1105-The Beast of Hollow Mountain

Film Year:  1956
Genre:  Western, Horror, Fantasy
Director:  Edward Nassour, Ismael Rodriguez
Starring:  Guy Madison, Patricia Medina, Carlos Rivas, Mario Navarro
MST Season:  11

The Movie

Once upon a time King Kong creator Willis O'Brien woke up with an idea.  That idea was "Dudes!  Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs!  Let's make it happen!"  O'Brien came up with a story called Valley of the Mist playing with his concept and sold his idea with the intention of doing special effects for the film, but had to drop out.  The show must go on, but in some cases maybe it shouldn't.

The Beast of Hollow Mountain tells of an American cowboy living in Mexico as a cattle hustler who suspects some of his cattle to be missing.  Adding to his problems is locals trying to bully him out of the country and back into the States.  As he contemplates his life in Mexico things take a turn for the unexpected when a Tyrannosaurus Rex shows up, exposing itself as the creature that had been eating the cattle, and a few ranch hands on the side.

One thing that the film boasts as being is that it's the first color film to use stop motion animation techniques.  This would be much more impressive to me if the stop motion in the film were any good.  The titular Beast can often vary from shot to shot, with close-ups usually coming off more impressive than far away shots, which can look shoddy at best.  The full body puppet looks like a child playing with Play-Doh, and things take a turn for the worst when the film attempts to liven the puppet up with a tongue, which flails around in a squiggly fashion.  If the film were more abstract I'd cut it some creative license slack, but by combining this dinosaur with a mostly straight drama there needs to be an attempt at making it feel real.  The actors and the special effects unfortunately look as if they're from two entirely different worlds.

And the sad thing is that the best part of the film is the dinosaur.  The rest of the movie is dull and dry, though fans of westerns might get more of a kick out it, but it's really just a dull drama in a desert landscape.  The dinosaur act is out of nowhere and out of place, but for the most part it saves the film from audience interest waning.

After the drastic disappointment of Beast of Hollow Mountain, O'Brien continued to revise his Valley of the Mist until his death in 1962.  These concepts were later turned into the far superior Valley of Gwangi in 1969, with special effects by O'Brien protegee Ray Harryhausen.  Watch that one instead.

The Episode

This episode doesn't seem to have much time for pleasantries, as it mostly seems to be in a hurry to get into the theater whenever it's out of it.  For most of the episode's runtime it's difficult to see why.  The meandering Western/Mexican setting doesn't seem to inspire a lot in our trio, who chip away at it the best they can, but it's fairly dry and too inert.  Every once in a while they'll pipe up with a slick reference or two, I personally enjoyed a shout out to a classic King of the Hill line "THAT'S MY PURSE!  I DON'T KNOW YOU!" which got a fair laugh out of me.  But overall the movie is winning for quite a while because they seem a tad lost and not entirely sure what to do with it.

It's not until the fourth and final theater segment that the titular Beast of Hollow Mountain finally makes his appearance and the viewer can finally say to themselves "Okay, THAT'S why they chose this movie!"  The creature is so poorly realized and the action is now so frantic, quick, and lacking dialogue that the jokes come heavy and fast and the laughs start flowing at a generally excellent pace.  The experience of this episode is not unlike the second season episode Godzilla vs. Megalon, which was a pretty meh episode for a while itself before it's final segment redeemed the experience entirely.  Whether twenty minutes of laughter makes the hour before it a worthwhile to break through is up to the viewer, but boy that segment is a gem.

As mentioned above, the host segments are slight but fun.  We have brainstorming new monster movies (as well as putting dinosaurs in other movies later on), a movie inspired fashion showcase, and Servo and Crow playing festival while disturbing Jonah and the Mads.  The Invention Exchange is equally slight but amusing, with Jonah's Disco Cannon being a fun visual gag, though Kinga adding hot water to the Titanic is mostly just set-up for a vaudevillian gag (but it made me laugh anyway).

I can be a bit on the fence about Beast of Hollow Mountain, because the episode dangerously walks the line into boring territory at its worst moments.  However it catapults us into traditional Mystery Science Theater delights for its hectic third act that closes up with a lot of guffaws and leaves me with a stronger impression of the episode as a whole.  If I were thinking about this logically I would say that the majority would win out and this were merely a mediocre episode but holy crap is this episode fun when it finally kicks into high gear.

Good

The DVD and Blu-Ray

Shout Factory unleashed The Beast of Hollow Mountain on their complete Season 11 set, which is available on both DVD and blu-ray.  My copy is the #WeBroughtBackMST3K Collector's Edition blu-ray, which was available to Kickstarter backers of a certain tier.  Audio and video are aces and there are no bonus features on the disc.  It does however share its disc with the following episode, Starcrash.