“In all my travels I never seen anything like that two-ton lizard. If we could just get him back alive.”

Flinthart’s review: With the bland, irritating white noise of Velma still in my head, I decided I’d lean into the lunatic end of things a little and see if I couldn’t find something more interesting to watch and review for my fellow mutants. Browsing through a backlog of hints, suggestions, old DVDs, streaming channels, YouTube and more, I ran across a really stupid-sounding title: The Valley of Gwangi.

Why not? It sounded like some godawful mid-century African-Explorer-Discovers-Lost-Tribe kind of nonsense, and I was in the mood for something really dumb. Imagine my surprise when instead of a turgidly neo-colonial quasi-racist rip-off of H. Rider Haggard, I got – well, think Cowboys vs Dinosaurs with a chunky helping of King Kong thrown in. Not only that, but it was well shot, adequately acted, and best of all, right there in the opening credits was that name of names: Ray “The Legend” Harryhausen!

Now, if you know Harryhausen’s work – and every self-respecting mutant really should – you’ll realise why I sat up straight and poured myself a double. And if you don’t know Harryhausen… wow. Just… wow. The King of Stop Motion Animation? The man who almost singlehandedly kept alive the tradition of fantasy filming in Hollywood back in the days before CGI? The genius behind all the niftiest monsters in Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts and so many more? Turns out that this The Valley of Gwangi (and that’s pronounced gwan-gee, by the way) is Harryhausen’s very last dinosaur movie – and damn, but he was definitely at the top of his game.

The movie itself is nothing too startling. Set around the end of the 19th century in Mexico, we find a Wild West show run by the beautiful T.J Breckinridge (Gina Golan) down on its luck, trying to scrape up an audience to pay for feed for the animals. Meanwhile, TJ’s ne’er-do-well (with a heart of gold) ex Tuck Kirby (James Franciscus) shows up out of the blue with an offer to buy TJ’s star attraction, Omar the Wonder Horse (Omar can dive off a tower into a large vat of water with a rider on his back) for Buffalo Bill (who also operated a Wild West show back in the day.)

TJ doesn’t trust her ex, and she doesn’t want to sell Omar. Besides, she’s got a better offer: A shady character named Carlos has turned up with a miniature (really miniature – like terrier-size!) horse that she’s planning to train, thus creating an even greater attraction than poor diving Omar. But Tuck knows a little about this micro-horse, because he’s recently befriended an obsessive paleontologist by the name of Bromley (Lawrence Naismith) who has a strange fossil – an Eohippus (ancient, miniature horse-ancestor) which is somehow impossibly attached to fossilised human remains!

In short order it unfolds: We know Carlos got his Eohippus when his brother went to some valley forbidden by local gypsies (why does Mexico have gypsies?) and brought it back at the expense of his life. The angry gypsies steal back the Eohippus from the Wild West show, and suddenly there’s a whole train of pursuers: Bromley, who wants to find the valley of the Eohippus; Tuck, who wants to bring back TJ’s new star attraction to make things right between them, and TJ plus her crew of Wild West types who are all chasing Tuck because Carlos (the villain!) told them Tuck stole the Eohippus.

With little more fuss, the whole lot of them find their way to the inevitable Mysterious Lost Valley, and plentiful dinosaur shenanigans ensue. And honestly, it’s here that the movie is at its best. Harryhausen’s models and stop motion work in this film are the peak of his craft. Sure, the old-school tech can’t make the lighting of the models quite match up with the backdrop screens and all – but the detailing and the movement of those models is breath-taking.

The big moment is a complex set-piece in which the cowboys use ropes, lariats and horses to lasso and control Gwangi himself (an Allosaur – and a damned good one!) Combining horse stunts and horseback action, fires, falls and of course animation of the Allosaur model, all these elements are integrated damn’ near seamlessly into the visual narrative in a remarkable display of virtuoso skill from Harryhausen and the crew.

Mind you, Gwangi the Allosaur breaks free of his restraints despite the courageous efforts of the cowpokes. Only a convenient rock-fall knocks him unconscious, allowing them to bind his jaws and haul him back to civilisation to be displayed as the Ultimate Attraction in TJ’s Wild West show. And does Gwangi break free during the show to go on a giant dinosaur Tex-Mex all you can eat take-away rampage? You bet he does!

Naturally, by the end the bad guys get their just desserts (even the villainous gypsy dwarf!), the good guys emerge sadder but wiser, ready to move on to a happy ending together, while poor old Gwangi suffers the fate of every giant stop-motion monster… but really, who cares? The story is just a showcase for Harryhausen’s magic – and that is very special indeed.

As a Western, Valley of Gwangi gets no more than 3 out of 5 blind Mexican gypsy harridans. But as a display of an art-form rarely seen in these modern, computer-generated days, I’d give it a full 8 out of 8 tragically slain giant monsters.

It did my heart good.

Intermission!

• Why does that thrashing hessian gunnysack sound like a horse?
• Wait… is she blind? One-eyed? What’s with that eye-patch? How does it stay on?
• Oh, Carlos… defying Gwangi in the first five minutes of the film? Things cannot possibly end well for you.
• Hmm. T J Breckenridge is pretty easy on the eyes. I wonder if they planned that diving-horse stunt just to make sure her costume got wet.
• Ah, the old ‘drunken British paleontologist lost in the desert’ trope. I wondered how long that would take to show up.
• Whoa… that miniature horse! Holy spunt! Harryhausen is absolutely on fire here!
• Aiee! Evil gypsy dwarf with a crowbar!
• Ooh! A pterodactyl stole the mule!
• Wait… how come the pterodactyl can’t carry a little kid if it could carry a mule just yesterday? What’s that kid made of, anyway?
• Oops. I guess cowboys don’t much care about the Endangered Species Act. Scratch one pterodactyl.
• Gwangi! Yayyy!
• Cowboys Vs Dinosaurs! Yayyy!
• Oooh. See, Carlos? I told you, didn’t I?
• Bonk! Ha! Cop that, Gwangi!
• Uh-oh… Return of the Evil Gypsy Dwarf With A Crowbar!
• Hmm. Why a stop-motion elephant? There really can’t be any shortage of trained elephants around Hollywood.
• Oh. Right. Kind of hard to train a real elephant to battle a miniature model dinosaur…