Beast from Haunted Cave: Elvira’s Movie Macabre Edition (1959/2011) – A Movie A Day 2021 #21
Beast from Haunted Cave: Elvira’s Movie Macabre Edition (1959/2011) – A Movie A Day 2021 #21
Cheesy monster movies are great, but what makes a cheesy monster movie even better? Elvira! I’ve been watching Elvira host bad horror movies for as long as I can remember, and the original Movie Macabre theme music from the 1980s is forever imprinted in my brain. The original run of Movie Macabre ended in 1986, but I still regularly watch the show on VHS, DVD, and online. The show was revived in 2010 but lasted for just under a year before going away again. Episodes from the revival of Movie Macabre, including a few unaired episodes, have been released on DVD, and I, of course, have a few of those discs. So when I was looking for my daily movie to watch, picking an Elvira episode I hadn’t seen yet was an easy decision.
The movie I chose was Beast from Haunted Cave. The film is a Roger Corman produced monster movie about a gang of thieves who concoct a seemingly unnecessarily complicated plan to steal a few gold bars. The gang consists of Alex, the leader of the group, Gypsy, who is (sort of) Alex’s woman, Byron, the comic relief, and Marty, the uh… other guy. Alex wants to rob a bank near a busy ski resort, and he has Marty set off a bomb in a local mine to draw attention (and police) away from the city while they go to work. After robbing the bank, the whole group will take a multiple-day cross-country ski trip with the ski resort’s instructor, Gil. The goal is to avoid local police by travelling into the snowy wilderness with Gil and waiting at his solitary cabin in the woods until a plane arrives to pick them up. Things don’t go according to plan though. The plane is delayed because of a snow storm, the almost-always drunk Gypsy has the hots for Gil, and the bombing of the mine has woken a spider-like beast that is following the group as they trek towards the cabin.
What ensues is a cheaply-made crime thriller with some monster horror tossed in from time to time. The filmmakers did the best they could with a low budget, which means that the beast is rarely seen, and when it is on camera, it’s usually too dark to make anything out. We’ll see a leg come into frame and grab someone, or we’ll see what might be the web-covered head of the beast bobbing around for a second, but until the finale, we don’t see much of the monster at all. So what we’re left with instead is a movie about a bunch of bank robbers who are basically holding a guy hostage even though he’s unaware of it. There is more drama than there are scares, but I still had fun with the movie.
The dialogue is campy, the acting will often make you smirk, and the writing is just cheesy enough keep you interested enough to stick around until the beast finally starts to do stuff. The only thing I really didn’t care for was the comic relief guy, Bryon. I didn’t even realize he was supposed to be funny until later in the movie, and when I did realize he was trying to be funny, he just made me a little sad. Byron does have an unusually good story arc though, one that’s bigger than a lot of the other characters, so I suppose I don’t dislike Byron. I just wish he hadn’t been so annoying in the first hour.
Beast from Haunted Cave is fun though. It’s fun to joke about, but I also just enjoy it for what it is. I will say that having Elvira pop up every once in a while with her skits and comments made the experience much more enjoyable, but I’d probably watch Beast from Haunted Cave even if I didn’t have the DVD of the Movie Macabre version.
Elvira’s bit for this movie is that she’s cutting costs for her show. After all, if Roger Corman can produce a movie like Beast from Haunted Cave for like $100, then surely Elvira can do some skits on the cheap, right? So Elvira fires nearly all of her staff and ends up having to do everything herself. Insert some bad puns and a few boob jokes, and you have another great episode of Movie Macabre. Watching this definitely made me want to build up my collection of Elvira movies.