Chapter 28
One double bill that didn’t go the rounds in the early 1960s was The Beast of Hollow Mountain paired with The Giant Claw, the first reason being that two different companies were involved (in the United Kingdom, if nowhere else, legislation demanded that film couplings had to be composed of movies from the same company). The second reason would have to be the pictures themselves: The Beast of Hollow Mountain, more suited to a younger audience, takes an interminable amount of time to get to the point where the monster makes its entrance, which would have lead to restless bums on seats; as for The Giant Claw, this would have lead to said bums on seats getting up and walking out in derision. 1956 and 1957 were peak years for monster movies and these two faced stiff competition. Let’s see why both failed to rise to the occasion by hoisting a metaphorical white flag in surrender.
Under its joint Mexican/U.S. title of El Monstruo de la Montana Hueca, United Artists’ dinosaur-on-the-loose adventure from 1956 sounds promising, on paper at least. Scripted from an idea by Willis O’Brien, the film features Jorge Stahl, Jr.’s lush CinemaScope and DeLuxe Color photography; presents a rousing Raul Lavista score and debuts a new process termed by producer/director Edward Nassour as Regiscope. Nassour, aided by Louis DeWitt, Jack Rabin and Henry Lyon, constructed a fully armatured two-foot Tyrannosaurus Rex, which was blended into the live action by conventional stop-motion animation. Several other models were plaster-built, each in a different pose. When these varying models were shot two frames at a time, it gave the appearance of movement, termed “Replacement Animation” or “In Depth Animation.” Big rubber feet were used in close-ups. Did this imperfect combination of traditional stop-motion animation and electronically controlled (Nassour’s description) animation work, though?
Although at 45 minutes there’s the briefest-of-brief glimpse of the giant lizard, attacking Pascual Garcia Pena near a swamp, it’s 62 minutes before we are treated to a full-on view. Before then, we are rooted in Western soap opera territory. Gringo rancher Guy Madison is herding cattle over the Mexican border, some of which are ending up dead in the swamp at the foot of Hollow Mountain. Madison blames greedy land baron Eduardo Noriega, who’s jealous of fiancée Patricia Medina making eyes at the American. He wants Madison to vamoose back over the border for good. Carlos Rivas plays Madison’s sidekick, while Pena and urchin son Mario Navarro are roped in to supply comic relief (all three Mexicans starred in The Black Scorpion a year later). The movie’s eye-catching and attractive to look at, with fistfights, wedding preparations, fiestas, fireworks and striking scenery, but hell, this is supposed to be a monster movie, so when’s that darned monster going to appear? When it does, the beast chasing Navarro out of the swamp into the arms of Medina, the two seeking refuge in a dilapidated building, audiences can’t help feel moderately disappointed. Looking large one minute, small the next (particularly in long shots) and sporting a ludicrously long tongue, the jerkily animated T-Rex is novel if nothing else, becoming the star of the show for the remaining 18 minutes (depending on which text books read at school, it could be an Allosaurus). The composite shots are admittedly rendered with skill, especially when the monster drags Noriega out of a cave and mauls him to death. The same can be said of the lively finale, the cowboys riding in to help Madison, who lures the dinosaur into the quagmire by swinging Tarzan-style on a rope, recalling Harryhausen’s The Valley of Gwangi, made 12 years later. In this sense, Nassour’s newfangled process was years ahead of its time. Budget restraints meant that the beast didn’t show up until later, but if it had been allowed more screen space, the picture could have been a minor classic. It’s that hour-long stretch of filler that almost kills The Beast stone dead. But give the film its due — it was the first to introduce an animated dinosaur in widescreen as well as color. That alone makes Nassour’s effort a tiny bit special.
