MooT Clue-in-the-Trivia: Natalie Wood worked as an assistant behind the scenes of this movie. She typed script revisions, shopped for wardrobe and props, and also appeared, well-disguised, as an extra in some crowd scenes.

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MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "You have to be two people. The saint and the sinner. The librarian and the stripper."

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MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "Do you think these haircuts have come to stay?"

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The question is: what would such a rig be used for???? Astronaut training?

And how to get anyone down ... Hollywood! Sheesh.

Nice maracas, right?

Born in Madrid in 1936, Mags was an accomplished tap dancer at the age of four.

At 20, she arrived in the U.S. on a nightclub tour, and caused quite a stir with a fiery dance on "The Jack Paar Show."

Her big break came when Warner Bros. executive Bill Orr caught her performance at the Persian Room in New York City. Orr signed her to a contract on the spot, and gave her the starring role of "Cha Cha O'Brien" in the series "Surfside 6" (1960). The show ran two seasons, after which Sierra returned to the club circuit.

Fast-forward to Spring 1963, when Sierra had to undergo open-heart surgery to correct a heart defect. After several months, with her condition worsening, she was hospitalized in Hollywood, where she died on September 6, 1963. She was 27.

MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "You gotta be a saint to stand all the power that little box can give you."

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MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "Listen, I'm no cop now. I'm a husband! What did you do with her? Where's my wife? My wife?!"

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MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "If you deny what you know, or what you are, or where you are, you deny the simplest part of being alive, and then you die."

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My second-favorite, unintentionally funny, sci-fi horror western of all time is "The Beast of Hollow Mountain" (1956), starring long-time MooT fave Patricia Medina as Sarita, the sultry love-interest of an ex-pat American cowpoke, Jimmy Ryan (Guy Madison).

The story (written by Willis O'Brien, the man who designed and animated the original "King Kong") concerns Ryan's discovery that the cattle that keep goin' missing from his Mexican ranch are actually hors d'oeuvres for a local T Rex (actually, a cranky Allosaurus).

Turns out the surly dino shacks up inside a hollow mountain (aptly named Hollow Mountain), and local legend has it that the creature emerges only during times of drought to forage for water, a few tons of steak tartar, and unlucky Mexicans. Is this where the term "peasant food" comes from?

Holy Human Chalupas, Batman!

To make matters worse, the village has been set up right next to a treacherous swamp, said to be cursed and full of deadly pools of quicksand, from which no one dumb enough to enter ever returns. Someone obviously missed the real estate seminar on location, location, location!

Sound like the cinematic equivalent of a hot, steaming cow-pie?

You might think so, but I encourage all MooT followers to give "Beast" a chance, It's not that bad, but is cheesy enough to inspire the full MST3K treatment.

Hell, it was filmed in "Nassour Regiscope." So, it's got that going for it. Now, if only I knew who Nassour Regiscope was.

Regiscope was actually a fancy name for replacement animation, essentially animation created by filming multiple, rigid models instead of one super-articulated puppet.

In this case, the models were all hollow clay figurines (fired in a kiln just like the kind you may have used in elementary school, if you went to elementary school before the Eighties), sculpted in various poses and painted to match a larger version, as well as a rubber suit some actor wore if closeups were needed.

I wonder if Art Clokey saw this, and Eureka'd "Claymation!"

Nassour refers to stop-motion guru Edward Nassour, who co-directed "Beast" with live-action director Ismael Rodríguez. It was he who supervised the painstaking process of shooting some 20 different clay miniatures of the Allosaurus to create the illusion of a running and jumping monster (these apparently sold for $20,000 just last month). Many scenes in "Beast" are combos of traditional stop-action and Regiscope footage of the clay minis. The result is a monster that looks like it's doing "The Jerk" — when it's not pulling a muscle, that is. Makes me wish story writer O'Brien had had more to do with animating the beast, since he did a far better job with the creature in "The Black Scorpion" (1957).

Early on, Nassour did try to lure investors by describing Regiscope as a "computer-controlled" process whereby "actuating impulses" were fed to a mechanical figure, thus "bringing it to life for the cameras." (So that's how they coaxed a performances out of Tab Hunter!) This *was* Hollywood, remember, and that was probably the 380th lie told in that town at a particular quarter-second during the Spring of '56.

