Sat 28 Jun 2014
A Movie Review by Jonathan Lewis: THE BEAST OF HOLLOW MOUNTAIN (1956).
Posted by Steve under Horror movies , Reviews , Western movies[7] Comments
THE BEAST OF HOLLOW MOUNTAIN. United Artists, 1956. Guy Madison, Patricia Medina, Carlos Rivas, Mario Navarro, Pascual GarcÃa Peña, Eduardo Noriega, Julio Villarreal, Lupe Carriles. Directors: Edward Nassour & Ismael RodrÃguez.
Imagine you’re watching an average B-Western about a goodhearted rancher from Texas in both a business and romantic rivalry with a mean-spirited rancher from Mexico. The movie is in color; the acting by Guy Madison and Patricia Medina isn’t all that bad; and the foreboding Mexican landscape is well integrated into the storyline.
So you keep watching. Somewhat entertained, somewhat bored, and now and again remembering the film was billed as a creature feature. Then nearly an hour into the film, a giant, deeply angry stop-motion T-Rex (a fairly impressive special effects achievement considering the film is from 1956) makes its way out of the local swamp and wreaks all sorts of havoc on cows and humans alike.
That’s The Beast of Hollow Mountain for you. Based on a story idea by King Kong special effects innovator, Willis O’Brien, it’s all good fun. While not a particularly great film, the mid-fifties movie is actually quite entertaining provided you go into it with the right mindset.
The last twenty minutes or so, when the T. Rex finally emerges from its mountain hideaway, make up for the fact that you had to wait an entire hour to see the creature. This too long a delay really does make the film significantly less compelling than it could have been.
But getting back to the dinosaur. What a creature! The giant feet making an impression in the mud, the giant teeth and red tongue, and eyes that convey anger. It’s a far more impressive movie dinosaur than the one that appeared in The Giant Behemoth, which I reviewed here. That said, at least in that particular film, we actually got an impressive political backstory as to why the dinosaur decided to stomp all over London. In The Beast of Hollow Mountain, all we really know is that local legend held that there is a – you guessed it, a monster – in the mountain.
There are some fairly harrowing moments, such as when the dinosaur claws at — and peers into — the roof of a shack where two would-be victims are cowering, and when protagonist Jimmy Ryan (Madison) swings back and forth on a rope hanging from a limb of a tree, luring the dim-witted dinosaur to its swampy doom. And listen for the birdsongs. Whether they were deliberately recorded or whether they were merely picked up during filming doesn’t much matter. They really help establish an atmospheric setting for the world’s first, and dare I say, preeminent, dinosaur western film.
June 29th, 2014 at 4:12 am
One of my favorites as a child, and still lots of fun. Guy Madison was the perfect little-kid’s-idea-of-a-cowboy and the Monster likewise suitably monstrous.
June 29th, 2014 at 8:00 am
I watched part of this movie with Jon, both the opening ten minutes and the long finale, which I enjoyed very much. You can see the ending in the video clip I embedded in the review. Guy Madison as Wild Bill Hickok was a favorite of mine as a kid also, on both radio and TV. He has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for each. I hadn’t seen one of his movies in a good long while, but his distinctive voice came back right away. If he ever played a villain on the screen, I don’t think I want to see it.
June 29th, 2014 at 10:56 am
I’ve never seen this, but the description reminds me a bit of Hammer’s THE LOST CONTINENT. The move starts as a mixture of sea-going drama and character driven stuff, and suddenly half way through the running time the characters find themselves stranded in an ocean of man-eating seaweed, giant lobsters and the Spanish Inquisition. Like this movie, it’s as if the writer/producers suddenly remembered what sort of movie they were supposed to be making.
June 29th, 2014 at 2:11 pm
Well, it’s not the preeminent, dinosaur western film while “Valley of Gwangi ” is around. I mean that one is measurably less dull, slightly better in most respects and boasts better stop motion and more of it.
June 29th, 2014 at 4:02 pm
Thingmaker, I’m sure you’re right about VALLEY OF GWANGI on most counts, but one thing GWANGI didn’t have is an authentic cowboy hero as star. (See my comment #2.)
What’s interesting is that both movies were based on ideas or previous projects of Willis O’Brien.
June 29th, 2014 at 4:24 pm
Have to agree about Gwangi which has a better cast plus Harryhausen, but this one has its charms. Black Scorpion is also quasi western at first though no dinosaur. Cowboys also figure in Mighty Joe Young but again not dinosaurs.
Still this little film is such a pleasant surprise it has a cachet of its own. The best way to see it is to catch it early on not knowing the name and then get the kick when it turns out to be a monster flick rather than a sedate western.
Steve
Like you I was a Madison fan. Before the booze got the best of him he had a promising career and actually got some good reviews in his first two movies. In Since You Went Away he and Robert Mitchum have small roles as sailors on leave who meet Jennifer Jones and Robert Walker, but in Madison’s case it was impressive enough to earn him his first lead later on as a struggling returning vet. He also did a good western that was one of the better 3D efforts.
Wild Bill was a childhood favorite though now I would likely appreciate Andy Devine’s Jiggles more.
Madison did a good little foreign film with George Raft on Zero Hour lines where he is an innocent man pursued by cop Raft and they end up on a jet with Madison the only passenger who can fly — a popular theme until the Airplane franchise ruined it hilariously forever. I think it’s Jet Over the Atlantic.
It was sad to see him end up in stuff like Superargo and the Sandokan movies, whatever charms they had otherwise. It didn’t seem fair to find him playing second string to Steve Reeves and Ray Danton. He was also in a couple of peplums and swashbucklers out of Italy sometimes as the lead in the latter, though it was hard to adjust to Wild Bill in tights.
Bradstreet,
Lost Continent was part of Hammer’s shot at creating a Dennis Wheatley franchise (The Devil’s Bride, To The Devil a Daughter) and that odd structure is true to the book though a bit more Ship of Fools in the film. Great actor, but Eric Portman as the hero was really strange casting — I kept expecting him to murder someone. It has a very claustrophobic feel as well what with the fog, the Sargasso Sea, and set bound atmosphere.
It’s one of a handful of science fictional outings by Wheatley including Black August the first Gregory Sallust adventure (a Wellsian outing about a second General Strike) and a one off, Star of Ill Omen, replete with Martian invaders, UFO’s, a Secret Service assassin hero, mad scientists, traitors, evil Soviets, and an A-bomb aimed at London. I particularly recall how apt it seemed when the Reds teamed with the Martians. Red on Red. It may be Wheatley’s worst book (which is saying something even though I like Wheatley), but it is great fun as an alternative classic of epic proportions.
His best science fictional outing is The Man Who Missed the War, a lost world novel, and at least one later Sallust on that theme, The Island Where Time Stood Still, where he finds a lost island from which the last true emperor of China plots to overthrow Mao.
June 30th, 2014 at 1:06 am
David: STAR OF ILL-OMEN is pretty much unusual in that the communists team up with the Martians instead of Satan, who is their usual buddy in Wheatley. THEY FOUND ATLANTIS has a similar structure, in that for the most part it is a crime thriller on board a boat, before suddenly turning into a weird fantasy novel set in a cavern at the bottom of the sea in the last part of the book. My fave of his lost world novels is THE ISLAND WHERE TIME STOOD STILL, which can perhaps be described as ‘realistic fantasy’ for want of a better description.
You’re very right about the weird casting of the movie. It gets even weirder in that the second romantic lead is Tony Beckley, who is ALSO best known for playing villains!