La valle dei disperati

I saw The Beast of Hollow Mountain in the theatre when I was nine. I slept under my bed for weeks. I just knew that T. Rex was going to walk up to 504 5th Avenue West and look in my second storey window and consider me a tender morsel. The world has changed considerably since this movie was in theatres. While it was just as primitive as described by the other reviewers here, this little boy had the be-Jesus scared out of him. I call that good film-making.

This movie is scripted by Willis O'Brien ,who obviously thought so much of it ,that he used it again in 1969 for the superior The Valley of Gwangi It is a curiosity among movies, being a science fiction and Western hybrid .Mexican based rancher Jimmy -woodenly played by Guy Madison -believes that his dead cattle are the result of predators .He is thinking "Mountain lion " or "coyote " maybe .Wrong!Its a T-Rex and the pattern then follows the standard monster movie template -capture and escape ,rampage and eventually happy ever after resolution . The monster effects are okay for the era but completely overshadowed by the genius of Ray Harryhausen ,employed in the remake .Add somewhat muddy colour and you have a movie whose technical side is deficient by today's standards It still remains worth watching however if only for its being such a rare commodity in combining monster movie and Western

"The Beast of Hollow Mountain" would likely have more appeal for any viewer who first saw it at a young and impressionable age. If you're seeing it for the first time as an adult, like this viewer, you may well still find it to be fairly charming, an interesting combination of the monster movie and Western genres. The beast of the title, a dinosaur, doesn't show up until 3/4 of the way into the movie, and until then we get a likable enough human drama with a touch of mystery and mysticism: just WHO, or WHAT, is responsible for the disappearances of cattle in Mexico?

One of those eager to find out is American rancher Jimmy Ryan (amiable Guy Madison, often to be seen with a smile on his face). In the meantime, Jimmy finds employment for local drunk Pancho (Pascual Garcia Pena) and loves the sweet Sarita (lovely Patricia Medina), although she's agreed to marry another man, Enrique Rios (Eduardo Noriega), a rival of Jimmy's in more way than one, and a constant thorn in his side.

Co-director Edward Nassour does the decent stop motion animation in this reasonably entertaining little diversion; the concept originated with the legendary stop motion specialist Willis O'Brien of "King Kong" fame. The colourful CinemaScope photography is quite gorgeous, giving us an eyeful of all of the flavour of the Mexican locations; there's a lot to take in. The script by Robert Hill is dialogue heavy so less patient viewers may fidget a little while waiting for the dinosaur to show up. But things do get pretty exciting once it does.

Madison and Medina are highly engaging leads, and the supporting cast features some fine performers. Julio Villarreal has a solid presence as friendly old Don Pedro, but Noriega captures the lions' share of the attention playing a man who turns out to be a real piece of work. The audience will be primed and ready to see this human antagonist get his comeuppance.

This Mexican-American production is fun stuff - nothing great, but very easy to take while it lasts and it doesn't overstay its welcome at a running time of 80 minutes.

Seven out of 10.

When it came to dinosaur special effects in the 1950s, absolutely no one came close to Ray Harryhausen, and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms still reigns as the classic of that time. Others who dared try and compete were lucky to come in a distant second, but that didn't mean there wasn't a fun quality to their films. The Beast From Hollow Mountain is one of those minor league yet highly enjoyable attempts to combine the two favorite elements of 12 to 15 year old boys when we went to the movies back in the mid-fifties: cowboys and dinosaurs. We knew Guy Madison well from his long run Wild Bill Hickock TV series, which had precious little to do with the real life of that historic character but was plenty of fun all the same. Here, he's a range rider who discovers that his cattle are disappearing. Could it be outlaws? No, the title creature, who attacks Madison, a cute little Mexican kid, the gorgeous Patricia Medina, and a whole host of vaqueros. There is (as was the case back then) precious little dinosaur footage, for the way they kept costs down back then was to 'tease' you with distant growls, but avoid showing you the real thing for as long as possible. After about an hour of this, you got maybe fifteen minutes of actual footage with the creature (who has the weirdest, wildest tongue of any dinosaur in movie history) chasing after Guy and friends with the swiftness of a professional track star. And it's a good thing they keep him offscreen, because he's at best semi-convincing when you do see him. That doesn't make this brightly colored film and less fun to watch. And the way in which Madison gets the thing at the end is a real lulu.

Just a little south of the Texas border, the cattle ranchers are having trouble with an unusual rustler -- a Tyrannosaurus Rex. This is one of the few non-Harryhausen stop-motion films produced during the 1950s. The original concept was bought from Willis O'Brien by Edward and William Nassour, but they reneged on their promise to hire O'Brien to do the animation. The Nassours did it themselves. The animation is extremely rough, but the model of the tyrannosaurus is pretty good (except for its excessively long tongue -- it looks like a long red tentacle!)

Be prepared for a long wait before the dinosaur shows up; the first two thirds of the film is pure Western soap opera and endless filler scenes of a Mexican fiesta. The dinosaur doesn't actually make an appearance until the last twenty minutes of the film. The climax, however, is action packed -- a running battle on the open range between a hungry dinosaur and the cowboy hero, Guy Madison (star of TV's `Wild Bill Hickok' from 1954 to 1957). Patricia Medina is the lovely heroine.

Watch for a scene in which the tyrannosaurus runs after a galloping horse; the animation was done with a series of plaster models, each one posed at a different point in the running reptiles stride. Special effects processing was handled by Jack Rabin and Louis DeWitt (`Kronos' and `Atomic Submarine').

TRIVIA NOTE FOR TRUE SCI-FI FANS: The T-Rex in this movie is just one of many sci-fi monsters that were defeated by actors who achieved fame in cowboy roles. In `Tarantula' the spider is destroyed by a bomb dropped by pilot Clint Eastwood. The Martians in `War of the Worlds' are pitted against Gene Barry, star of TV's `Bat Materson'. The ants in `Them' are gunned down by James Arness of `Gunsmoke'. `The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms' dies from a radioactive bullet fired by Lee Van Cleef, star of `The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly' (among others). `The Blob' proves to me no match for Steve McQueen, star of `Wanted: Dead or Alive'.

Other famous cowboys featured in 1950s sci-fi movies include Eric Fleming (`Rawhide') in `The Conquest of Space' and `Queen of Outer Space', Michael Landon (`Bonanza') in `I was a Teenaged Werewolf', and Ken Curtis (`Gunsmoke') in `The Killer Shrews'. Sci-fi veteran Richard Carlson never achieved fame as a cowboy star, but he did get to play a cowboy in Ray Harryhausen's faithful 1968 version of the ORIGINAL cowboy-versus-dinosaur idea -- which was first thought up my Willis O'Brien back in the 1930s; `Valley of Gwangi', twenty years before `Beast of Hollow Mountain'!