La Bête de la Caverne Hantée

Beast from Haunted Cave (1959)

** (out of 4)

Slow-moving but mildly entertaining horror film from director Monte Hellman has a group of thieves stealing some gold and deciding to hide out in the snowy mountains. Their plan seems to be working at first but soon they come across a giant spider deep within the cave.

This here was an early Roger Corman production and like a lot of the films from this era you soon realize that they were working with very little money, which means that there's going to be a lot of talking and very little action. One of the Corman's most known sayings was how when you're monster looks bad it's best to keep it hidden. That pretty much happens in BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE as the spider is rarely seen outside of a part here or a part there. The bad costume finally shows up at the very end but at that point it's too late to turn the film off.

I thought the cast were decent for what they were asked to do, which was basically hit their marks and say their lines. The cast were at least interesting enough to keep you glued to the movie and to stick with it longer than you probably would have otherwise. The spider creature design is obviously very cheap but there's some mild charm that you can take from it.

Hellman would go onto make much better cult movies but this one here was mildly entertaining as long as you don't take it too serious.

The film clearly was done on little money, but there are a number of matters that elevate it above other cheap monster films of the era.

Charles Griffith does a much better job with dialog than he did in It Conquered the World or Little Shop of Horrors. There's some actual meaning in the banter. Furthermore, it is delivered in an interesting style that also might derive from the low budget, so that chunks of the dialog are oddly timed, and naturalistic for that. I was only half-watching early on, and suddenly the delivery of the lines made me really attend to the thing.

I liked Sinatra in this--never heard of him before watching this movie.

As others have said, it's slow in the middle, fairly exciting at the end.

In the great scheme of all things cinematic this is certainly not a great movie, but it is in many ways an intriguing one. Made in 1959, it is billed as and pretends to be another example of the '50s creature-features, but it largely eschews the standard formatting of those films for a deeper, character-driven narrative, more in common with subsequent films of the sixties and beyond. In that sense, it is slightly ahead of its time.

In fact, the horror elements take a back seat for much of the film, which plays more as a drama of tensions between a band of criminals and the skiing guide they have hired as part of their cover story. From this point of view, the film's real strengths come to light. The characters are written as though they could be actual people and not just devices to move the plot along, as some earlier films of the genre tended to portray their casts. The photography is very good, and there is a superb performance by Sheila Noonan as a troubled moll, one that virtually carries the movie and makes it much more interesting whenever she is on screen.

While the characterization is good for a B-movie, the writing is somewhat uneven. There are some quite deep philosophical insights offered up by the characters, such as the benefits of city life versus country living. If the writer wanted to take these musings in a more serious direction, perhaps this could have been Beast From Plato's Cave. But we can't read too much into a film where the guide's sister - Kay Jennings in a neat little performance - tries to sweet-talk a handsome stranger with the line "Did I tell you I knitted this sweater?" to which he replies "Is knitting your scene?" Some find the ending quite disturbing and scary for a film of its time. Others may find it somewhat flimsy and rushed. Either way, this film still has enough going for it to rate as a must-see for the serious fans of the genre.

In a skiing station in Dakota, a gang of criminals leaded by Alexander "Alex" Ward (Frank Wolff) plans the heist of golden bars from a small bank. While the lover of Alex, Gypsy Boulet (Sheila Carol), goes to an isolated cabin with the ski instructor Gil Jackson (Michael Forest), a time bomb explodes a cave to divert the attention of the locals and the gangsters steal the gold. But the explosion releases a spider-like monster and due to a storm, the group becomes trapped in Gil's cabin and threatened by the creepy beast.

The debut of Monte Hellman as director is a typical trash movie of the 50's. The story is not bad; the low budget effects are very poor and laughable; the heroine is gorgeous; the sudden conclusion gives the sensation that the shooting was interrupted; and the cover of the Brazilian DVD is extremely funny with the following text: "Young girls scared and sucked by a maze of horror and blood of a hunger beast from hell", which is delightfully funny and ridiculous, since the story has nothing to do with it. In spite of these remarks, I like this type of film, which are part of mine childhood, therefore "Beast From Haunted Cave" is a good entertainment at least for me. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "A Besta da Caverna Assombrada" ("The Beast From the Haunted Cave")

It's not a beast from *a* haunted cave, it's from a cave called Haunted. Or not. I think they need an indefinite article in there. Either way, this is a low-budget, low-effects, low-costume thriller about a gang robbing a lodge and then escaping via cross-country skiing. There's a menacing leader, the sensitive guy, the dopey guy, and the 'secretary.' And the guide who's smarter than any of them know! Plus a formidable Native American housekeeper. But the real star of the show is the monster, which looks quite tame (and humorous) by modern standards. Roger Corman was the producer, and Monte Hellman made his directing debut, so you know expense was spared all over the place. I did like some of the dialog, particularly from Sheila Noonan as the moll. This is probably best viewed as an unserious example of wacky monster movies of the 1950s.