This low budget cheapie, just one of the scores of flicks which rolled off the Roger Corman assembly line in the late '50s, actually took me by surprise. The mixture of gangsters and monsters, plus the snowbound setting, is certainly unusual for its day, especially with a script that for once isn't aimed strictly at the kiddies.
Crime boss Alex (Frank Wolff), his boozy girlfriend Gypsy (Sheila Carol) and henchmen Byron (Wally Campo) and Marty (Richard Sinatra) have come to a sleepy South Dakota ski resort posing as tourists. Their plan is to raid the administration office of a nearby gold mine, where Alex knows a small but valuable cache of gold bars is stored in an easily opened vault. Marty is to plant a bomb in the mine itself, which at the appointed time will serve as a handy diversion for the small resort town's citizens. Alex has already arranged for the local ski instructor, Gil Jackson (Michael Forest), to guide his party on a cross-country trip to an isolated cabin deep in the forest. A ski plane is scheduled to land near the cabin at a prearranged time to pick up the gang and spirit them to Canada. The unsuspecting Gil is to be eliminated.
Events, however, take a strange turn the night before the robbery. As a cover for his bomb planting, Marty takes the town slut, barmaid Natalie (Linné Ahlstrand), up to the mine for a little hanky panky. While setting the charge he finds the remains of a strange egg in one of the shafts. Then he and Natalie are attacked by a weird, moaning creature, a monstrous, spider-like thing covered in wispy filaments. A visibly shaken Marty returns to the ski lodge alone, telling Alex that Natalie is dead, killed by some kind of monster. Alex thinks Marty is off his rocker, that it was he who killed the girl. No matter; the heist is to go down as planned. And it does. The bomb detonates on time, drawing the townsfolk and any law officers to the site of the blast. Alex, Marty and Byron break into the mine office and fill their backpacks with gold bars. Then they hightail it to the lodge, where Gypsy and Gil await them to start the cross-country trek into the wilderness. But something is following them...
As alluded to in the opening paragraph, Beast from Haunted Cave is much better than it has any right to be. The script spends an unusual amount of time on characterization, particularly Alex's world-weary moll, Gypsy, believably played by Carol, and Gil, the "mountain man" who's anything but the slowwitted yokel the gang thinks he is. (Michael Forest, perhaps best known to EC readers as Apollo in the classic Star Trek episode "Who Mourns for Adonis?", makes an appealing hero.) Most of the dialog is on a more adult level than one would expect, especially between these two characters. First-time director Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop, Shatter) doesn't allow the low budget to hamstring him, giving the film a perceptible 'crime noir' edge even without the customary trappings and aesthetics of that genre, tossing in the occasional quirky moment to keep things interesting. Then there's the monster...
Beast's beast is pretty silly looking, moving so clumsily that the film has to be significantly speeded up during the climax to lend it an air of impending menace. It's the cheesiest aspect of the movie. Wisely it's kept mostly out of sight until the end. Nonetheless it apparently made quite an impression when the flick first appeared at drive-ins and later made the rounds on creature feature shows during the days of pre-cable TV. This is due more to the monster's method than appearance. A shambling, vampiric thing, it doesn't kill its victims right away. Instead it cocoons them to the walls of the cave, enveloping them in the same shimmery, web-like filament that covers its own body. The helpless victims are trussed for slaughter, still conscious, as the beast slowly sucks out their blood.
Like the one effective scene in the otherwise inferior Attack of the Giant Leeches (showing trapped humans being fed upon), these moments are genuinely creepy — and simply had to have inspired the production designers on Aliens. (Note: Beast from Haunted Cave shares something else with the Corman-produced Leeches besides similar 'monsters munching on humans' scenes... They also have the same music score.)
