*For the next week or so, I’m going to add a random film the great Ray Harryhausen worked on. The legendary special effects MASTER passed away on May 7, 2013 at age 92 in London and yes, the film world owes him more than they can ever repay…

1969’s The Valley of Gwangi is a bit of a bittersweet classic for many fans of Harryhausen’s work. By this time, stop motion animated fantasy films weren’t drawing the audiences they did ten years earlier, so this film didn’t get the promotion it deserved. It wasn’t the first cowboy meets dinosaur flick at all – that honor goes to 1956’s The Beast of Hollow Mountain, produced by Harryhausen’s mentor, Willis O’Brien.

While that older film’s effects weren’t done by O’Brien (and despite a few cool scenes, it showed), Harryhausen’s vision for the project (which O’Brien had wanted to do for decades) links the two masters together thanks to some incredible animation that ended up being the final dinosaur film he worked on in his career…

It’s a pretty cool flick that ties together the Old West, dinosaurs, a bit of border crossing into Mexico and a hidden valley where prehistoric life just so happens to be thriving. It’s pretty cool to see a low-tech approach to capturing the film’s “Gwangi”, an Allosaurus (which isn’t exactly realistically modeled after an actual one, but you won’t care at all) that’s caught and used like King Kong in a traveling show that you KNOW is going to end up in big trouble. Although it’s only an hour and thirty-six minutes long, the film is pretty packed with effects big and small. Harryhausen spent nearly a year working on the stop motion effects and for the most part, you’re getting some of his best work of the decade.

The dinosaur-roping sequence is the killer scene here and it’s such an influential slice of history that Steven Spielberg paid homage to it in the second Jurassic Park film with a smaller, digitally animated dino getting roped up and getting the best of some hunters in one very amusing scene. There are a few annoying actors in Gwangi, but like a few of the other films where his effects steal the show, Harryhausen’s “Dynamation” creatures make you forget all about some bad dubbing or an annoying kid actor who should have been eaten by a dinosaur or lion or other well-animated animal.

While this one holds up quite well on its own for many of Harryhausen’s fans (and it’s a great flick to introduce younger kids to his work), I actually once saw it at a friend’s place teamed up with (of all things) The Wild Bunch, Warner Bros./Seven Art’s bigger and more famous (and a hell of a lot more controversial) western of that year. THAT was quite a shift in tone, but thankfully, Peckinpah’s flick came first. Gwangi was a total upper compared to that great, depressing classic even if the big scaly dope burned up at the end… yeah, that’s a spoiler, but what, you were expecting a happy ending?