Beasts Unleashed
A double bill of monstrous meanderings brought forth from the depths of the vault of science fiction B-movies by Eureka to make their UK Blu-ray debuts, The Beast with a Million Eyes and The Beast of Hollow Mountain were originally released in the summers of 1955 and 1956 respectively, one monochrome and one distinctly more colourful with the costumed and masked Chinelo wedding celebrations but both setting forth on the then-unexplored plains of the Weird West.
Credited as being directed by David Kramarsky from a script by Tom Filer which had caught the attention of producer Roger Corman, The Beast with a Million Eyes was shot around the bleak setting of Coachella Valley and the nearby town of Indio, home to struggling date rancher Allen Kelley, his surly wife Carol, their daughter Sandra and her dog Duke, with the creepy mute “Him” in the shack opposite.
The piercing sound of a strange aircraft rending the sky on Sandra’s birthday, it is a herald of aberrant behaviour first in the birds and farm animals and then in the locals, Carol suffering from mood swings and Him acting aggressively, the strange urges more pronounced in the deep desert where a chrome object lies, pulsating with mechanical menace compromised by the lack of budget or compensating creativity in the end-to-end amateur production.
Starring Paul Birch, Lorna Thayer, Dona Cole, Leonard Tarver and Bewitched’s Dick Sargent as Sandra’s boyfriend Deputy Larry Brewster, John Bickford’s dramatic score valiantly tries to compensate for what The Beast with a Million Eyes lacks, a film which makes little sense and had an explanatory prologue added for television broadcast, something unheard of at the time and included on the disc, acknowledging that whatever story it tries to tell it failed.
Carol a resentful wife and grudging mother, her encounter transforms her into a nice person, when the reverse would have been more disturbing, and aimlessly wandering the dunes in confusion the cast are poorly served by the terrible dialogue and lack of urgency, threat or any kind of atmosphere, the characterisation incoherent and Allen’s secret of prior friendship with and debt to “Him” (Leonard Tarver) kept to a final-scene revelation which defies logic.
Moving forward but looking back, while The Beast with a Million Eyes was a contemporary film with an extra-terrestrial intruder travelling in a contraption rigged from tin cans and an old kettle, The Beast of Hollow Mountain is the subject of folk legends dating back generations at the start of the twentieth century shortly after “Americano” Jimmy Ryan and his close friend Felipe Sanchez took possession of Rancho Bonito, an arrangement apparently unquestioned by the locals who simply accept their adjacent living quarters and comfortable familiarity.
Local cattle rancher Enrique Rios taking exception to Ryan’s incursion into what he feels is his rightful territory and his friendship with Sarita to whom he is to be married, the tension between the two escalates with accusations of cattle rustling and fist fights in the town square, but the truth of the situation is stranger even than the flying-saucer sized sombreros worn by Felipe.
Starring The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok’s Guy Madison, Carlos Rivas, Eduardo Noriega and Patricia Medina, born to an English mother and Spanish father on the exotic shores of Merseyside, The Beast of Hollow Mountain was directed by Edward Nassour and Ismael Rodríguez, shot in rugged authentic locations with superior writing, acting and production values, though despite being an American/Mexican co-production the indigenous characters such as Rios’ henchmen and Pascual García Peña’s overweight, drunken Pancho are as clichéd as Felipe stumbling into quicksand.
The titular beast, a stop-motion Allosaurus, is more impressive that of the preceding film and arrives marginally sooner, but is in no way a dominant presence, though the film manages to be passingly entertaining, and paired with the The Beast with a Million Eyes, allegedly shot by four directors creating a patchy outcome, the precision crafted relief of The Beast of Hollow Mountain is seemingly a masterpiece.
Part of the Eureka Classics collection, Beasts Unleashed is supported by an informed interview with science fiction expert Mark Bould on alien invasion cinema of the era which regards the domestic politics of The Beast with a Million Eyes with a more sympathetic eye than it might deserve and an interview with critic Kim Newman on the history of dinosaur movies and their resurgence in the era of pioneering stop-motion animation.
Beasts Unleashed will be available on Blu-ray from Eureka from Monday 20th July
