Rocketship X-M (1950) – Review

In 1950 two science fiction films sent cinemagoers venturing off into space, one was George Pal’s seminal classic Destination Moon and the other being Kurt Neumann’s Rocketship X-M, but where George Pal’s film was attempting to depict a nuts and bolts representation of a trip to the Moon, with at least some attempt at scientific accuracy, Neumann, on the other hand, was more concerned with beating Pal’s film into theatres than in being anything approaching a realistic look at space travel.

George Pal's high-profile release of Destination Moon was, at the time, heralded to the press as “Two years in the making” with a budget of $500,000 dollars, that's roughly $6,00,000 in today's dollars, and the American people were dying to get a peek at this promised science-fiction spectacular, unfortunately, they’d have to wait just a little longer. This was good news for Lippert Pictures as these production delays on Destination Moon allowed producers Robert L. Lippert and Kurt Neumann to put together their own rival space project in a matter of 18 days on a budget of just $94,000 dollars, which is impressive in anyone’s book, and thus Rocketship X-M landed in theatres twenty-five days before George Pal’s film was released.

 

The first Space Race was, in fact, not against the Commies but rival studios.

The premise of Rocketship X-M was much like that of Destination Moon in that it dealt with a small group of intrepid explorers planning a trip to the Moon, but unlike the George Pal film, this crew would include a woman! Shocking, I know. The crew of RX-M consisted of Dr. Karl Eckstrom (John Emery), physicist and designer of the RX-M and Dr. Lisa Van Horn (Osa Massen), who came up with the rocket fuel formula that they’d be using on this flight, next we have pilot Colonel Floyd Graham (Lloyd Bridges) and astronomer and navigator Harry Chamberlain (Hugh O'Brian) and finally, there is flight engineer Major William Corrigan (Noah Beery Jr.) who would be providing the film’s comic relief. The idea of a woman being part of this mission is handled with all the subtly of drunken frat boy and the first example of this comes when a reporter comments on the attractiveness of Lisa Van Horn and Graham responds, “If you don’t look like a chemical formula you haven’t a chance.” And how bad does this stuff get?  Well, let’s just say that if the Rocketship had been powered by testosterone they wouldn’t have had those pesky fuel issues later on.

 

“I’m 90% male ego with the other 10% being pure flatulence.”

We do get one ray of hope that this movie won’t be a complete sexist piece crap when the next reporter asks “Is there a specific reason why one member of the crew should be a woman?” and Eckstrom replies “The reason Miss Van Horn is making this trip is because of her pioneering research with monoatomic hydrogen which enabled her to develop the first rocket fuel powerful and concentrated enough to make this flight possible.” Well, I hope she enjoyed that one brief moment of praise and acknowledgement because it will be her last because it's all downhill from there. Once the ship gets into space one problem after another arises, first they are almost hit by their own jettisoned first-stage rocket booster, then a meteoroid storm threatens to destroy them – which Floyd calls "meteorites" despite that being the term for when it is travelling through the atmosphere and hitting the ground not while in space – but things really get tense when the engines inexplicably stop.

 

"Didn't anyone check to see if we'd filled up before we left?"

This leads to one of the most painful moments in the film when Lisa and Eckstrom argue over each of their own solutions to the fuel ratio problem. When she comes up with a different result than Eckstrom and he states “I have to say that you have made an error and to discard your figures. I'm sorry” and he insists they go with his work, but she doesn’t take this lying down and points out “You can't be arbitrary about imposing your will when these people's lives are at stake, don't you realize that?” He then excuses her for becoming too emotional and when she apologizes, for no reason that I can see, he responds with this classic line “For what, for momentarily being a woman? It's completely understandable, Miss Van Horn.”

 

I’d like to think she is now plotting to kill him in his sleep.

Not only is her worth as a scientist belittled by her colleague she also has to constantly deal with Floyd’s caveman mentality about where a woman in society truly belongs, as personified by this following exchange. While on route to the Moon Floyd asks her “I've been wondering, how did a girl like you get mixed up in a thing like this in the first place” so she, in turn, asks “I suppose you think that women should only cook and sew and bear children?” which Floyd responds with the jaw-droppingly terrible line “Isn’t that enough?” Thank god they end up flying widely out of control and ending up on Mars because any more of that and I’d have felt obligated to punch myself in the groin. And why exactly did the ship careen past the Moon into deep space, could it be because Professor Asshat was wrong? The screenplay doesn’t lay the blame at Eckstrom’s feet but it’s clear to me that this mission was doomed by misplaced male arrogance.

 

“Quick, someone kill the screenwriter before the truth gets out.”

It's at this point when things get a little more visually interesting as the sequences on Mars were tinted red so as to impart a sense of the alien Red Planet into this otherwise black-and-white film, and I must say, it was a rather effective technique and a nice cost-cutting method to trump the more lavish production values of George Pal’s film and Death Valley National Park was a more than an adequate location to portray the barren Martian landscape, but what really stands out is the sequence showing the consequences of atomic war on Mars, with ruined buildings poking out of irradiated sands.  It should be notated that this was one of the first times a movie had shown the dangers of atomic war and later we get Eckstrom waxing on poetically that their discovery here could prevent the same fate befalling mankind, but I doubt even the most obtuse person in the 50s thought that nuclear war was ever a good idea.

