Saturday, October 21, 2017

A Quick Look: BEAST FROM HUANTED CAVE (1958)


   BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE was one of the dozens of monster pictures to be unleashed during the last half of the 1950's. In some ways, and I don't mean this at all to the film's detriment, it foreshadows the cranked-out direct-to-video movies which ruined The Sci-Fi Channel back in the late 90's. The story concerns a group of crooks who knock-off a gold depository in a small skiing town, then take to the wilderness by partaking in a cross-country ski tour package. Following them, however, is a ghostly cave creature... Natural locations add to the production value of a somewhat limited scenario. The cast is good, the monster neat, and the photography can get pretty moody at times. The ending is one of the most abrupt seen outside a British genre film of the same era. Like a number of these films, it was expanded for television a couple years later. Unlike most of them, most of the original cast was reassembled and made subject of the new footage. Although a major plus to these films is how taught they are by their skimpy runtimes, BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE reportedly was made stronger in it's expanded format. I haven't seen that version myself yet, but I'm certainly intrigued!

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