FIFTY YEARS AGO TODAY
Fifty Years Ago Today was Saturday, June 9, 1973 … The Belmont Stakes run today proved to be one of the most astonishing events in sports history as Secretariat won the Triple Crown by beating his world-class rivals by an almost supernatural 31 lengths…
British writer John Creasey died in England. He wrote crime, science fiction, westerns, and romance. In all he produced over 600 novels under 28 different pseudonyms…
Fright Night on Channel 41 offered up a fun double feature this night—KILLERS FROM SPACE and NIGHT MONSTER. But they were both movies I’d seen before and enjoyed. Matter of fact my memories of the first viewings of both of them were fond indeed.
I’d seen KILLERS FROM SPACE after school on the 4pm movie when I was 10 years old so how could I not love it? NIGHT MONSTER had come to me in 1962 on a Saturday night Shock Theater. My mother, brother, and I had watched Shock every Saturday throughout that year so, again, how could I not love it?
But I’d seen both of those (and I may have watched them again tonight, can’t remember), so my movie of the day came elsewhere.
Today’s movie was sort of a white whale for me. A teeny, puny, underweight white whale, but still… Here’s how that came about…
When I was a kid, we had a local movie theater called The LeRose. It was a last-run sort of place which featured recent releases on their last legs and lots of fillers from the back catalog, whatever rented cheap. At the LeRose, from 1960-1963, I saw dozens and dozens of movies. Some westerns, some teenage rebellion flicks but mostly sci-fi and horror, tons of ‘em. Bright colorful new things like the early Hammer classics and plenty of those grainy, black-and-white, fun-in-spite-of-themselves sci-fi and monster epics from the ‘50s. It was great.
But not always great, I guess. Because there was a much too long break in the midst of my attendance years and I missed lots of movies I’d have love to have seen. There are a couple of possible reasons for that long-ago, months-long absence from the bijou. But…too long, too boring, not going into it now.
In November of 1960, I was a 10-year-old 5th grader at Ingramville Elementary School and I was smack in the middle of my strange hiatus from the LeRose. I’m gonna guess it was November 7 or 8, when my good friend from 6th grade, Steve, stopped me in the school hallway with exciting news.
There was a mouth-watering triple feature scheduled for the LeRose on the coming Saturday. Surely, he thought, I’d be first in line for such a three-headed wonder. Steve was clearly excited as he told me about it. And it did sound great. It sounded like, very likely, the greatest triple feature in the history of movies. Showing that Saturday afternoon would be KING KONG, THE WASP WOMAN, and BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE.
I was still pretty new to the world of monster movies at age 10, but I knew that KING KONG was a really big deal. The other two were unfamiliar to me but those titles certainly sounded like the real deals.
So, yeah, I should have been all over this but, for the undisclosed reasons mentioned above, I told Steve, “No, I can’t go.” Or something like that.
Steve was understandably dumbfounded. How could a monster loving kid resist such treasures? How could anyone resist them for that matter? He tried, Steve did, to lead me to the righteous path, to make clear to me that this was an unmissable matinee. And he was right, of course, but I was not to be swayed. He didn’t understand and, frankly, I really didn’t either, but that’s the way it went.
Steve went to the triple feature that Saturday. I didn’t. I would catch up to KING KONG on the late show about six months later. It would take me about another six years to reel in THE WASP WOMAN. But the third movie I wouldn’t get to see until, yes…FIFTY YEARS AGO TODAY!
On this day, Channel 32’s late movie gave me, finally, a chance to see …
BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE
And what did I think of my white whale that night? Well, it had certainly gone gray. I found it boring, cheap, insubstantial, and with almost no meat on it for a growing Monster Kid. I saw the movie a couple more times over the years and it didn’t get better. But maybe this time will be different.
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Despite the fact that I am in the front guard of the Legion of Colorization Haters, I watched this in a colorized version this time. I didn’t feel good about it but there was a reason. Every time I’d seen BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE it looked so washed-out, so fuzzy, that it was often tough to even make out what I was seeing. So I thought maybe the colorization, however evil, might at least make things easier to see…
Right away, I notice that the dialogue is actually pretty good. Surprisingly crisp and natural…
After an opening ten-plus minutes of no BEAST, and no sign of a HAUNTED CAVE or a HAUNTED anything, the LeRose audience of which I was not a part probably got a mite fidgety…
It’s weird how the colorization makes genuine, beautiful locations look like oversized soundstage sets…
The colorization, by the by, she’s no good. It is amusing that faces frequently flip from pink to yellow with no notice…
One of the bad guy’s henchmen is always eating something. I know that trick well—a character trait which is a shortcut substitute for an actual character…
All that deep, genuine snow must have made filming difficult, especially on what was probably a 6-day shoot…
The BEAST, when we finally see it, is both laughably cheap and makeshift, and also kinda creepy at times…
I’m sure the snow made it tough, and the colorization probably didn’t help, but the day-for-night stuff here is ludicrously bad…
I just realized why this story seemed to fresh and familiar to me. I just saw THUNDER OVER HAWAII (aka NAKED PARADISE) a few days ago, and this is the exact same story, just subbing snow for sun and sea. Even some of the dialogue is direct from the other movie…
The kitchen and other interiors of the cabin couldn’t possibly fit into the cute mountain hideaway we see from the outside…
The BEAST looks like a mix of mummified corpse, giant spider, and a truckload of asbestos…
Well…it’s cheap and embarrassingly derivative, and has lots of other flaws, but it is very well-directed, pretty well-acted, and has a script which, though simple, is pretty much devoid of howlers. It’s biggest problems are that it’s kinda static and its monster is a wispy thing which is just sort of dropped in on occasion to justify the title. It’s no classic, but it is much better than I’d ever thought it to be. Why, I might even watch it again sometime.
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