 

“I’m not saying let's build a summer home here but I’ve seen worse."

Stray Observations:

• In this outing the Brooklyn stereotype is substituted for that of a Texan and it does not improve the comedy all that much.
• They hold a press conference a mere twelve minutes before launch and it is there that they announce that their plan is to go to the Moon, that’s what I call a last-minute bombshell.
• This is a rare 50s space adventure film that utilizes the idea of a multi-stage rocket but then they screw it up by having the jettisoned section still firing its rockets and almost running into them.
• Weightlessness appears to only affect random objects and not people, this film doesn’t even bother to provide us with those silly magnetic boots.
• Eckstrom states they’d use less fuel landing on a planet with atmosphere than they would be landing on an arid moon, of course, in reality, this is quite the opposite. Are we sure this guy is an actual scientist?
• When leaving their ship the crew members are outfitted with overalls and aviator's leather jackets which would not be ideal for wandering around a hostile planet like Mars.

 

Question: Why exactly did they bring a rifle on a planned trip to the Moon?

For its limited budget, Kurt Neumann’s Rocketship X-M looks surprisingly well, I actually find the interior of the Rocketship to be better than what we see in Destination Moon, but the blatant sexism and overall treatment of Dr. Lisa Van Horn was beyond the pale terrible and every cringe-inducing line of dialogue looked to be an attempt to set the Woman’s Movement back a generation, yet when the film does eventually get to Mars and our heroes are fleeing the primitive Martian descendants, who somehow survived their atomic holocaust and prove that bringing guns into space is a good idea, the movie steps into the silly space adventure tropes of the 50s which one can’t help but enjoy and laugh at. Overall, this is a time capsule as to how media was portraying the battle of the sexes at the time and it was clear whose side Hollywood was on.
 

Spoiler Warning: What is truly surprising is that no one survives this film. Eckstrom and Corrigan are killed by the Martian savages while the rest of the crew perish when their powerless ship, which had predictably run out of fuel, crashes into Nova Scotia, which is a rather dark and unexpected ending to a movie about the excitement of space travel.

Destination Moon (1950) – Review

It was back in 1902 when Georges Méliès adapted Jules Verne’s novel "From the Earth to the Moon" to the big screen for his short film A Trip to the Moon that the idea of bringing science fiction works of literary greats had truly begun – though I’m betting the "Man in the Moon" getting hit in the literal eye with a space capsule wasn’t quite what Verne had envisioned – and with advances in cinema technology filmmakers were able to truly explore that Final Frontier. Enter legendary producer George Pal who would team up with sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein to create the first attempt at a practical and scientifically based journey to the Moon.

Throughout the 30s and 40s when it came to science fiction stories dealing with space travel audiences had to settle for the likes of the Flash Gordon serials for otherworldly adventures, which were a lot of fun but not all that realistic, but in the 1950s the public interest in space travel and new technologies had grown to such heights that Hollywood was quick to take notice and would begin what is known as the golden age of science fiction films. With Destination Moon the filmmakers took an interesting take on the “Space Race” by having a group of patriotic U.S. industrialists step up to fund a space program after government funding collapsed due to sabotage that caused a rocket test to fail, of course, five years after this movie premiered the real Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union would begin in earnest, but what is weird is that in the film space enthusiast General Thayer (Tom Powers) points out to potential investors that “The first country that can use the Moon for the launching of missiles...will control the Earth” and sure, that sounds bad and very scary but in retrospect, we know that the Moon never became a launching point for missiles, at least not that I’m aware of, but beating the Soviets into space was a big deal at the time so the idea of the United States government not wanting to be involved because of the expense was a bit ridiculous.  Even a cartoon bird could understand that.

Trivia: George Pal and animation legend Walter Lantz were good friends and thus Pal tried to include Woody Woodpecker in all his films and with Destination Moon that cameo came in the form of a cartoon that was used to help sell the idea of space travel to investors. Funnily enough, later that very cartoon was updated and used by NASA to explain space travel to the public, how cool is that?

As a science-fiction entry that dealt with space travel Destination Moon was rather unique as it didn’t rely on alien encounters such as giant spiders on the Moon or a lost civilization to capture its viewer's imagination, instead, it focused on not only the challenges of creating a functional rocket ship but the dangers such a journey into space would actually entail. Who needs Ming the Merciless for drama when stepping outside your ship could kill just as easily? The film isn’t very plot-heavy as it simply follows a small group of men who try and pull off this amazing achievement, first, we have rocket designer Dr. Charles Cargraves (Warner Anderson) and his pal General Thayer, who though worried about the Commies the Soviet Union is never mentioned by name, and then we have aircraft magnate Jim Barnes (John Archer) who becomes the rallying point for all the other U.S. industrialists.

 

“Just think of all the casinos and hotels we can build on the moon.”

