a review of

#97 (April 7/30) (This review is for the MST3K version, currently on Netflix) This one's a little bit of an endurance run, since (much like the preceding episode, "Avalanche") it delays the reveal of its titular beast until more than 2/3 of the way in. The bulk of the runtime is mostly given over to the romantic rivalry between the gringo cowpoke and the Mexican rancher over the lovely senorita, and the horrifically-resolved "comic relief" subplot with Pancho and Panchito. There is literally nothing about the latter two characters that is not heartbreakingly sad, but thanks to the funhouse mirror of 1950s racism, their story is warped into a light-hearted sideline to Guy Madison wooing a pretty girl. Coming in a distant third to these two plotlines is the Beast itself, rendered in shockingly unconvincing fashion as a stop-motion dinosaur, with a crazily-animated tongue that totally undercuts whatever realism was being attained by the rest of the effect. It cannot be stressed how much this creature DOES NOT MATTER to the entire rest of the film, but the entire last 20 minutes are devoted to it anyway. The riffing and sketches for this episode are solid (particularly the closing bit with My Dinner With Andre reimagined as a killer-dino film) even if the movie itself isn't quite an all-timer.