Showing posts with label westerns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label westerns. Show all posts

Thursday, July 06, 2017

This Week in Rixflix #16: June 23-29, 2017


I am not sure if I am more excited about getting a chance to take TCM's online course about Alfred Hitchcock throughout the month of July, or the fact that they are showing over 40 of his films on their network around the same time. Granted, I do already own the bulk of his films from 1934 (starting with the original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much) through his final film in 1976 (Family Plot, which is the only Hitchcock film that I got the chance to see in a theatre upon its initial release). The other thing to take for granted is that I have seen most of his films in that span as well, with just a couple of outliers (having only missed 1937's Young and Innocent and 1953's I Confess, which I do own but haven't watched).

But they are showing most of his extant silent films and the bulk of his early British sound films, and that is where I really need to do a bit of catching up, as it were. Of his silents, the only one that I have ever watched all the way through is his breakthrough in 1927 with The Lodger, his tale of a Jack the Ripper type on the loose and the suspicions of the denizens of a boarding house over whether an odd man staying there might be the suspect. I am really excited to see the films just before The Lodger to see just where the Hitchcock style truly got going; The Lodger definitely shows him to already have developed some of the weapons in his arsenal, though he was still just under a decade away from his first great period, and he really hadn't truly settled on the thriller as his primary canvas.

In the meantime, I did finish going through the films from the Western course, which I wanted to get out of the way before I began the Hitchcock thing this week. Within this time, though outside of the course's range of interest, I watched two more John Wayne films I had not recorded yet as having seen: The Comancheros (1961) and The Undefeated (1969). 

Let me restate that: I thought that I had not seen either one before, but in watching each one, I am not so sure now. Seeing Stuart Whitman's Southern gentleman in the first film, and the quite similar role played by Rock Hudson in the second, both men sparked recognition in my soul. Entire scenes seemed to trigger a sense of deja vu in my mind whenever they were on screen, and I am now pretty certain I must have encountered both films in my childhood. I have said before that it is unusual for me not to remember a film that I saw in my youth, as I am crazily connected to cinema as my chief means of true escape from the world. However, I did not really come fully into that sense until I was around thirteen or so, and I also did not really start paying attention to the western as a genre of interest for myself until even later. I remember numerous Wayne westerns fondly from those days, but these two were apparently not amongst them. However, since I pretty much enjoyed both films equally and felt that pull of recognition, now I am not so sure. There must be more cinema buried in my head from that time than I first thought.

The Numbers: 

This week's feature-length film count: 21; 14 first-time viewings and 7 repeats.

Highest rated feature-length film: Fort Apache (1948) – 9/9
Lowest rated feature film: Jem and the Holograms (2015) – 4/9
Average films per day in June so far: 3.10
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 3.05
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 198

The Reviews:

Jem and the Holograms (2015) Dir.: John M. Chu – Am I wasting my time even writing about this film? Probably. Most people aren't going to bother trying to watch it, and honestly, except for the fact that I was passing by HBO one day and ran into it just as it started, I most likely would have never even though about it. But I do remember the cartoon show from the '80s, even if I only saw it once or twice, and so I did have a passing interest in wondering how they would adapt it for today. I needn't have bothered. This film is not the cartoon show at all. Sure, there is still a story about an up and coming pop-rock band, but most of the sci-fi trappings from the show, where the lead singer wears a pair of earrings that connect to a robot that creates a holographic persona that disguises her true self from the public, are missing here. There is still a really stupid robot, but all he does is trigger... a scavenger hunt! And there is a mystery in the film, but all it does is lead to... a pair of earrings that her dad left her but which never set off a helpful disguising hologram. If the film is just setting us up for a sequel where the original concept from the toy-selling show is actually used, it pays terrible service to it by, at the very least, ending with those elements fully in play. It's a shame, because the film does have some true style to it in the costuming and the cinematography, and the dramatic parts were actually played fairly well by the mostly young cast. Even Juliette Lewis is kind of fun in the evil manager role of Erica Raymond (the original character was named Eric), but wasted by film's end. I also didn't mind some of the music even most of it was fairly rote. I know the show was pretty much junk but it has some devoted fans, and I am sorry they weren't treated better by this film. – TC4P Rating: 4/9


Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words (2016) Dir.: Thorsten Schütte – Sure, I get it... Zappa isn't for everyone. Zappa wouldn't give a shit whether you liked him or not. That's kind of the thing with him. You either got his music or you didn't, and even if you did, he probably didn't really care. He was going to create music whether you were around to hear it or not. For me (and for many people), Zappa fandom for me has been a "warts 'n all" affair; there is a lot about the man's character (and some lyrical elements of his music) that I may (depending on the day) find misogynistic, homophobic, politically suspect (his negative attitudes towards unions), and downright racist on a surface glance. (You should note that I did not say "obscene"; I find nothing in this world obscene except for our current president and his cronies...) But each negative element was usually counter-balanced by often gorgeous melodies, a high level of instrumental aptitude, and satirical jabs that could be devastating in their ability to cut deeply to the core of the issue. It's the satirical element that is Zappa's saving grace in regards to charges of the crimes above, as it can be argued that each outrageous negative portrayal of certain societal groups was meant to provoke the listener into paying attention (though sometimes just to sell a juvenile joke or two). But don't get me wrong: my intense regard for Zappa's craft does not mean I love him without limits; there are moments where he does get to my own personal sense of morality. But rather than cast him aside, it just makes me want to understand him more.

Eat That Question is going to allow you to fully understand Zappa far less than owning more than 90 albums of the man's work (as I do) is going to allow for closure, but it will give you a sense of Zappa's place in entertainment and the culture of his time. It consists mainly of news clips, film clips, videos, slices of interviews and live performances, and other various Zappa ephemera, all arranged in mostly chronological order to allow for historical context. It carries right up to his death in 1993 from prostate cancer. The documentary, however unintentional, all ties in perfectly with Zappa's "conceptual continuity," where each element of his music and art, and even outside interviews, were as integral to his overall narrative as the rest. Most of his albums are each connected to the rest by recurring motifs, self-referential in-jokes, and connecting musical phrases or call-outs to previous material. Obscure characters from far older songs may suddenly burst back to life in the middle of an unrelated piece, as if dropping by for tea. Even watching many of these old clips brings his music to life – especially to a long-time fan – which is further proof that as long as the man's legend continues to bring fascination (there are numerous Zappa docs already), his music will never die. (However much his son Ahmet wants to chain it up... sorry, taking Dweezil's
side in that battle...)  – TC4P Rating: 8/9

Morgan (2016) Dir.: Luke Scott – Forgive me if I kept flashing on the superior techno-horror flick Splice from a few years back while watching Morgan. Once again, we have a genetic engineering company operating in a highly creepy fashion in a remote lab with human hybrids that age rapidly, when one of their experiments not only goes well beyond what they had envisioned, but also escapes. Unlike Splice, things are kept mostly at the human level here as far as mutations are concerned... well, human-looking but definitely super-powered. No wings sprouting out of the back here. Kate Mara plays a risk management specialist tasked with keeping things under wraps when things start to get out of hand at the lab (pre-escape) and with tracking down the hybrid girl afterward. The real remoteness of the lab surrounded by forest (filmed in Northern Island) also brings to mind some similar scenes in Ex Machina (Norway, standing in for my home state of Alaska in that one), though the intellectual head games of the latter film are not to be found here in Morgan, which survives mainly on pure action. There is a big twist in the plot here, which I will not reveal, but it somehow came off as being both pretty obvious and weirdly satisfying at the same time. Not sure how it happened, but it ended up being my favorite part of the film. Apart from that though, while Mara is good in her role, the film is just OK. And now all I want to do is watch Splice again. – TC4P Rating: 5/9