The project is soon threatened by manufactured public opinion over the perceived danger of radiation surrounding the rocket, such negative propaganda the film hints could be originating from a foreign power, and thus our intrepid space travellers must quickly move up their launch date from months away to mere hours. To complicate things even further the expedition's radar and radio operator (Ted Warde) is suddenly sent to the hospital with appendicitis – there is no mention if this was somehow how also caused by the Commies – and so Barnes and Cargraves have to convince a very skeptical Brooklynn born Joe Sweeney (Dick Wesson), who helped install all that equipment, to make the trip with them. Needless to say, this Brooklynite isn’t too keen on the idea but is eventually convinced to tag along, mostly because he doesn’t believe the rocket will ever lift off at all, and his comic shenanigans provide all of the film’s comedic moments, and I use “comedic” in the broadest sense of the word. What follows is some pretty thrilling stuff and George Pal, along with director Irving Pichel, do a great job at illustrating not only the dangers of space travel but the excitement of such a venture, and as this was the early 50s we can’t expect them to be all that scientifically accurate but it’s clear that they were doing the best to create a somewhat realistic take on space travel with the information they had at the time.

Note: The idea of a single-stage rocket launching from Earth, landing on the Moon and then safely returning to Earth was something aerospace engineers like Wernher von Braun believed for years.

Stray Observations:

• This film began the long-standing tradition of having one comic relief crew member aboard the ship coming from either Brooklyn or Texas.
• They decide to construct the ship out of titanium, due to it being a lighter metal, but this would negate the ability to later use their magnetic boots as titanium is non-magnetic.
• The ship’s propulsion is furnished through a nuclear reactor, which produces extremely high-pressure steam, but then why do we see sparks and flames during lift-off and not steam?
• When they go out to fix the ship’s frozen antennae one of the crewmembers has to be rescued from drifting away off into space but after he’s saved we don’t find out how the antennae got fixed. Did kindly space elves finish the job?
• In Robert Heinlein's original shorty story three teenage boys find a hidden Nazi base on the Moon but that element was clearly abandoned in the earlier scriptwriting stage. *sigh* Am I wrong for wishing the Brooklyn guy had a chance to punch a Nazi?
• The crew are outfitted with brightly coloured spacesuits so that they won’t get lost on the drab surface of the moon, but how lost could you get on a barren landscape?

 

“Okay guys, don’t forget where we parked.”

One of the most notable aspects of Destination Moon is the absence of women, aside from the brief appearance of Cargrave’s wife women are not featured in this film and are certainly not part of this mission to the Moon which, sadly, was fairly accurate as NASA didn’t put a woman into space until the mid-80s.  On the plus side, the lack of women in this film is a little better than when women did appear in science fiction films as throughout the 50s and 60s women were mostly around to bring the men coffee or scream hysterically at creepy aliens.  Robert Heinlein’s next feature film Project Moonbase would simply be littered with the kind of sexism that would plague the genre for decades to come, so their absence here is kind of a mixed blessing. Setting aside the film's lack of a sexual balanced script it should be noted that Destination Moon was also the first Technicolor expedition into space and George Pal and company did a bang-up job in their attempt at making a serious and scientifically accurate film and it looks fantastic, sure, viewed today some elements will seem rather quaint if not outright comical but that shouldn’t negate the importance of this film nor its place in science fiction history, without a film like Destination Moon would he have gotten Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Note: This film used matte paintings by noted astronomical artist Chesley Bonestell and his panoramic views of the lunar landscape are simply gorgeous and for these alone, this is a movie worth checking out.

Straight Outta Nowhere: Scooby-Doo! Meets Courage the Cowardly Dog (2021) – Review

Scooby-Doo and guest stars go together like peanut butter and jelly as is pairing the Scooby gang with a variety of celebrities icons, which dates back to 1972 and The New Scooby-Doo Movies and this concept continue to this day with Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? but with Straight Outta Nowhere our favourite Great Dane finds himself paired, for the first time, with a like-minded canine in the form of Courage the Cowardly Dog, who was the star of his own dark and often surreal horror cartoon.

This crossover mystery begins as Scooby gang are wrapping up the current case, an evil bank-robbing clown but they don’t quite get to close the case as Scooby (Frank Welker) is suddenly overcome by a strange sensation caused by something only he can hear, this results in Scooby racing off to parts unknown with his panicked friends in hot pursuit.  This leads our group of intrepid mystery solvers to the town of Nowhere and a truly bizarre mystery. Those not familiar with Cartoon Network’s Courage the Cowardly Dog should know that the town of Nowhere is a hotbed of weird activities and Courage (Marty Grabstein) and his owners, the sweet and good-natured Muriel Bagge (Thea White) and her crotchety husband Eustace Bagge (Jeff Bergman), frequently encounter a variety of villains such as aliens, demons, mad scientists, zombies, vampires and other such perils involving the paranormal or supernatural, and for this particular adventure, the problem stems from a swarm of giant cicadas, led by an even larger Queen Cicada, that seem to be infesting the area around the Bagge homestead.

