The Beast Of Hollow Mountain!

The Beast of Hollow Mountain is a flick I've been wanting to see for many many years. I never caught it on television in its original form and never seemed to find it on VHS or DVD. Finally I took the plunge and picked it up on Blu-Ray (alongside The Neanderthal Man) and fulfilled my desire to see this Willis O'Brien inspired cowboy-meets-dinosaur "epic".

It's a B-movie right from the start with an evident smallish budget but blessed with a lovely Mexican landscape. They make the most of the landscape and right across it many times, many many times. We have two ranchers (one a gringo played by Guy Madison) who run afoul of the local thug and cattleman and most of the movie's time is spent detailing how these two factions cannot get along all the while both seem to wish to romance a local lovely played by Patricia Medina.  Cows are missing and each side blames the other There's an obligatory kid, a comedic old man, and other long-standing movie tropes that help to fill out the running time. And frankly the movie gets downright dull before any real dinosaur action gets underway. We have a few attacks from the "Beast's" perspective but we see nothing of it. 

But in the final reel it kicks off and doesn't let up. The "Hollow Mountain" of the title is separated from the rest of the territory by a deadly swamp but a drought has made the swamp less of an effective barrier and in these times the "Beast" roams. The "Beast" is a T-Rex fashioned in the classic mode, fitted with a flickering tongue and at times quite fast, surprisingly so for stop-motion. So while this is a film from a Willis O'Brien story, O'Brien had nothing to do with the effects (aside from perhaps maybe planning some shots) which aren't bad really given the limits of the time. They don't equal what Harryhausen will do with The Valley of Gwangi a decade later, but that was expected. My advice if you want to watch this one, is to linger for the first hour but pay close attention in the last fifteen minutes. It's a hoot. 

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