The Valley of Gwangi Reviews

The Valley of Gwangi was an inherited project for Ray Harryhausen. Originally intended by mentor Willis O’Brien as a follow-up to King Kong, with a few sequences of cowboys on the loose in Africa repurposed into Mighty Joe Young, Gwangi is actually the second run-through of this material after O’Brien produced 1956’s The Beast of Hollow Mountain. Of course, a weird western about cowboys battling it out with prehistoric animals sounds like something from the whacky imagination of Harryhausen anyway, so the transition of the idea between the men is seamless.

The Valley of Gwangi is inoffensively kitsch, a movie where you’re very likely to witness an Allosaurus (that would be Gwangi) munching on a character only dubbed “the dwarf,” then fight an elephant, before meeting its end in a cathedral undergoing renovations in a hellish vision of flames destroying the terrorizing monster. The first forty-five minutes has to be powered through, although none of it is terrible so much as it is a bit mundane and workman-like, before the back half goes completely insane.

The second half is where we plunk ourselves down in the valley and a succession of Harryhausen creatures come trotting across the screen. There’s a Pteradon attack, a battle between Gwangi and a Styracosaurus, Gwangi attacking a Ornithomimus in a sequence that was directly lifted for Jurassic Park, and the cowboys trying to wrangle an adorable little Eohippus like a cow. If all of that sounds like wonderfully arcane nonsense, that doesn’t even account for the band of Gypsy hanging in Mexico, a British paleontologist, a traveling Wild West show, and a pervasive sense of daffiness.

Nothing about Gwangi is serious, and nothing in it should be taken seriously. Like many of the films in Harryhausen’s canon, the acting is blandly proficient but the dubbing of Gila Golan is noticeably bad. Her mouth and voice rarely match, nor does the dubbing match the emotive acting that Golan is displaying. Only James Franciscus manages to match the outlandish vibrato of his acting style to the material. Look, if your reaction is anything like mine, then you’ll be rooting for Gwangi to just lay waste to everyone and leave a trail of destruction in his wake as he makes his way back to the valley. I’m not usually so nihilistic, but it would be greatly entertaining to see that happen.

The Valley of Gwangi would prove to be Harryhausen’s last dip into the prehistoric realm, and it is a noticeable improvement over the interminable One Million Years BC. What’s more prominent is just how obviously indebted the entirety of the Jurassic Park series is to this lone film. The Michael Crichton novels provided the beats, characters, and framework, but this Harryhausen film gave the cinematic blueprint and visuals to follow. Trace over in more than a few instances. It’s a good-bad movie, the kind that knows it’s adorably strange, completely implausible, and clunky in its use of clichés.