 

Unfortunately, ignoring such pests will never be an option for these guys.

Though the whole Scooby gang are on deck to solve this mystery, with Velma (Kate Micucci) providing integral research to uncover the truth, but along with Fred (Frank Welker) and Daphne (Grey Griffin) she is mostly on the sidelines here as it’s mostly Shaggy (Matthew Lillard), Courage and Scooby who are front and centre for the bulk of this direct-to-video outing. That this story takes place in the town of Nowhere skews the mystery more into the realm of the bizarre and unusual, there will be no unmasking of Confederate ghosts or real estate scams being uncovered in this movie because even though the movie does end with an unmasking it’s of the sort that fans of Courage the Cowardly Dog will be more accustomed to rather than that Scooby-Doo fans. But what fans of both shows can appreciate is that this is another great looking film from Warner Bros. Animation and the blend of traditional Scooby-Doo designs with that of the more surreal and stylistic type of animation found in Courage the Cowardly Dog makes this entry a visual feast, and when our heroes encounter a “Dark Matter Meteorite,” one that has reality-altering properties, it’s the viewers who will be in for a real treat.

 

This is the kind of altered reality I can get behind.

Stray Observations:

• The movie starts with a cold open which finds the gang after they have apprehended a clown that looks a little like Pennywise from Stephen King’s IT.
• Eustace Bagge calls the Scooby gang “Meddling kids” thus making him the first non-criminal to make that accusation.
• Fred, Velma, Daphne and Shaggy all fail to see Scooby and Courage fighting a giant hairy monster in the sink despite the encounter taking place mere feet away and right in front of them. Did the gang suddenly become blind or have they become too blasé when it comes to monsters?
• Over the last little while Fred has become more and more obsessed with the Mystery Machine yet somehow Daphne was able to install a nitrous booster without him noticing.
• When the name “Frau Glockenspiel” is uttered lightning flashes and a hear a horse whinny, which was a nice nod to Frau Blücher’s character from Young Frankenstein.
• While stumbling across an underground chamber the gang is caught in an anti-gravity field but when they decide to leave, they simply float down to the ground, but who cut off that ant-gravity field?
• The gang receives a dinner invite from the Mayor of Nowhere but when they arrive, he denies sending it, but as to who or why this invitation was sent is never explained because not even the Scooby gang knew they were coming to the town of Nowhere.

 

At what point should the Scooby gang not even think of entering a place like this?

A nice little element introduced into this movie is the idea of Shaggy and Scooby using a “Self-Help” ap on their phone in an attempt to end their constant cowardice and when it informs them “Courage isn’t the absence of fear, true courage is taking action in the face of fear” it’s a nice reveal that for over five decades of mystery and terror these two have never failed to return for more, that is real courage. If that doesn’t make them the bravest pair in the world I don’t what does and then with the teaming up with Courage the Cowardly Dog you’ve got a match made in heaven as this trio plays off each other perfectly.

 

Friends who scare together care together.

Now, there isn’t really a straightforward mystery to be found in Straight Outta Nowhere as the story is more in the wheelhouse of the bizarre adventures found in episodes of Courage the Cowardly Dog rather than that of Scooby-Doo and the gang, in fact, the reveal at the end of this movie though fun and clever will certainly make more of an impact with fans of Courage the Cowardly than that of people who have not seen that show, yet people who have not seen even a minute of that Cartoon Network series will still get a kick out of this movie because this outing is simply chock full of the bizarre inventiveness that one could expect from this pairing and the supernatural-type misadventure that follow. Basically, what we find ourselves facing here is a lot more entertaining than the typical “Guy in a Mask” scenario that has been the staple of the Scooby-Doo franchise for decades, which had but a few diverging moments where “The monsters are real” to keep fans on their toes, and the completely out-of-this-world encounters the Scooby gang must face is nothing short of insane and completely hilarious.

 

Daphne fighting a monster chair is but one of many great moments.

It should be noted that Straight Outta Nowhere was originally intended to be just a regular episode of Guess Who Scooby-Doo? but clearly, writer Mike Ryan and the people at Warner Bros. Animation realized such a team-up was worthy of so much more than a quick twenty-minute mystery and the proof is in the pudding as this is not only one of the best Scooby-Doo adventures it’s easily one of the more original and bizarre outings the franchise has offered in years. So, if you are either a fan of Scooby-Doo or Courage the Cowardly Dog do yourself a favour and check this one out.

 Question: This team-up with Courage the Cowardly Dog worked so well I wonder if at some point in the future we could get Mystery Incorporated visiting Gravity Falls?

The Crater Lake Monster (1977) – Review

The idea of a Loch Ness type monster inhabiting a lake in Northern California is certainly an interesting premise but an interesting premise will only get you so far and as often is the case it will at least require a modicum of a decent budget to correctly pull off but with The Crater Lake Monster Crown International Pictures had no money and no idea what they were doing, possibly due to a complete lack of understanding of the basic fundamentals of filmmaking, and thus the resulting end product was as bad as it was cheap looking.

