cinema history class: the valley of gwangi (1969)

The session: "Westerns with a Twist of Monster"

For this year's version of our session of Westerns, Keith is showing us four mashups: Westerns with monsters

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 4: The Valley of Gwangi (1969)
Directed by Jim O'Connolly

My Impressions Going In:

I had heard of this one. Heck, Keith sometimes has a poster for it in his basement. It's one of those titles that's iconic enough that it's been in my consciousness. But, of course, I hadn't seen it and couldn't have told you anything about it.

Plot:

Somewhere in Mexico there's a hidden valley with prehistoric creatures. Which is all well and good until people enter hidden valley -- and the dinosaurs exit.

Reaction and Other Folderol:

Valley starts off kind of slow, but when it gets going...wow! It becomes relentless and refuses to let up.

With Ray Harryhausen's genius stop-motion animations, the dinosaurs (and the eohippus) come to life, the dinosaur and cowboy elements blend remarkably well to tell an interesting story. It's reminiscent of King Kong, but set in the old West.

What was particularly interesting was the climactic scene in the church. I viewed that scene as being sacreligious in a way I don't expect from European Westerns. You had a church being damaged by a dinosaur, and actually burning down. Keith, however, saw it differently. He argued that it was in a way affirming of religion. With the fire and the hellish screeches, it was almost as if the church itself was sending the dinosaur to hell. It's an interesting take, and not without merit, though I wonder what exactly the dinosaur did to deserve hell. He was just dinosauring along, minding his own business. He didn't ask for all the trouble. And it's bad enough that bhe had to die for his trouble. Do we really have to imagine him going to hell?

Ratings

Me: 9

Bob-O: 9.8

Christina: 9.4

Dave: 9.9

Ethan: 8.5

of cats and men

 I've recently seen a lot of comments and posts on social media asserting that cats don't recognize humans as being fundamentally different from cats.

This assertion is made in service of describing differences between cats and dogs. Dogs, the argument goes, know that people are not dogs. Cats, on the other hand, think that people are just incompetent cats.

I call bullshit.

Full disclosure: I am a cat person. Growing up, I had both dogs and cats. And I preferred dogs. But I -- and my family, once I got married -- have had cats since 1995. Right now my family has four -- Red, 18, Wilko and Copic.

I have seen how cats react to new and unknown cats and I've seen how they react to new and unknown people. If you bring a new adult cat into a home with cats who are already established, there's a lot of hissing, growling and swatting. The established cats make it clear that the new one is not welcome. If a new human comes into the house, the cats don't mostly ignore him.

Don;t tell me they don't know the difference.

cinema history class: the living coffin (1959)

The session: "Westerns with a Twist of Monster"

For this year's version of our session of Westerns, Keith is showing us four mashups: Westerns with monsters

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 3: The Living Coffin (1959)
Directed by Fernando Mendez

My Impressions Going In:

Never heard of this one.

Plot:

An old spirit is haunting a sleepy Mexican town, scaring away the residents.

Reaction and Other Folderol:

Almost twenty years ago, my family took a roadtrip from Anchorage, Alaska, to Inuvik, Northwest Territories. I remember particularly, when we stopped to eat in Dawson City, in the Yukon. The restaurant we stopped in had a creepily abandoned feel. Of course, it was mid September, and the tourist season was over, so there were very few customers. And years after that, we went on a driving tour of Centralia, Pennsylvania -- a small city that has been all but abandoned because of an underground fire that has been burning since 1962.

The Living Coffin reminded me of those travel experiences because of the creepily abandoned quality of the town -- especially the saloon. They clearly saved money by having a very small cast. It kind of fit with the whole conceit that the town is in the process of being abandoned, but had the result of making it feel like a stage-play.  I think that feeling was also driven by the sets which had an oddly surreal quality.

I did enjoy the Scooby Doo quality of the plot, and the obvious references to Poe. But there was just too much downtime, so it failed to capture my attention.

The makeup was good, though.

Ratings

Me: 6.5

Bob-O: 8

Christina: 8.1

Ethan: 7

cinema history class: curse of the undead (1959)

The session: "Westerns with a Twist of Monster"

For this year's version of our session of Westerns, Keith is showing us four mashups: Westerns with monsters

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 2: Curse of the Undead (1959)
Directed by Edward Dein

My Impressions Going In:

Never heard of this one.

Plot:

A mysterious disease is claiming the lives of the young women in town. Can Preacher Dan save the day?

Reaction and Other Folderol:

This was much better than The Beast of Hollow Mountain, which we saw the previous week. Beast seemed like two separate movies -- an hour of typical Hollywood Western followed by a half hour or so of a T-Rex running wild through town. By contrast, Curse did a good job of integrating its Western trappings with the vampire plot.

There were a lot of really good one-liners thrown into the dialog, which was fun. For a movie of this type, the characters were surprisingly well-developed. I enjoyed the fact that the villain himself was shown, through revelation of his backstory, to be ambiguously evil at worst. I did feel sorry for him, even as I knew that he had to die. And Ethan took that a step further, observing that, in this movie "you feel every death; the deaths matter." On the other hand, the whole thing did sort of drag around the middle.

It's a fun watch, but not particularly memorable.Were I rating it now, I would have gone a half point to a full point lower.

Ratings

Me: 8

Bob-O: 9.1

Christina: 9.2

Dave: 9.5

Ethan: 8

Joe: 10