If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast (2017) Dir.: Danny Gold – For the last few years, I have found it quite amusing and fascinating that the great Carl Reiner, now 95 years of age, has taken so well to adopting social media. I am not surprised to hear when someone's older parents (including mine) are always on the computers or their iPhones, or emailing or playing games. I know it used to be a running joke about the elderly not being able to connect a VCR or getting lost trying to get on a computer, but those days really are past. The elderly today were only a short while ago using those VCRs and computers, and thus, we have an advanced age population who are more comfortable with succeeding technologies, especially as the ease of general use of these products opens up further. In the Reiner-hosted If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast, the filmmakers gather the collective thoughts of numerous celebrities above or around the 90-year mark and have them muse about life. Reiner's longtime friend and sometimes partner Mel Brooks is here, as well as Kirk Douglas, Tony Bennett, Norman Lear, Dick Van Dyke, Stan Lee, Betty White, Dave Grusin, and many more. The chief thing you may notice amongst this group, and they discuss it at length, is that many of the participants are still quite actively creative in their lives. It's a lovely if not light documentary with some terrific performers in it telling us anecdotes about their careers and what keeps them going day to day. A charming show overall. – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Lawman (1971) Dir.: Michael Winner – This is yet another film that I am fairly certain I must have seen at some point in my childhood. It's not that I remember any scenes from it, but I was a big Burt Lancaster fan in my youth, and watched nearly anything he was in when I crossed its path. And the image of Lancaster as the aging bounty hunter who enters a small western town intent on bringing to justice a murderous gang of locals certainly registers with my catalogue of remembered images in my mind. He will not be swayed by his task – not by bribery, threats, gunfire, or the fact that his ex-lover is currently involved with one of the gang – and in the usual manner of these affairs, very few in the town are willing to lend even casual assistance to him, thinking more of themselves than of the common good. Lancaster is as tough as usual here, if not a little more one-note than I would prefer, and he has a terrific supporting cast behind him: Robert Ryan, Robert Duvall, Albert Salmi, Lee J. Cobb, John Hillerman, Sheree North, Joseph Wiseman, John Beck, Ralph Waite, and in his very first big screen role, Richard "Logan's Run" Jordan. Director Michael Winner would make a western the following year with Charles Bronson called Chato's Land, and then Winner and Bronson would move to the present day with the original The Mechanic. Both were three years away from making their biggest splash with the all-time, bona fide revenge classic, Death Wish. While it is easy to use hindsight to make connections that may or may not have been intentional, it is not hard while watching Lawman to squint a little bit – to eliminate the genre trappings of the western – and see the same style of tough guy in those films captured here on the screen with Lancaster. Lawman didn't pay off as much as I had hoped, which might be why it didn't stick with me if indeed I did see it as a kid, but it is still a strong enough '70s western to warrant a second look... if it wasn't my second one already. – TC4P Rating: 6/9

You Get Me (2017) Dir.: Brent Bonacorso – Oh, the dangers of trying to keep up – even ever so briefly – with the latest original films on Netflix. Sometimes, the results are just dandy, but more often, as it is with all things, you end having dabbled in the mediocre for 90 minutes. So, bright and early one morning, looking for a relatively short film to fill a gap in time, I went with You Get MeI will admit that I chose You Get Me solely because the poster had a pretty girl in a blue bikini floating in a swimming pool on it. (Blue, especially in lighter tones, is a trigger color for me.) So, yeah... you can call me a perv. I let my guard down and I paid for it. In the film, a dopey high school senior breaks up with his girlfriend (Halston Sage) at a party, gets really drunk, and then leaves the party with a hottie (Bella Thorne, kind of an "it" girl right now). From there, it is nothing more than Fatal Attraction with millennial teens (and sans boiled bunny, thankfully). The girls are cute but bland, the boys are the usual dopes that boys are, every succeeding plot twinge is ever more unbelievable, and my interest wore off after the swimming pool scene. If things with both the girls and the movie had gone more into the area of Wild Things (a far better if not equally unbelievable film), then I might have forgiven You Get Me. And I learned that just because Netflix has a new original film on there every fourteen minutes, I don't need to pursue watching all of them. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

Thursday, June 22, 2017

This Week in Rixflix #14: June 9-15, 2017


Going into this week, there was just one film on my mind: the new Universal version of The Mummy. I had a sense going in that it was probably not going to be great, and in a way that is quite unusual for me, I did not prepare for the film by watching a marathon of the original Universal Mummy flicks (all six of them, including the Abbott and Costello one), nor did I wade into the later Universal Mummy series with Brendan Fraser. (And don't even get me started on The Scorpion King spin-off series... to be fully honest, I am no fan of the Fraser films either.) Instead, I concentrated on other films and just waited for The Mummy to arrive. Jen had no interest in all with it and told me to "go see your buddy Tom" (a running gag that I must explain fully at some point in the future).

And yeah, the result was rather tepid. I did manage to have fun enjoying the film as a straight ahead monster flick, and enjoyed some of the character and set design. But I am so confused as to why Universal dropped the Universal Monsters label they had been pitching and keeping alive (like the truly undead) for so many decades. Now I can't, officially, say that I am going to the latest Universal Monsters picture, and am instead told that this is the first film of their – big fucking yawn – DARK UNIVERSE series, a title that has already supposedly been co-opted by Warner Brothers and DC Comics for their adaptation of Justice League Dark, which I guess is their own stupid move to not burning out the Justice League brand (even though they put out a comic and an animated film (this year nonetheless!) called Justice League Dark (which I will get to next week). So, now instead of a Universal Monsters series and Justice League Dark live-action, we have two stupid things called Dark Universe from different studios, neither of which has anything to do with the other except for shared elements of basic horror.