Note: The poster boasts “A beast more frightening than your most terrifying nightmares!” yet not only is this movie not frightening in the least but the creature on the poster does not even remotely resemble the plesiosaurus that appears in the movie.

The movie starts with paleontologist Dan Turner (Richard Garrison) and his girlfriend Susan Patterson (Kacey Cobb) showing off a startling discovery to their friend Richard 'Doc' Calkins (Bob Hyman) that of cave paintings depicting people fighting off a Plesiosaurus, despite the fact that millions of years are supposed to separate mankind from these giant reptiles. Unfortunately for them, a flaming meteorite crashes into the nearby lake resulting in a cave-in that destroys the cave system and the drawings and basically rains on everyone's parade. The next day Sheriff Steve Hanson (Richard Cardella) agrees to take the three scientists out on the lake to search for the meteorite only to discover that the heat from this space rock has resulted in the entire lake becoming approximately ninety degrees warmer than normal which, apparently, is the right temperature to awaken a Plesiosaurus from a centuries-old slumber.

 

It rouses itself and decides to visit the Ponderosa for dinner.

The increased water temperature not only caused a long-dormant Plesiosaurus egg to hatch but also to reach full monstrous maturity in record time, to which it then quickly proceeded to munch on some tourists, now, one would assume the primary protagonists of the film would be the sheriff and the two paleontologists but you’d be wrong as the film spends the bulk of its running time with two local idiots, Arnie Chabot (Glen Roberts) and Mitch Kowalski (Mark Siegel), whose attempts at starting a boat rental business leads to several people having disastrous encounters with the monster and to say these two are the film’s “comic relief” is being way too generous as every moment spent with them would make an hour at the dentist seem like a pleasant reprieve by comparison.

 

These two yahoos are an affront to comedy and deserve to be eaten.

Nothing remotely resembling a plot unfolds during the film’s tedious 83-minute running time and it’s all made worse by a bizarre subplot concerning a liquor store holdup man, who kills the clerk and a poor hapless patron, before later getting in a high-speed car chase with the Sheriff that results in the crook/murderer driving his car off a cliff but then after a bit of a foot chase, during which the Sheriff shoots the asshole in the leg, the killer is then eaten by the monster. That is one overly complicated set-up for just some random kill by the title creature, it’s one thing to have a character come to a kind of karmic end but this whole bit with the liquor store robbery has the appearance of something that had drifted in from a completely different movie, and we still have a half-hour to go before the end credits roll.

 

Who thought a crazed gunman was needed in this particular monster movie?

Stray Observations:

• Dr. Calkins tells Sheriff Hanon that to a paleontologist finding a meteorite is better than “Finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow” but paleontology is "the study of ancient life" so they wouldn’t be all that thrilled about finding a space rock, well, unless it woke up a dinosaur that is.
• The first victim of the Plesiosaurus is killed when the creature comes ashore to eat some poor sap which is odd as this particular marine animal was definitely not amphibious by nature so anybody twenty feet inland should have been safe.
• The Sheriff describes the creature as looking like an alligator but with flippers instead of feat, seriously, that’s the impression he got seeing that thing? Wouldn’t your first reaction to seeing that monster be something more along the lines of “It was a fucking dinosaur!” and not that it was an alligator as big as a house?
• Dan Turner repeatedly refers to the plesiosaur as being a dinosaur but they are actually from completely separate orders of animals, which being as a paleontologist Turner should have known, and thus it puts credentials into question.
• Not since the epic steam shovel versus Tyrannosaurus Rex in Dinosaurus have we seen such an epic battle than with this one of Plesiosaurus versus bulldozer.

 

“Hey dude, back off, I was just looking for the lake.”

This could have been a fun Jaws rip-off, with a paleontologist trying to convince the local authorities that somehow a prehistoric creature had taken up residents in their lake, but instead, we get the “Hillbilly Comedy Hour” whose antics gets more painful by each passing minute, then there’s the fact that film provides no real decent monster attacks to break up the tedium and add to all that the issue of being saddled with a cast of actors who wouldn’t pass muster at your local community theatre, which just adds insult to injury. As to the creature itself, the life-size prop used to depict the creature in the water more closely resembles that of a giant rubber novelty turd floating in the lake than it does a Plesiosaurus head, and while the stop-motion animated model was fairly decent all I could think of was that it deserved to be in a much better movie than this one.

 

Smokey and the Plesiosaur.

Unfortunately, bad acting and a hackneyed script were not the only things plaguing this production as Crown International completely screwed up the financing and thus no money could be spent on post-production, thus some poor hack was given the job to edit the film while many of the scenes that were shot day-for-night were not tinted and thus people were saying stuff like “Moonlight on a gorgeous lake, so beautiful and peaceful under the stars” while it was clearly daytime. Basically, every moment of this film is an exhibition of cinematic embarrassment.  There are many fun low-budget monster films out there but this is not one of them as pacing is beyond sluggish and the characters range from dull to outright annoying. The Crater Lake Monster is a perfect example of how not to do a monster movie and that even if you don’t have the money to fully realize your vision at least get a script together that makes at least a lick of sense.
 

