The reason I haven’t reviewed Beast from Haunted Cave before as part of my giant spider odyssey is because I couldn’t figure out if the beast in question was a goddamned spider. Having watched it, I still don’t know, so I’m taking a leap of faith.
I couldn’t fall back on my usual method of ‘when in doubt, count the number of legs.’ We only see a couple of the beast’s legs, and they are used more like arms. It has a weird humanoid head covered in web and we don’t see any other limbs at all. How this thing gets about is a mystery.
Despite the creature design being awful, the smoking gun is the creature’s habit of cocooning people in web and returning later to suck its victims dry. That’s spider behaviour, so it’s in.
Cliffhanger
Beast from Haunted Cave is the second giant spider movie to be set at a ski resort. Well, technically it’s the first, because Ice Spiders didn’t come along until 2007.
The plot is intriguing: four criminals pretend to be rich tourists so they can befriend the local ski instructor and use his mountain log cabin as a hideout after they have pulled off a heist.
They blow up the local goldmine as a distraction, then when the authorities are looking the other way, steal the gold from an unguarded administration building. Unsuspecting ski instructor Gil leads them to his cabin where they await a getaway pilot, who is due to pick them up in his plane.
But there’s a blizzard. And a giant spider.
I may have accidentally made Beast from Haunted Cave sound more exciting than it actually is. Cliffhanger, this is not. This is a bog-standard 1950s creature feature, and not even one of the good ones. Clocking in at an hour-and-six-minutes, it’s B movie time.
The writer, Charles Griffith, is something of a legend in this genre. He wrote such classics as It Conquered the World (1956), Not of this Earth (1957) and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). He also went on to write the original Little Shop of Horrors (1960) and Death Race 2000 (1975).
Pacific Rim
Alex is the head of the criminal gang. He is accompanied by two fools called Smith and Jones, and a morally flexible, high functioning alcoholic femme fatale called Gypsy.
Sorry, here she is:
Gypsy Danger is Alex’s girl. But when she drinks, which is always, she flirts heavily with Gil. I can understand it up to a point, because she is there to sweet talk Gil into using his cabin. But she does it right in front of Alex, which creates tension.
For example, Gypsy Danger asks Gil if he caught the cougar that he was after. I think she meant an actual cougar, but still. She dances seductively and asks Gil if he’s got a girlfriend. When he says ‘two or three,’ she says it’s not enough.
On another occasion, she walks right up to Gil and kisses him while Alex is standing right there. She ends up instigating a mass brawl that escalates to knives and then guns.
You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them.
Point Break
Surprisingly, the thieves aren’t greedy. Faced with an entire safe full of gold bars, they take only six. This is because the cabin is a two-day trek through the snow, and the extra weight would slow them down.
But why not give it a try at least? They can always dump a few bars later if it gets too much.
In a weird way it reminded me of Point Break, except shit. Patrick Swayze’s bank robbing gang never get greedy and go for the safe because it’s not about the money. It’s about them versus the system.
Here’s the full speech. It’s great, right up until you realise you’re one of the dead souls he’s talking about.
In Beast from Haunted Cave, Alex gives a potted version of Patrick Swayze’s ‘human spirit’ speech, talking about normies tied down to their petty little futures.
Swayze’s gang eventually get greedy and go for the safe, and it gets most of them killed (spoiler). In Beast from Haunted Cave, they never get greedy but still get handed a super-sized karma burger. They may as well have aimed big.
The Canary Man
A giant spider appears in this movie somewhere, but it sure is lesser spotted. It lives in the gold mine until it gets nuked. The characters later theorise that the miners dug too deep and unearthed something that should have remained buried. Moria problems.
After the criminals blow up the mine, the spider finds itself homeless and at a loose end. It seems to know who is responsible because he follows them up the mountain to the cabin.
Replace the spider with Jason Statham and you’d have a pretty good revenge tale. You could even throw in some canaries that Statham keeps as pets but are killed in the explosion. Next summer, Jason Statham is…The Canary Man.
I was going to say The Canary Keeper but would you believe it, a book of that name already exists.
Quite a Turnover
For a shockingly long time, the characters think the giant spider is a cougar, even after it attacks one of them with its tentacles. At the cabin, they meet Gil’s housekeeper, a native American woman called Small Dove.
Beast from Haunted Cave is full of random stuff like this, but it never lingers on anything long enough for it to be interesting. It lacks tension, suspense and terror. I can’t imagine this being scary even in the 1950s.
The acting is mostly horrible but Charles Griffith’s dialogue is probably better than the delivery makes it seem. Every line is read like a telegram, followed by a three-second pause before the next character speaks.
I will give credit to a couple of dialogue exchanges that stood out as well written:
Gil: I think you make your own luck.
Gypsy Danger: You’re wrong. Your luck makes you.
And this one:
Gil: How many people do you have working for you in Chicago?
Ales: About 200, why?
Gil: You must have quite a turnover.
It may seem like he’s talking about income, but he could also be referencing staff turnover. Basically, it’s a subtle way of saying Alex is a complete dick and nobody could stand working for him for long.
Playmate of the Month July 1958
Gypsy Danger remains the best part of Beast from Haunted Cave, playing the men off against each other. She wants to leave Alex so hitches her ride to Gil (he’s got his own place, after all).
She tells him about the heist and Alex’s plan to kill Gil, although why they didn’t kill him as soon as they reached the cabin is beyond me. When Alex finds out she is going to run away with Gil, she says Gil forced her into it.
We never find out for sure if Gypsy Danger is a victim or a manipulative sociopath. Given that Beast from Haunted Cave was made in the 1950s, I’m sure the former was the intention. But seen through a modern lens, the latter seems just as likely.
To be fair to Gil, he’s not a complete sucker and openly questions her sincerity.
Fun fact: Beast from Haunted Cave also co-stars Linné Ahlstrand, who was Playboy Magazine’s playmate of the Month in July 1958, and the first ever playmate to die (in real life, not in a movie). Morbid, but true.
Anyway, the movie ends with an uninspiring showdown with the spider in a cave. It seems impervious to bullets, so they kill it with fire.
Everyone you expect to die dies. I was glad it was over – an hour-and-six-minutes never seemed so long – but part of me wanted an epilogue with Gypsy Danger shooting Gil and making off with the loot.
Rating: 2 spider legs out of 8