I have so much more to gripe about how Universal is screwing up the use of their monster franchises, especially at their theme parks. (You know how annoying it is to walk through Universal Studios in Hollywood and not find a single Dracula shirt in their gift shops? And yet, you can walk straight past the Universal store in CityWalk and go to Things from Another World and find scores of monster t-shirts. The company itself, though, doesn't care for selling its own creations.) Once I saw the new Mummy, apart from watching Svengoolie have fun with The Mummy's Tomb on his show the next day, Universal went away almost immediately in my mind. The film did not propel me into maintaining the mood because there was no real mood to maintain. (Honestly, the films it really reminded me of were Van Helsing and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, both huge disappointments in my book. I thought the new version of The Mummy was much better than both of them however.) 

I instead spent the week concentrating on classic western films. Five such films to be precise, starting with Stagecoach, and then plowing through They Died with Their Boots On, Red River, Winchester '73, and High Noon throughout the remainder of the week. The reason? An online course on the History of the Western that I found while signing up for TCM's upcoming course on Alfred Hitchcock. I decided to take the Western course to see if I would enjoy and benefit from the experience, and while I still have a few last items to complete, I have passed all of my tests and found it to be great fun. (I still have to watch Fort Apache this weekend, which I don't own anymore but is showing on TCM; Turner Classic Movies isn't hosting this particular online course, so it is complete coincidence that it is airing.) Mostly, I enjoyed simply watching each of these films again, even the one that I don't like all that much (the Custer one starring Errol Flynn).

Next week, you will notice that the aftermath of taking this course has done something the new Mummy movie couldn't. It inspired me to do an immersion in a bunch of westerns over a couple of days, including one this morning (the day of this writing). I have more lined up for this weekend, including two more John Wayne films, that should be the 86th and 87th films of his that I have seen in my lifetime. (Just writing that last part exhausted me...) I may not enjoy the western genre as much as I do classic horror or film noir, but I have always had more than a quiet appreciation for the genre, and taking this course has truly made me remember my roots in film, having watched a great number of western films and shows growing up in the '70s. 

The Numbers: 

This week's feature-length film count: 24; 13 first-time viewings and 11 repeats.

Highest rated feature-length film: Red River (1948), Stagecoach (1939), Out of the Past (1948), Winchester '73 (1950), High Noon (1952), and The Lost Weekend (1945) – 9/9
Lowest rated feature films: Island of Lost Women (1959) – 4/9
Average films per day in June so far: 2.86
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 3.02
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 184

The Reviews:

Becoming Bond (2016) Dir.: Josh Greenbaum – Riding to physical therapy on the bus towards Riverside, I looked out the window at one of the bus stops and saw the smirking face of George Lazenby staring back at me. I was absolutely not expecting it, and in my half-awake daze, I started to wonder if I had really seen the poster that I had or if I had some strange daydream in which Lazenby popped in for a non-sequitur cameo. Riding on the bus back, I managed to look across the several lanes and see the poster at that stop. Then I started wondering if it was a film playing at a theatre at the mall next to that bus stop. Looking up the Jurupa Valley theatre there, I found no such reference to such a film as Becoming Bond. Riding the bus two days later (once again to PT), I took a longer look at the sign as we stopped to pick up a couple of passengers. Ah, so it is a Hulu documentary! The second that I got home, I fired up the Hulu page and found myself watching a most surprising and entertaining look at the most unlikely and oddball career of the guy who played James Bond once and lived to tell about it... almost 50 years later. And it is hard, even with it being so entertaining (or especially because of that) to believe many of the stories that spill out the corners of Lazenby's still charming, wide, handsome smile. 