"The Beast of Hollow Mountain" is actually a quite charming and colorful example of post-Korean War kiddie matinee fodder made for undemanding eight-year olds. It packs a lot of cheesy action into just 78 minutes, along with a lot of treacly exposition to get you to care about the characters.

Yet, oddly, it's superior in a dozen ways to the recent "Land of the Lost," mostly because of its way higher cute factor and blazing retro-cool color palette — if you're lucky enough to find a version that's not washed out, that is. The costumes and locations are the stuff widescreen Technicolor was made for, but most of the versions available on the Internet are dogged by poor focus and exaggerated color shifts caused by sloppy conversions. The original had its problems in both areas as well, since the composite process used was not sophisticated, and merging live and process shots in color — in CinemaScope no less — required extra care, which its budget and schedule wouldn't allow.

"Beast" has a good-natured self-awareness at its core, under the candy coating so to speak, that reminds me of the unpretentiously lovable "Son of Godzilla."

And every so often, scene after scene sans a beast, the camera pulls back and shows ... the mountain!

Hey, maybe this thing was supposed to be called "Mountain of the Hollow Beast"?

Madison — our hero — is as charismatic a piece of man-cake as you'll find in Fifties B's. Along with the voloptuous Medina, he carries this thing as "story" — for what that's worth.

Okay, so he does look a little *too* handsome and campy-debonair in his brightly colored Roy Rogers shirts. Just how did he recruit the troupe of muscular cow-hunks that comprise his fun-lovin', ass-slappin' team of ranch-hands? There's not a Wishbone, soup-in-the-beard-type in the lot. They all look like varnished extras in a Cyd Charisse number in an Old West musical.

Amazingly, Madison's out-ponced on "Beast's" virtual cock-walk by a band of dandy Mexican Vaqueros, whose elegant charro suits, hallucinatorily bright silk neckerchiefs, and exquisitely detailed sombreros evoke regalia designed during an all-night tequila jag with Mr. Blackwell and Liberace. (Maybe they shoulda called it "Brokeback Mountain" based on all the male plumage on display.)

And the camera pans the desolation of the landscape, revealing ... the mountain!

Medina is a walking dream that mixes Jane Russell with Faith Domerogue. I do so like my English-Spanish spitfires in bullet bras. More notable, though, is the fact that her character has more resourcefulness and independence than most period monster-movie eye candy we're used to. She's resilient, sassy, brassy, and tough. When she falls and twists her ankle when running from the beast (a given occurrence), she snarls at the beast. She's no whiner! No stock screaming for her.

Plus she calls Ryan "Señor Cheemy." How cute is that?

And then the shot widens, and we see ... "The Mountain."

The rather formulaic plot furnishes a vintage red herring in the form of evil Enrique Rios (Eduardo Noriega), a rival rancher-racketeer who is engaged to Medina. The jealous and possessive Rios has an ... ahem, a beef ... with Ryan over the fact that his wife-to-be is in deep smit with the fancy-pantsed gringo. Ryan, whose competitive male dander is instantly up, accuses Rios of poaching his cows. The two adversaries hitch up their chaps and snarl at each other, in a bizarre dueling male camel-toe moment that never explodes into proper Western fisticuffs.

Did I mention that there's an annoying brat too? I mean really annoying. I mean he makes Short Round from "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" seem like a well-behaved delight to be around.

Panchito is his name (I told you he was little). He's the son of the village drunk, Pancho, who ventures into the swamp and is never seen again. When you get a dose of the whiny Panchito, you'll chalk up his Dad's disappearance as suicide. Damn! There goes the comic relief.

They search high and low for Pancho (I've already signed Artie Lange for the part in the remake), which brings them to the edge of the swamp. The camera lingers on all that's left of him, his sombrero, floating atop a pool of quicksand, then tilts up to show ... the mountain!

The Jurassic rustler — who doesn't appear on screen until the film's final 20 minutes — has the longest, reddest tongue I've ever seen on film (except for footage of KISS in concert). Did it swallow a live octopus? But that's not the fakest-looking aspect of what is a pretty striking stop-motion creation (you must consider that the great Ray Harryhausen didn't have a hand in the production). That award goes to the obvious painted rubber boot feet used by an actor in an Allosaurus costume for certain shots.

Oddly, those goofy feet are the focus of numerous closeups — it's one of the few times the production values really veer into the cheesy Godzilla-Gumby end of the rubber creature scale. In those herky-jerky moments, I feel like we're watching a Groinpullasaurus with back spasms doing the Macarena.