Science Note: Crater Lake was formed by the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Mazama, less than 8,000 years ago, so it would be impossible for 65-million-year old plesiosaur eggs, fossilized or otherwise, to be present on the lake floor.

Unknown Island (1948) – Review

If you happen to have an “adventure seeker” for a friend you have my sympathy because this can lead to all kinds of problems, such as them never shutting up about their last adventure, but worst of all is the possibility that they will somehow manage to get you to go along on one of these so-called adventures, which will more than likely end badly. Now, in the case of Unknown Island, this dilemma is made trickier by the adventurer in question dragging along his poor fiancé to an uncharted island for what must be the worst pre-honeymoon in history.

Who exactly would bring their fiancé on a trip to an uncharted island that is believed to be inhabited by dinosaurs? This question is the plot of Unknown Island which kicks off when Ted Osborne (Phillip Reed) brings his fiancée Carole (Virginia Grey) to a local watering hole in Singapore, a dive populated by your basic riffraff and criminals, and they are there to find Captain Tarnowski (Barton MacLane) a gruff and no-nonsense seaman who they hope will allow them to charter his ship in their search of a “Dinosaur Island” that Ted claims to have seen while a pilot during WWII. Tarnowski is initially reticent to take on such a charter, as it sounds like a plan by a lunatic, but when Osborne shows him a photo that could actually be a dinosaur he changes his tune, that, and the fact that Osborne’s story jibes with that of John Fairbanks (Richard Denning) a man who claims to have been shipwrecked on an island full of prehistoric beasts.

 

"Have you heard of Kong?"

Unfortunately, Fairbanks isn’t interested in returning to the island where he witnessed his friends being torn apart by prehistoric monsters, stating that “I'd blow my brains out first before I'd go back to that island” but this doesn’t’ deter Tarnowski who just orders his First Mate (Dick Wessel) to shanghai the poor man and set sail the next night. Sure, bringing along a man who is using alcohol to wipe out the terrors he witnessed may seem like a bad idea, but things get even worse as we discover that Tarnowski is keeping their destination secret from the crew, a superstitious lot of natives and who make up the bulk of the crew, and once they find out they immediately decide that mutiny is a better option then visiting a taboo island inhabited by forbidden beasts, citing such rhetoric as “If we die, we must see the blood of our master” but the mutiny is quickly quelled by Tarnowski, who actually gives them back their knives stating, “If they try that again they’ll be shark bait for they’re a day older.”  Which one has to admit is rather badass, if a bit pyscotic.

 

Shark bait or dinosaur bait, basically these guys are screwed.

The only real sensible person in the group turns out to be Fairbanks, who now sober becomes the voice of reason and is more interested in seeing the bastard Tarnowski get what’s coming to him as he informs the captain that “I’ve changed my mind, I think I’ll go along, I want to hear you when you start screaming.” When they eventually spot the island our brave band of “heroes” row ashore and quickly set up camp, despite seeing with their own eyes that dinosaurs such as Brontosaurus, Dimetrodon and Tyrannosaurus Rex are roaming freely all over the island. Needless to say, things do not go well for the group as we’ve got Osborne focusing on the fame and fortune he’ll achieve with photographic proof of living dinosaurs, the fact that this expedition was funded by his fiancé could be a factor as to why he becomes so obsessed with making a name for himself, and with Tarnowski going mad with jungle fever and putting everyone’s life in jeopardy with his insane desire to capture one of these prehistoric monsters alive things get worse and worse, oh, and he also tries to sexual assault poor Carole.

 

That he meets his end via a Giant Sloth is a bit of poetic justice.

Stray Observations:

• The island is described as ten miles square which isn’t big enough to support much in the way of animal life let alone creatures as large as dinosaurs.
• As proof that there is an island full of dinosaurs Osborne shows Captain Tarnowski a photo he took from his plane but the picture he displays looks like a child simply drew a T-Rex with a crayon on top of a photograph.
• Actor Richard Denning knows enough to avoid monsters having starred in The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Black Scorpion.
• Ray "Crash" Corrigan plays the Giant Sloth in this movie which was only slight a departure from playing a gorilla in Tarzan and His Mate and an "orangopoid" in the first Flash Gordon serial.
• This movie does get bonus points for not gluing fins to the back of some poor iguana to make a dinosaur, the puppets and dino-suites they created may have looked a bit goofy but at least it wasn’t animal cruelty.

 

This dinosaur comes SPCA-approved.

The dinosaurs on display in Unknown Island may have been goofy looking but the screenplay by Robert T. Shannon has a collection of well-rounded characters that you rarely find in films of this calibre, we’ve got adventure-seeker Ted Osborne who is more interested in proving dinosaurs exist “In the name of science” while not caring who dies in the process, including his fiancé who he doesn’t even seem all that concerned about when she is kidnapped by the crazed Captain, as for Captain Tarnowski himself, well he goes from being simply a two-fisted bar fighter and a man who can easily break up a mutiny, to a sexual predator who becomes obsessed with bringing back alive one of the dinosaurs, and finally we have John Fairbanks as the one pragmatic man in the cast, he had no desire to go to the island in the first place and once there is all about getting Carole out of danger. The only real weak character in the cast is that of Carole herself who is nothing more than your typical damsel in distress,  that she kills a dinosaur is one of the most surprising moments in the script and she does provide the film with a bit of romance to help pad out its meagre 72-minute running time, but it’s as predictable as one might expect.

