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5
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5 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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This
low budget cheapie, just one of the scores of
flicks which rolled off the Roger Corman assembly
line in the late '50s, actually took me by surprise.
The mixture of gangsters and monsters, plus the
snowbound setting, is certainly unusual for its
day, especially with a script that for once isn't
aimed strictly at the kiddies.
Crime boss Alex (Frank Wolff), his boozy girlfriend
Gypsy (Sheila Carol) and henchmen Byron (Wally
Campo) and Marty (Richard Sinatra) have come to
a sleepy South Dakota ski resort posing as tourists.
Their plan is to raid the administration office
of a nearby gold mine, where Alex knows a small
but valuable cache of gold bars is stored in an
easily opened vault. Marty is to plant a bomb
in the mine itself, which at the appointed time
will serve as a handy diversion for the small
resort town's citizens. Alex has already arranged
for the local ski instructor, Gil Jackson (Michael
Forest), to guide his party on a cross-country
trip to an isolated cabin deep in the forest.
A ski plane is scheduled to land near the cabin
at a prearranged time to pick up the gang and
spirit them to Canada. The unsuspecting Gil is
to be eliminated.
Events,
however, take a strange turn the night before
the robbery. As a cover for his bomb planting,
Marty takes the town slut, barmaid Natalie (Linné
Ahlstrand), up to the mine for a little hanky
panky. While setting the charge he finds the remains
of a strange egg in one of the shafts. Then he
and Natalie are attacked by a weird, moaning creature,
a monstrous, spider-like thing covered in wispy
filaments. A visibly shaken Marty returns to the
ski lodge alone, telling Alex that Natalie is
dead, killed by some kind of monster. Alex thinks
Marty is off his rocker, that it was he who killed
the girl. No matter; the heist is to go down as
planned. And it does. The bomb detonates on time,
drawing the townsfolk and any law officers to
the site of the blast. Alex, Marty and Byron break
into the mine office and fill their backpacks
with gold bars. Then they hightail it to the lodge,
where Gypsy and Gil await them to start the cross-country
trek into the wilderness. But something is following
them...
As alluded
to in the opening paragraph, Beast
From Haunted Cave is much better than it
has any right to be. The script spends an unusual
amount of time on characterization, particularly
Alex's world-weary moll, Gypsy, believably played
by Carol, and Gil, the "mountain man" who's anything
but the slowwitted yokel the gang thinks he is.
(Michael Forest, perhaps best known to EC readers
as Apollo in the classic Star Trek episode
"Who Mourns for Adonis?", makes an appealing hero.)
Most of the dialog is on a more adult level than
one would expect, especially between these two
characters. First-time director Monte Hellman
(Two-Lane Blacktop,
Shatter) doesn't allow
the low budget to hamstring him, giving the film
a perceptible 'crime noir' edge even without the
customary trappings and aesthetics of that genre,
tossing in the occasional quirky moment to keep
things interesting. Then there's the monster...
Beast's
beast is pretty silly looking, moving so
clumsily that the film has to be significantly
speeded up during the climax to lend it an air
of impending menace. It's the cheesiest aspect
of the movie. Wisely it's kept mostly out of sight
until the end. Nonetheless it apparently made
quite an impression when the flick first appeared
at drive-ins and later made the rounds on creature
feature shows during the days of pre-cable TV.
This is due more to the monster's method than
appearance. A shambling, vampiric thing, it doesn't
kill its victims right away. Instead it cocoons
them to the walls of the cave, enveloping them
in the same shimmery, web-like filament that covers
its own body. The helpless victims are trussed
for slaughter, still conscious, as the beast slowly
sucks out their blood.
Like the one effective scene in the otherwise
inferior Attack Of
The Giant Leeches
(showing trapped humans being fed upon), these
moments are genuinely creepy — and simply had
to have inspired the production designers on Aliens.
(Note: Beast From Haunted
Cave shares something else with the Corman-produced
Leeches besides similar
'monsters munching on humans' scenes... They also
have the same music score.)
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review is of the budget-priced Alpha DVD edition
of Beast From Haunted Cave,
not the Synapse release (which reportedly uses superior
film elements for its transfer). All in all the
flick looks pretty good here; being of more recent
vintage it fares substantially better than Alpha's
releases of 'Golden Age' fare like The
Phantom Creeps and Black
Dragons. Sound quality again gets the short
end of the stick — the audio track is marred by
muffled dialog, particularly in the first 5 or 10
minutes. (Some of Sheila Carol's lines are all but
unintelligible.) Fortunately this clears up to a
great degree for the remainder of the film. As with
all Alpha discs there are no extras, not even a
trailer, but the cover art is pretty spiffy. For
five bucks ($8 online) I'm really not going to complain
too much. 3/24/03 |
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