic buddies and I jumped on it like it was made of solid gold, no matter the actual quality of the film. It just didn't matter. The aforementioned Exo-Man was a big deal to us when it came on (though once it was on, it was no longer a big deal; it was a pretty shabby affair, as you can tell from the clips in The Avengers 1978 trailer). Short-lived shows like the very silly Holmes and Yoyo and the more serious Future Cop came and went, but we watched them all in the hopes of see something new, something different, something cool... and something heroic. In 1978, we got Superman on the big screen, and man, was it a big deal. I still have promotional magazines for the film's release in my collection (included an over-sized jumbo magazine that DC itself put out and the requisite set of Topps trading cards). And when we sat in the theatre and saw the new, charming Man of Steel portrayed perfectly by Christopher Reeve (still the standard) fly for the first time, well, even without being told that we would believe he could do so by the advertising, we really did believe it for a short time. Or at least we were willing to suspend our disbelief long enough to enjoy the experience, even though we were already too touched by Star Wars and the new media concentration on how special effects were created in that day to not see the men behind the curtain. The magazines told us everything, but the effect did still work on us -- because we wished it so -- and it was bigger and better than any superhero effort to that point. We loved it.
Most of the time, however, it was me and my comics alone. Lacking a live-action source for most superheroes (or even an animated one), I read and reread each issue devotedly. In my mind's eye, I treated each comic as it were the latest episode of that hero's television show. The next step was a tad insane. Obsessed with TV listings at that age (even memorizing the times and stations of every prime time program and many of the daytime ones), on paper I constructed my own networks that were to be rivals to television's (then) Big Three. There was a DC and a Marvel network, and I delighted in plotting out prime-time schedules, pitting particular comics against one another in the same time slots. I even had a network for the non-Marvel and DC titles, where Richie Rich, Casper, Archie, and Charlton Comics got their fair shake as well. Whatever I was reading at the time, they got a "show". In this dream comic television universe, Batman almost always ran concurrently against Captain America and the Falcon, and of course, the Justice League of America always faced off against the Avengers, and so on... Studying the TV ratings announced in the local paper, I was already attuned to which nights were the most popular ones, and tried to adjust my "hero" networks in the same way, putting what I perceived to be stronger shows on the nights that drew the bigger ratings to do battle against the most popular "real" shows.
In this way, when I actually read the comics, they came to life even more for me, since I was now perceiving each one as an actual live entertainment. I would even write out brief synopses for each issue to put in my bogus TV Guide to entice the would-be viewer into watching that "show". And this alternate television universe in my mind also extended to the movie world. Multi-issue arcs, of the time the Avengers were often prone to, were feature films to me.
My superhero network world collapsed after a year or so, mostly due to maturation (albeit slight) on my part. We grow up and get distracted by other things. Comics were still a major component of my lifeblood; the extra time in my late teens was spent in building fake TV schedules was put into more worthy projects like writing, music, going to actual movies, obsessing over girls (and all of its attendant weirdness), and drawing my own comics. But even though I was growing up, there was one aspect of childhood that I never outgrew: I still felt the world was seriously lacking comic book entertainment beyond the printed page. I never fell out of love with the fantastical onscreen. Straight through the rest of the 20th century, every major science-fiction, superhero, fantasy, and horror project was treated with equal fervor and excitement before it either came out to theatres or arrived on the television screen. And then, once it was released and viewed, likewise treated with either the acclaim or disdain appropriate to its result. This leads to situations where The Last Starfighter,Krull, and Megaforce all seemed equally interesting in concept in advance of their release in the 1980s, but then I discovered that -- in my opinion at the time (and now), and in order -- that one was a thoroughly marvelous entertainment, one was dull and too derivative in conception, and the last was an insipid pile of horseshit. But I chose to go see each one on the same neutral grounds, and if I didn't come out with the same positive opinion of each one, well, that's mostly on me. No matter how I felt about them afterward, I was happy to go see all three in the theatre. It doesn't come down to idiotic statements like "I want my money back" or "I wasted two hours of my life that I'll never get back"; you know, the rote things that people who don't take ownership of their actions say when they are upset about the consequences of a simple night out at the movies. No, I chose to spend my own money and see all three films, and it wasn't the excellence of the films in which I was investing those few precious dollars... it was the experience. Buying a movie ticket doesn't guarantee that you will enjoy the film that is showing on the movie screen that day. It is a contract between you and the theatre owner that you have rented space in one of their seats, gives you access to their refreshment counter (where you will encounter further, sometimes ridiculous fees for usually mediocre food), and allows you the chance to see the featured film at the specific time printed on your ticket. It doesn't say anything about actually enjoying the film; you are basically purchasing a night out at the movies, and whether you end up enjoying the experience or not is up to you. No one gets refunds on a ticket to the baseball game when the home team doesn't win the game. You are going to the game to see two teams play each other. You are going for the experience. Just like with a movie, your happiness over the few hours you have spent there may depend on the outcome of the game, but that is merely your perception of the event. The doofus next to you in the stands -- or in the same theatre row -- may have had a wonderful time overall. For me, even seeing a crappy film in the theatre is still an experience worth having. Seeing what you believe to be nothing but top-notch films all the time may sound great, but what it does is whitewash the results of what you are seeing. You have to have a little bit of the bad with the good on occasion to make what is good seem even better. You have to mix it up. Megaforce is a truly terrible film, but we actually had a terrific time making fun of every horrid moment on the screen -- in a pre-MST3K way, since it was only 1982 -- and every stupid line delivered by a truly out of his element Barry Bostwick and company. Once an audience is unified in its belief that what they are seeing is beyond even the help of the most proficient editor in the world, the results can be a ball. But the biggest thing for me is that when I went to a film in those days, it was more about the communal experience of seeing a film -- any film -- with my friends. The film really didn't matter; it was about sitting in the dark with my best pals and having a good time. Popcorn, soda, red vines... if the movie turned out to be fantastic, all the better. Beyond this, then and now, the movie theatre has become my church. It is where I go to work things out for myself, to perhaps catch a few minutes of quiet in the dark, and just let a movie wash over me while my mind clicks away in the background. (Sorry, unlike many people who prefer that a movie let's them "not think" for a while, I cannot do that.) Sure, I prefer to go see a film of which I might be anxious to check out, but when I need to escape to the theatre, it can be any film. As a result, I do often see movies that are considered subpar on a critical level. So I learned how to deal with those potential disappointments when encountered on the big screen. Beyond becoming simpatico with a crowd and firing back at the screen (something which totally violates my movie-going code of the past 25 years and which I would never do these days), I learned that the best way to combat ill feelings towards a film was to write them about them; to put these experiences down on paper, and learn to cast a critical eye towards anything that I was watching. Whether or not anyone else was going to read what I had just spilled out on paper (and in those early days, nobody was reading anything that I wrote, even myself), the point was to get it out of my system.
Now, one could say that there is little difference between what I taught myself to do over the years in writing about my movie experiences, and what people were doing in advance of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Weren't they also getting out their disappointment onto, if not paper, then on the internet, and probably on Twitter or Facebook, for the world to see? Well, yes, they were, but there is a critical difference between what I do and what they were doing... ... I wait until I have actually seen a film before I start deciding if it is the worst thing I have ever seen or not.