The SFX team of Jack Rabin and Louis DeWitt ("Kronos" and "Atomic Submarine") aren't close to being in Harryhausen's league, but they give us a serviceable if unsophisticated monstrosity most of the time. If you're in the 3rd grade, that is.

I do love this beast of the empty hillock regardless of all of my sarcastic comments. And I think it's a boy, actually. A young monster, just like the beast in "Cloverfield." He's just so mischievous. He's feisty. He causes a cattle stampede (actually, speeding up the camera does) — to, what, tenderize his meal? And each cow he catches is devoured with uncommon joy. He (thankfully) terrorizes little Panchito for shits and giggles. Smelling a trap, he clumsily moonwalks backwards out of a some swamp goo. He just doesn't like the feeling of mud between his toes.

When Sarita and Panchito hole up in a house, he runs around it woo-wooing like a dopey dervish before sticking his snout through the roof — just to drive them batty, I think. He slides down a dirt embankment on his prodigious butt and chases after a horse. He fights like a mental patient. Through it all he wiggles that tongue crazily and brays like a cross between a cougar and a hyena.

Turns out it's the shortest reign of terror of any movie beast ever, clocking in at around 14 minutes.

"TBoHM" certainly inspired Harryhausen's "The Valley of Gwangi" (1969), which turns out to be my favorite — and perhaps the best — Western monster movie ever made (and the full realization of O'Brien's tale). D'ya think Gila Golan, "Gwangi's" version of Sarita as I call her, has something to do with that?

Best line? When Ryan opines "You know, I've always believed that sombreros were the goofiest-looking hats ever invented."

Watch "Beast" here, in its entirety, as it resides in the public domain.

In the meantime, a few more pix of funky cool Medina might help explain my gushing ...

That hunk of man up there with Patty is Lex Barker; the still is from "Duel on the Mississippi" (1955), in which she played a man-eater named Lili Scarlet.

And where was this hot tamale born? Why, where else but Liverpool, England!

P.S. Patty turned 90 this past July.

MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "We operate on a first-name basis. My first name is Captain."

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Mother ...

And daughter ...

Although Eva looks like she got more of "it."

MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "They feel no fear. Cortical nerve clusters show complete inactivity. They feel no pain. Concepts of morality are disengaged. They feel no regrets. No remorse."

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Bob was one of my favorite character actors. I loved his gravelly voice and that catcher's mitt of a face that had dockyard and dogface toughness written all over it.

The Animal's real name was Stanislas Kasava (which I still use as an Internet alias from time to time), and fans of the movie will remember he had a major crush on pinup Betty Grable. When Harvey Lembeck dresses up as a girl for the POW's Christmas party, Strauss hallucinates that Lembeck is Betty and creeps Lembeck out when he takes his delusion a little too far.

In addition to "The Animal," he's best remembered by the MooT as Beer Barrel in "The Bridges at Toko-Ri" (1954), PFC Bernstein in "Attack" (1956), Black Frankie Udino in "I, Mobster" (1958), and Romeo Scragg in "Li'l Abner (1959). He was also the janitor in Marilyn Monroe's and Tom Ewell's apartment building in "The Seven Year Itch" (1955).

A quintessential "New York actor," Bob moved from Broadway into TV in the early Fifties, appearing in many shows emanating from Manhattan — things like "Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, "The Alcoa Hour," "Damon Runyon Theater," "The Eddie Cantor Comedy Theater," "The Ford Television Theatre," "The Colgate Comedy Hour," "The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse," "Cavalcade of America," and the "Schlitz Playhouse of Stars."

He appeared as a guest star in numerous TV shows in the Sixties.

Bob died in 1975.

MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "Sir, this is Private Elliot at Opana Point. There's a large formation of planes coming in from the north. 140 miles, 3 degrees east."

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All photos are used solely for the purpose of discussion and comment. These images are not intended for any commercial purpose. Credit, where known, is given. No copyright is implied or granted. Many are from my personal collection of movie production stills and lobby cards.

Another one of Stel's numerous "Fallen Woman" roles, which she would bring to an apotheosis in "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" (1970).

I think the woman in the other barrel is Ariadna Welter, a Mexican actress of some repute. But if anyone knows for sure, comment to confirm or correct.