[  Mood: Hypnotized ]
[  Currently: Reading Class-related nonsense ]
Rating:
Flow: **
Special Effects: *
Character Development: **
Entertainment value: ***

Review:
This movie is, in sum, about a group of people who enrage a "beast" whilst blowing up a mine in order to distract a small town so that they can steal some gold. The director thanks (appologizes to?) the people of South Dakota in the first few minutes for being allowed to film in (desecrate?) the state.

The Beast from Haunted Cave, directed by Monte Hellman, who is also known for Flight to Fury (1964), begins at a ski slope in the Black Hills. The group arrives and the giddiest member proceeds to take pictures. At some point, he happens upon a mine shaft, which later on we find out he meant to find.

At this point, it is time to place the charge in the mine. For some reason, the man who is sent brings a waitress from the bar with him, who, of course, gets killed by the "beast." This scene is our first glimpse of the "beast," who from here on out shall be referred to as the Cotton Candy of Doom (CCD). All we really see is some cotton-candy-like-substance with a spider-like leg in it poke the woman, who proceeds to "die."

The mine is set to blow in the morning the next day, and the posse needs somewhere to hide. They convince some guy named "Gil" to let them visit his very remote cabin that can be reached only by cross-country skiing. The true reason is, of course, so they can meet a plane on a frozen lake that will take them to Canada. The next morning, the mine does in fact blow, and does manage to empty out the entire town (oh right, everyone would leave, including the people guarding the gold that is kept behind unlocked or badly locked doors).

What happens next is incredibally dull, so I will not get too much into it. Just imagine watching a cross-country ski race, only very slow and with one interruption from the CCD with the still somewhat alive woman.

They arrive at the cabin and Gil discovers shortly thereafter that his guests are not very good people. He and Gypsy, the only woman in the crew, have hit it off fairly well, mostly because she does not enjoy her life as a robber and would like to find a way out. The leader of the robbers does not approve, and some mediocre-to-boring arguing and fighting ensue.

Why, Hellman, why? The only reason that I was still watching was so that I could see some more of that awesome monster. All we’ve seen up until this point is this very fluffy thing with a spider leg. A single spider leg that it grabs people with, or pokes them, depending. Monster movies like this always show the monster in its full "glory" eventually, so I stayed strong. Fortunately, all of my suffering would be worth it.

Some more stuff happens that is fairly unimportant. There is a loud shrieking noise outside (must be the cougar!), the maid is abducted (oh yeah, there is a maid), Gypsy decides to run off with Gil, and a horrible storm approaches.

Gypsy and Gil find themselves without shelter and must go to Haunted Cave to weather out the storm. Of course, the CCD is hiding in the cave. The beast is not in fact from the cave, but from the mine shaft. The miners disturbed an egg that was a million years old, which then hatched this abomination, which then moved to Haunted Cave.

In the cave, Gypsy and Gil have to battle the CCD after discovering the waitress, the maid and someone else cotton-candied to the wall. The beast is more glorious than I could have hoped. From across the cavern comes this humanoid-spider thing covered in its own fuzzy stuff (cotton candy, I guess, because it is certainly not spider silk). It uses its prehensile (yes, prehensile) spider legs to intimidate or grab people. It lives off of human blood (because there were humans in North America 1 million years ago…).

During the epic battle, the rest of the gold-purloining posse shows up and takes Gypsy hostage. Of course, I will not ruin the ending. Do Gypsy and Gil escape? What happens to the monster? What happens to the bad guys??

This is a truly aweful movie. It is boring, slow and full of holes. Its only redeeming quality is the monster, which makes the 65 minute wait for its revealing quite worth it. Sometimes it looks like a pile of yarn and cotton candy, and sometimes it looks like a spider-human-thing. I would recommend fast-forwarding through any scenes involving skis.

Clips!
The Beast looking like a mop
Just prior to the "epic" battle scene

[  Mood: Happy ]
[  Currently: Listening to MST3K ]
Rating:
Flow: *
Special Effects: **
Character Development: ***
Entertainment value: *****

Review
You probably read the subject line and thought that I would be reviewing a movie that was about Bigfoot. You would be wrong. Not that there is no "Bigfoot" in the film, at least as much as Ivan Marx dressed up as an ape-thing ambling through a meadow would count as such; its just that there is very little of its title character.

I should back up. The Legend of Bigfoot is a documentary about Ivan Marx, a man who dedicated his life to the pursuit of Bigfoot. He caught the "creature" on video a couple of times, amounting to maybe five minutes of footage, and so had to fill the rest of his feature-length work with vaguely related wildlife scenes and a good ten minutes or so of someone’s headlights.

According to Marx, Bigfoot lives up in the mountains (of the Rocky variety) somewhere and migrates many thousands of miles with the seasons. He spent most of his life tracking this creature. After years of relative lack of success in his endeavor, he decided to ask some elder of one of the First Nations for help. The elder basically messed with Marx and told him that, in order to find Bigfoot, he would have to find the breeding grounds of the moose and do some wierd dance and music routine at night on (presumably) the tundra. Footage of moose copulation and someone’s car headlights ensue (separately, of course). That is the gist of the Bigfoot-related part of the movie, which amounts to maybe 15 minutes.

The rest of the documentary is filled in with nature footage, most of which he explains with strange philosophical musings (you know, the savagery of nature, the natural order of things, the beauty of big scary animals, etc.). One scene in particular sticks out in my mind that involves two squirrels. I will not ruin it for you, but will say that it involves one frisky male, one frisky female and an accident with a jeep. If for no other reason, watch the movie for the squirrel scene.

The whole movie is a disjointed mess of nature footage and dubious Bigfoot footage loosely tied together with a monologue by Ivan Marx. Its good entertainment so long as one is prepared with, say, a few shots of tequila or a few good friends. I should note that Ivan Marx held that his Bigfoot footage, in all of its blurry and bumbling glory, was genuine even up to his death in 2002.

On a side note: I changed the name of my blog because I found another titled "The B Movie Review." I wanted to be unique-ish