CarlNaamanBrown

Well, well, a movie based on the infamous "Well to Hell" hoax of 1989. The title "Nine Miles Down" is based on the English depth of the hoax well (14.5 kilometers) down. Allegedly in the Hoax a Soviet geological expedition bored a hole through the earth's crust, lowered a microphone and recorded the screams of the damned in a literal Hell (the recordings to back the hoax were matched to the torture chamber scene of Mario Bava's Italian horror film "Baron Blood"). In real life, there was the Kola Superdeep Borehole that was abandoned at a depth of eight miles. Fahrenheit 360, the temperature at which Soviet scientists gave up boring at Kola.

So here I am finishing this movie on Chiller channel out of -- boredom? expiation of my sins? nah, boredom. This movie reminds me of "Event Horizon" set in the Sahara. Excruciating at times, promising at others. Watching it with commercial interruptions detracts suspense so my opinion is guarded. I must admit I have seen much, much worse. The movie is basically a two character study, from the hallucinating (maybe possessed) mind of a security officer sent to investigate a remote rig and finds a single survivor, other crew dead in the freezer (a dead giveaway something's wrong), a well where screaming voices may / may not be heard, and growing suspicion of the survivor, a woman who reminds him of his wife who committed suicide. The actress does a good job of portraying different personalities -- distraught survivor, calculating succubus -- as the plot POV demands.

I watched it, I have wasted time on worse, but I don't intend to save a copy.

Back in the 1950s, the big family weekend outing would be the drive-in movies. "It came from beneath the Sea", "The Alligator People", "Earth vs the Flyimg Saucers", "1984", "The Dam Busters", "The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake", "Love Slaves of the Amazons", etc. and (when I was 8 or 9) "The Beast from Hollow Mountain". I finally caught it again on DVR on TCM Thur 27 Jun 2013. For what is billed as the first Cinemascope and Color dinosaur movie, "Beast" has rough goodness.

And it is better than I remember. Surprised me. The dinosaur effects are some what better than "Dinosaurus!" 1960 (apparently the reviewers panning the FX have not seen "Dinosaurus!"), but it is not as good as what Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen did together in Irwin Allen's "Animal World" 1956. I think the "Beast..." FX were billed as RegiScope animation in depth.

I have read that Willis O'Brien's "cowboys and dinosaurs" idea had been kicking around since before his "Mighty Joe Young" another movie where O'Brien and Harryhausen worked together. And after O'Brien's death, Harryhausen decided to make his mentor's unmade pet project as "The Valley of Gwangi".

The dinosaur in "Beast..." appears late and the conflict between the gringo rancher Ryan from Texas and the Mexican rancher Enrique, and the growing romance between Ryan and Sarita, Enrique's betrothed, occupies the first two thirds or three fourths of the movie. Mysterious deaths of cattle are attributed to rustlers and the ranchers' rivalry. But after the steer-chomping Beast makes his appearance, he has lotsa screen time in the last part of the film. (OK, I concede the tongue gets to be a bit much in some scenes. Looks to me like the tongue was rotoscoped onto the sequences shot with replacement animation.)

What has stayed with me from seeing this film over fifty years ago, is the scene where Sarita and the kid Panchito are besieged in a cabin by the Beast. That was scary then, and is still is a moment (or that may be my nostalgia acting up again).