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Lizards in Movies
 
The Rawhide Terror (1934)
 
Spoiler Alert !

Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.
 
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  Deep Red  
This is a weird, dark, 1930s B-movie Western. It's on Amazon Prime, but it is also featured on a DVD of four weird Westerns called "Creepy Cowboys." It fits that description. And there's a Gila Monster in it, which is the reason I watched it.

A dozen white men disguised as Indians kill a man and his wife and steal all their gold but leave their two young boys alive. Ten years later one of the boys is the Sheriff and the other is a crazy killer who wears a rawhide mask and is called "The Rawhide Terror." He's also called "The Rawhide Killer," and "The Rawhide Devil," as if they hadn't figured out the movie's title yet when the dialogue was written. The masked killer's goal is to kill all twelve of the men who killed his parents, so you sympathize with him even though he's a homicidal maniac.

When we first see The Rawhide Terror, he is holding a Gila Monster that is suspended by rawhide strips tied to each end of the lizard. With a wild look in his eyes he says: "You're a demon, ha? You're the most poisonous animal of the desert. Your victims die a slow death." Then he laughs an evil laugh and puts the lizard down, twisting it onto its side with the strings. I was hoping that we'd see him use the lizard later in his revenge killing, but no such luck. It's not clear exactly what he was doing with the lizard, but he was probably torturing it or killing it to show us how crazy and how fearless he is that he can conquer such a deadly animal.

The Gila Monster looks like a real one, but it does not move at all, so it might have been dead or maybe chilled down to make it inactive before its use in the scene.