"Valley of the Gwangi"
Meh....Time lies to you about what you thought was once good.
The film is half over before the dino even appears, as such we have to sit through 45 minutes of needlessly complex plot shenanigans to eventually get the cowboys into the dino valley in the first place.
Mixed in with all those said shenanigans is a tedious love triangle sub-plot (to say my 5 year old daughter was asking where the dinosaurs are should come as no surprise) that bogs the swamp down until 1 point on the triangle is suddenly eaten, with hardly a reaction to the loss, as the film carries on as if the guy we have just spent 45 tedious minutes with had never existed.
The dino action is pretty good, but either the mostly dodgy (though certainly not always) matte work has dyed Gwangi blueish grey or Harryhausen and co choose a weird ass colour scheme for him.
Not that the block blue colour is stable anyway as it flips from grey to brownish and back to blue with wild abandon. Again, crappy matte or bad colour timing?
The eventual finale sees Gwangi at last doing something more interesting as it munches on elephants, chases cowboys and scares lots of Mexicans in their floppy hats.
Sadly though scaring the Mexicans is about all Gwangi does, as only one unfortunate is actually killed, the rest just look over their shoulders in fear as Gwangi ignores them. *sigh*
It all ends in a farcical fire that sees one tiny little pot of thrown burning embers (that Gwango decides not to simply walk away from) set an entire cathedral on fire in 20 seconds flat.
A nice idea poorly executed I'm afraid.
Harryhausen's pretty solid stop motion work deserved a better script, better execution and more damn screentime.
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