 

Who can't love a film with these guys lumbering around?

Basically, Unknown Island was a well-crafted “lost world” movie that is not only populated by a variety of cool if silly looking dinosaurs it also has a cast of characters that are far beyond what you often find in a low-budget adventure film of this type, which goes to prove that even with little money a good script and can make up for a lot, and Shannon’s screenplay is ably aided by a talented cast of actors who all do excellent work here, with Barton MacLane and Richard Denning providing especially standout performances, and even the low-rent dinosaurs on display have their own special charm. If you are a fan of dinosaur movies this one is a fun adventure film that is worth hunting down and checking out.

Two Lost Worlds (1951) – Review

When it comes to bringing dinosaurs out of prehistory and into the modern age the most common venue for filmmakers was for the protagonists to find themselves stuck in some form of “Lost World” where dinosaurs somehow survived by way of either being on a secluded plateau or in a valley that was cut off from the rest of the world, an idea first made popular by Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, but in 1951 an independent production company cobbled together a film with rather a lacklustre take on this particular premise.

The poster for the Sterling Productions of Two Lost Worlds depicts a couple of titanic dinosaurs battling it out while volcanic explosions erupt behind them but even though those events do, in fact, occur in the film it’s still a bit misleading as the story is more about a love triangle between two dudes and a girl and few nasty pirates than it is about a prehistoric lost world. The movie opens with an American clipper ship sailing to the East Indies when it is attacked by pirates and though they escape the ship's first mate Kirk Hamilton (James Arness) was wounded during the fight and Captain Tallman (Tom Monroe) decides that their best course of action would be to make port in Australia so that Hamilton’s splintered leg could receive proper medical attention. This is where the romance angle kicks in as Hamilton meets and falls in love with Elaine Jeffries (Kasey Rogers), the fiancée of sheep rancher Martin Shannon (Bill Kennedy), but this love triangle is interrupted by those self-same pirates that attacked the clipper ship earlier and have now decided to raid this Australian farming community. This results in the kidnapping of Elaine and her friend, Nancy Holden (Jane Harlan), and it’s up to our two male leads to set aside their differences and chase after the pirates and rescue the fair maidens.

 

“Commodore, are there any dinosaurs in that direction?”

When our heroes eventually catch up to the pirates we do get some pretty good swashbuckling action, with sailors and pirates swinging from the rigging as they battle for control while both ships catch fire around them, unfortunately for our heroes, the fire that is caused by the battle rages out of control and only a small group manage to escape via one of the ship’s longboats. It’s at this point that viewers who have been waiting for some dinosaurs will start getting their hopes up as our castaways find themselves marooned on an island inhabited by some prehistoric titans, well, maybe not what any of us would call prehistoric titans but more like two geckos with fins glued to their backs and made to fight each other for our amusement. What’s even more disappointing than this rather uninspiring dinosaur encounter is the fact that it’s not even original footage as it’s just stuff borrowed from the 1940s version One Million Years B.C. that starred Victor Mature and Lon Chaney Jr.

 

“Dear, I think those dinosaurs are more afraid of us than we are of them.”

Stray Observations:

• The Captain makes a big deal about his first mate wanting to chart a faster course through notoriously pirate-filled waters but then they are attacked even before reaching said waters, so what was the point of that debate?
• A large portion of the film takes place in Australia yet pretty much all the residents have American accents and by the 1820s the Australian accent we know of today had already started to develop.
• Shannon becomes jealous of Hamilton and tells Elaine he wants to announce their engagement right away, his reason being that “Since this Mister Hamilton has come into our lives you’ve changed, I hardly know you” but she had only met Hamilton for the first time that very morning, which means this must have been some massive change to be noticed so rapidly.
• The pirate captain dresses in a black cape and top hat and looks more like Snidely Whiplash than he does anything else.

 

“Are there any women around here for me to tie to railway tracks?”

Recycled dinosaur footage is the least of this film’s problems as its running time of a meagre 61 minutes allows no time for proper character development or story structure and thus the film relies on a narrator to do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to explaining the plot and the romance. The character of Elaine Jefferies comes across as a rather fickle damsel in distress who falls head-over-heels for this American sailor but then dismisses romantic intentions when she learns that it would mean leaving home and sailing off to America, but when her original suitor dies at the film’s conclusion she’s back in the meaty hands of James Arness, so I'm calling it, they should have left her to the volcano. The title of the film is actually more about the two separate worlds inhabited by our lovers while the “lost world” full of dinosaurs is nothing more than a detour to their eventual romantic finale.

 

“I think if we head in that direction we may find a plot.”