Those of a certain age born in England will remember comedian Rod Hull and his pet puppet Emu (the author caught his act at a convention in 1994). Well, if you’re English, the mighty buzzard from outer space in Columbia’s The Giant Claw (1957), flying millions of miles simply to lay an egg on Planet Earth, will unfortunately remind Brits of Hull’s threadbare ornithological prop. Director Fred F. Sears and producer Sam Katzman hit the heights with The Werewolf, but here, the duo laid a curate’s egg of titanic proportions, coming up with a monster that suffers the ignominy of being labeled the ’50s worst. Only Denmark’s Reptilicus, released by American International in 1962, can equal this creature in sheer cinematic shabbiness. It’s in a class of its own — lower class, that is!
Alternatively christened “A flying battleship,” “A big bird,” “An overgrown buzzard,” and “The feathered nightmare on wings” by a bemused cast featuring Jeff Morrow (who later felt embarrassed by the results), Mara Corday (a criminal waste of the lovely actress’ talents) and Morris Ankrum (the doyen of countless B movies was used to spouting lines of gibberish with a straight face, so no change here), this colossal bundle of squawking feathers arrives on Earth, gobbling up model trains, planes and automobiles and refusing to reveal itself on radar screens because of its antimatter composition. Electronics engineer Morrow, romancing mathematician Corday, puzzles over how to defeat the creature which causes global havoc, his brow furrowing in thought as Ankrum reels off samples of Sam Newman and Paul Gangelin’s let’s-play-it-for-laughs dialogue: “It’s some kinda bird alright.” “Hundreds of planes are searching for this overgrown buzzard.” “This should be the end of the big bird that was there but wasn’t.” “People having fun” states the narrator near the beginning, showing the cast at work. It doesn’t seem to apply here, judging by Morrow and Corday’s dismayed expressions! At first reckoned to be a UFO (farmer Louis Merrill babbles on about it being a legendary flying witch!), then “An extraterrestrial. Comes from outer space,” the monster lays an egg that is blasted to fragments by Morrow and Corday. It then flies off to New York, perching atop the Empire State Building (the film’s one half-effective scene) and demolishes the United Nations (note the footage of crowd panic borrowed from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms). Morrow eventually hits upon the solution to defeat the winged menace, a machine that can pierce the bird’s force field, installing the device in a plane. As they are attacked, the monster is enveloped in gas and bombarded with rockets — dead, it falls into the ocean, one huge claw showing above the waves as a lasting reminder of just how tatty this thing was. Morrow takes solace in Corday’s womanly embrace. Oh boy, after this picture, he needed an embrace!
Completed in two weeks (the effects were drummed up in a Mexican laboratory), The Giant Claw sucks audiences hook, line and sinker into its cack-handed 75-minute narrative, making us feel sorry for Morrow and Corday in their thankless roles and wondering what the whole crew felt when all and sundry viewed the rushes. Even composer Mischa Bakaleinikoff’s score was plundered from his other Columbia fantasy arrangements, sounding stale and unoriginal. That scrawny neck, those glassy eyes, that plastic beak full of plastic teeth and the visible strings working the model were hard to ignore. This (in the eyes of English fans) is Rod Hull’s Emu magnified a thousand-fold. To those non-English buffs, it is the quintessence of the word “turkey.” Not one of Columbia’s better features, it has to be said.
So goes The Beast of Hollow Mountain and The Giant Claw. Two of the ’50s least-favored monster movies, and two that rarely dared to announce their presence on England’s horror circuits (both A-rated, The Beast showed up occasionally with family-based features while The Giant Claw was usually paired with Zombies of Mora Tau). They let the side down and couldn’t meet the challenge set by The Deadly Mantis, Rodan, The Monster that Challenged the World and 20 Million Miles to Earth, all grade A creature-features from the same period. Viewed decades later, The Beast of Hollow Mountain can be appreciated as an early attempt to produce a monster feature in ’scope and color which didn’t quite come off; The Giant Claw, on the other hand, is so hilariously corny that one cannot help but laugh every time the camera zooms in on that beady-eyed face. For diehard addicts of jerry-rigged monster outings only!