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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