Thursday, April 27, 2017

THE BEAST OF HOLLOW MOUNTAIN (1956) **


Guy Madison stars as an American cowboy in Mexico who falls for a pretty senorita.  Of course, she’s betrothed to the local bad guy, and you know it’s only a matter of time before she leaves that scumbag for Guy.  Complicating their relationship is the appearance a mysterious beast that lives in a nearby swamp.  It’s been eating livestock left and right, and when it begins to get an appetite for fat drunk comic relief sidekicks, it’s up to Guy to stop the beast.

The Beast of Hollow Mountain kind of plays like a half-assed Valley of Gwangi as it only has one cowboy and one dinosaur.  The stop-motion special effects are rather cheesy, but they do have a certain charm about them.  The color Cinemascope cinematography is crisp, so it makes the dinosaur look cooler than he would’ve been in black and white.

The problem is you have to wait an awful long time before you get to see the beast.  The lovey-dovey stuff with Guy and his would-be girlfriend really slows things down to a crawl.  The subplot with the drunkard sidekick and his whiny son also eat up a lot of screen time.  At least the scene where Guy gets into a brawl with the bad guy is a lot of fun.  Their fight lasts a long time and they pretty much wipe out half the town in the process.  I can’t say it’s as good as the fight in McClintock, but it’s certainly in the same spirit.

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