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Valley Of Gwangi (The)
R4 - Australia - Warner Home Video Review written by and copyright: Noor Razzak (7th September 2007). |
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The Film
 The Valley of Gwangi follows Champ Connors' (Richard Carlson) Wild West show, which is falling apart on a Mexican tour around the turn of the century. Disreputable circus wheeler-dealer Tuck Kirby (James Franciscus) is trying to get star equestrienne T.J. Breckinridge (Gila Golan) to quit. But T.J. is keeping a secret from both Tuck and Champ, with the help of gypsy cowboy Carlos dos Orsos (Gustavo Rojo), she's entered the Forbidden Valley of Gwangi and stolen a rare prehistoric horse called an Eohippus. When the gypsies steal it back to return it to its home, everyone follows, including professor Horace Bromley (Laurence Naismith), an expert on extinct animals. In the Forbidden Valley, his specialty fossils are alive and kicking! After having spent overnight in this Forbidden Valley the group attempt to capture an T-Rex type dinosaur for the circus show, having failed they attempt to escape the valley and return home safe, but the dinosaur gives chase and is finally knocked unconscious by large boulders falling on his head while attempting to follow the group outside the Valley. Finally captured the beast becomes the new show’s attraction, but when the Gypsies hear of this they send in one of their own to free the beast, eventually he escapes and runs amok throughout the town. The Valley of Gwangi is best described as a western/prehistoric adventure film made for the Saturday matinee crowd looking for a good time but little substance. It’s no surprise that the film’s release was met with relative disappointment, despite the inclusion of effects from the industry wizard Ray Harryhausen the man behind the magnificent stop motion effects in King Kong, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Clash of the Titans. The film’s failure cannot be blamed on the effects if it’s one area that this film excels in it’s the magnificent effects that where then the peak of cinematic visual trickery. However the film falls flat in a number of areas primarily the script, which is poor to say the least. The first flaw is that this is your typical monster movie that clearly has taken a tune from King Kong a monster is captured, taken back to the civilized world, escapes in and wreaks havoc, so originality is not its strongest suit. The Valley of Gwangi is about as formulaic as B-movies get, aside from its combination of westerns and prehistoric time lines, which I believe was a first at the time and lucky for us this trend didn’t catch on. Now aside from its misgivings this film is fun to watch, if not for the camp action then certainly for a reference of special effects of days past. The now dated effects are certainly cheesy but you can’t deny that the craft and skill that went into them is a feat to behold. Look close enough and you’ll see a performance in these stop motion beasts that are even today used as references to big budget CGI loaded films (see the featurette in this disc for more on that.) The Valley of Gawngi is one of many B-grade monster films created during the 60’s, but what makes it stand out than others is the great Harryhausen and his wonderful monsters, It’s worth checking out just for that alone.
Video
This film is presented in a ratio of 1.78:1, this anamorphic widescreen transfer is quite good, however it does have some inherent flaws but this can be attributed mostly to the special effects matte shots. All of the footage with humans in the frame and no effects are of excellent quality, the image is sharp, colours well rendered especially skin tines, the black levels are adequate and shadow detail does suffer a bit but is generally quite good for a film of this age. Whenever we have special effects shots in the scene, that's where the image's flaws appear. The animation process used for this film is called "Dynamation" these stop-motion animations are married to the live action footage by matting the two together and painting the frame to hide the fact that these are essentially two elements joined into one to sell the shot to the viewer. Because of the matte process these scenes come out looking fuzzy, lacking detail, are slightly out of focus, and include a decent amount of film grain, dirt and the odd scratch. These flaws are not solely the fault of the transfer but are a victim of the effects technology of the time.
Audio
This film includes soundtracks in English, French and German Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono, for the purposes of this review I chose to view the film with its English soundtrack. Although the dialogue is clear the track lacks any dynamic range, the music and sound effects come out sounding tinny, despite this flaw the soundtrack has very few technical flaws, the track is distortion free, drop outs, pops and hissing cannot be detected, which is excellent considering the film's age. This DVD also includes subtitles in English, French, German, Icelandic, Portuguese, Hungarian and Swedish.
Extras
The featurette entitled Return to the Valley is an 8-minute piece that seems like it has been lifted from a longer documentary, this featurette takes a look at the then astonishing special effects of the film and of Ray Harryhausen. We have some brief interview snippets from Harryhausen and various Industrial Light and Magic effects personnel as they talk about how these effects inspired them as well as using The Valley of Gwangi as a reference for the effects and shots used in Jurassic Park. Although too short it's a rather interesting featurette. Additionally we also have a trailer for the film, plus bonus trailers for The Black Scorpion, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and Clash Of The Titans. This DVD also features a hidden Easter egg, to find this go into the Special Features menu and highlight the Return to the Valley featurette and go right to highlight the dinosaur head, press enter to see a short 1 minute 4 second clip entitled Gwangi and Vanessa this is an interview segment with Harryhausen talking about how his daughter took a liking to the Gwangi model he made for the film.
Overall
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