This film may contain some of the best and most imaginative dramatic reenactments that I have ever seen in a supposed documentary, and the use of prime cameos by the likes of Jeff Garlin, Jake Johnson, Jane Seymour, and especially Dana Carvey (doing a full-size Johnny Carson impression) make this film a bouncy, fun trifle. Some names do get changed to keep off the lawsuit monsters, and so those not already aware at least lightly about Lazenby's story coming in may be confused about who is who behind the scenes on his single Bond effort, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. It is no secret that OHMSS is my personal favorite of the entire Bond series, so I had no problems. In fact, this film goes down so smoothly, I don't care at all if ol' Georgie Boy is stretching the truth a little bit here and there. You know, just like the best spies do...  – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Phantom Lady (1944) Dir.: Robert Siodmak – One of the joys of watching TCM's Noir Alley show on Sunday mornings is not necessarily discovering obscure film noir gems but actually speeding up the inevitability that I will get to each of these films on my own naturally. I am so attuned to tracking down as many of these films that I can that I really begin to surprise myself more and more when I watch a truly incredible example that has largely slipped by my notice to this point in time. Such is the case of the truly insane drumming scene by Elisha Cook, Jr. midway through this film as he practically drools over the prospect of an evening spent with the admittedly smoking hot Ella Raines. Cook bashes the drums in a sweat-filled jazz room in such an increasingly rabid manner that you swear he is going to collapse in post-orgasmic exhaustion. In the words of Doug Stanhope: "Blort!!!" (Raines is definitely blort-worthy, and is she ever gorgeous throughout this film.) Phantom Lady is soaked in noir atmosphere, and boy, is the villain (I won't say who) an utter creep every second he is onscreen (and they give it away fairly early anyway). I am not so big on the set-up of the film involving the lady in the outrageous hat who becomes the catalyst to the mystery, but I believe a viewing down the road may relieve me of my initial reluctance to accept this film wholeheartedly. With noir, familiarity only breeds greater obsession. Once you are in, you can never get out... – TC4P Rating: 7/9


The Strawberry Blonde (1941) Dir.: Raoul Walsh – When I saw this title pop up on TCM one afternoon, it was a total impulse watch for me. Deep in my movie history is the knowledge that The Strawberry Blonde was the very first film featuring James Cagney that I ever saw as a kid, and I had not really sat down to watch it since then. The real coincidence though comes from the fact that this film was directed by Raoul Walsh in the same year in which he lensed They Died with Their Boots On, one of the six classic westerns I watched this week for the Western Film History course. On a personal level, I enjoyed this film much more, especially as a showcase for Olivia de Havilland, who may play second fiddle to Rita Hayworth as the titular character, but who is (eventually) first in the heart of the film's main character. Cagney's tough guy dentist is by turns blustery and amusing, and well matched by de Havilland's slightly more intentionally modern (and shocking to others) version of a female at the turn of the 20th century. The film is caked thick in nostalgia for a bygone era but also is just spry enough to know that wallowing in it too long is no good for anyone. Cagney's dentist realizes he must move forward and so must the viewer. A far more rewarding return to this film for me than I expected. – TC4P Rating: 7/9


Girl of the Port (1930) Dir.: Bert Glennon – A guy wallowing in self-pity and clearly suffering from PTSD from his World War I experience loses himself in the Fiji Islands. He falls in love with a barmaid who works in the saloon where he has chosen to drink himself to death, but he doesn't let on that he is a British lord who is hiding out from his family and peers. And it is an appropriate thing that his war scars are embodied by a crippling fear of fire (from being surrounded by enemy flamethrowers) because the natives of the island practice the art of fire-walking. Eventually, all of this is going to work out exactly as you suspect from the start, and the film is fairly creaky as it glides by rather mechanically. But Sally O'Neil is pretty charismatic as the love interest, and the war scenes are well sketched (if not nearly on the same battlefield as All Quiet on the Western Front artistically). Intriguing enough for a quickie talkie but no more. – TC4P Rating: 5/9


The Boy (2016) Dir.: William Brent Bell – There are just so many of these types of horror films today that it becomes hard to recall which ones one has seen or not. Luckily, the inclusion of Lauren Cohan (The Walking Dead) was pretty much the only catalyst I needed to allow this one into my life. We have here another creepy doll movie, and I must say that this is not my favorite subgenre of horror. Fine with the Chucky series and a few other examples of the ventriloquist dummy variety, but I just really don't clamor for them when we start talking porcelain or baby dolls. Sure, I find them equally creepy -- all dolls are that way naturally -- but the films using those types usually are too far out of my disbelief range. The doll here is a boy who may or may not contain the black-hearted soul of an elderly English couple's son, who died mysteriously decades earlier. The couple insist on treating the doll like their dead son, Cohan is hired as an au pair to spell them for a short vacation, and all sorts of madness begins. The film had me until about halfway, until coincidence and logic refused to play together nicely any longer. Cohan is good in the role, though, as is Rupert Evans as the local delivery grocer who develops a more than slight interest in Cohan's well-being and other parts. Overall, the film is well filmed with an interesting score by Bear McCreary, but I can only give it a TC4P Rating: 5/9.


Tuesday, April 12, 2016

The Monster's on the Loose!!! #1: The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956)


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

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