Director Norman Dawn didn’t have much to work with when helming Two Lost Worlds and I’m betting most of the budget was spent on that one cool sea battle and buying that dinosaur footage from United Artists but regardless of his limitation the end result was still nothing more than a shallow drama that was a bit of a genre mishmash and feels more like an extended chapter of a Republic serial than it does an actual movie. When the film does reach its climactic conclusion, with the island’s volcanic erupting because you can’t have a lost world movie without an erupting volcano, most viewers will have mentally checked out long ago and even the novelty of seeing an early career moment for James Arness isn’t worth the trouble. In conclusion, if you come across this film while surfing channels late at night keep surfing and maybe watch an infomercial instead.

 

"So this is the tale of our castaways. They're here for a long long time. They'll have to make the best of things, it's an uphill climb."

One Million B.C. (1940) – Review

When one thinks of classic movies that pit cavemen against dinosaurs the title that first comes to mind would normally be that of Hammer Film’s epic picture One Million Years B.C. but what many don’t realize is that film was actually a remake of an old Hal Roach Studios picture starring Victor Mature and Carol Landis, sadly, over time it has been overshadowed by the remake that featured Raquel Welch in a fur bikini, an accoutrement that became an iconic moment in cinema history, so today we will look back at One Million B.C. a film that came first but finished last.

The film begins with a modern-day prologue where we find a group of lost hikers seeking shelter refuge from a storm in a cave that just so happens to be inhabited by an anthropologist (Conrad Nagel), who at the urging of the group’s guide (Robert Kent) he interprets prehistoric carvings that tell the story of a young caveman and his star-crossed love affair with a cavewoman from a rival tribe. We are first introduced to Akhoba (Lon Chaney Jr.) the leader of the Rock Tribe who leads a hunting party with his son Tumak (Victor Mature) and it’s quickly made apparent that Akhoba is a cold-hearted bastard who leaves the injured to die and the weak and the old are on the bottom rung of his society, even his dogs get first dibs on food over women and children, but when Tumak defends his own portion of food from Akhoba he is forced out of the cave and into the path of an angry mastodon.

 

Prehistory was just full of animals with attitude.

The Mastodon knocks Tumak off a cliff and into the river below which then carries him downstream to the land of the Shell Tribe where he is discovered by the beautiful Loana (Carole Landis) and it is she who shows Tumak that life is not all about “survival of the fittest” as her tribe shares their food in an orderly fashion with the children, women and elderly being served first. Tumak is quite confused by the customs of the Shell Tribe but soon he comes to delight in helping the children get fruit out of the trees and he also earns the respect of the Shell Tribe by killing an Allosaurus that was trying to eat a little girl trapped in a tree, of course, things aren't completely idyllic as Shell Tribe member Ohtao (John Hubbard) is a bit jealous of Loana’s attraction to this newcomer and he’s also a bit prickly when it comes to Tumak wanting his spear, this leads to a brief fight between the two alpha males that results in Loana's father banishing Tumak. It’s at this point that Ohtao discovers that Loana’s feelings for Tumak were deeper than expected as she decides to leave with this gruff caveman, which is made more distressing by the fact that Tumak doesn’t seem to care if she comes along and basically ignores her for part of the journey.

 

“How do you like them apples?”

When watching One Million B.C. it should not be with the hope of finding any historical accuracy when it comes to Early Man but the film does at least try and show the evolution of society from one of “might makes right” to a more harmonious civilization, though when Loana is introduced to the Rock Tribe she’s almost like a Disney Princess who brings light and happiness to all around her and is probably not all that accurate as to how such a culture clash would occur. Then there is the issue of our heroes constantly on the run from a variety of “dinosaurs” despite the many millions of years that separate man from these prehistoric behemoths, but I guess conflicts with mastodons just weren’t enough for audiences, so the script had to be beefed up by some more interesting peril.

Note: Due to the process of forcing lizards with glued on appliances to fight each other the film was heavily edited in Britain because of their strict laws against animal cruelty and this film also caused the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) to ban many of the treatments of animals that occurred during the production.

Stray Observations:

• The mountain guide who stumbles upon the cave seems really surprised that Early Man once lived in such places, did he skip those classes in school or is he just an idiot?
• The anthropologist is baffled by the guide’s question about what the early cavemen looked like, responding “I don’t know. I never thought of it. Never seemed important to me what they looked like.” Which begs the question, “Are we sure this guy is an actual anthropologist and not just some nut living in a cave?” because I’m pretty sure that aspect of anthropology is kind of important.
• Tumak’s first kill is a baby Triceratops but why an herbivore would be wandering around a desert mountain landscape is never made clear.
• You’d think that after killing an Allosaurus and thus saving a young girl, the Shell Tribe could have at least made Tumak a spear of his own instead of being dicks about the whole thing.
• Loana teaches the Rock Tribe all about agriculture, but I doubt the land around their cave could support anything other than scrub brush and tumbleweeds.
• Aside from a man in a decent Allosaurus costume this film relied on dressing up animals to look like dinosaurs, which included a pig in a rubber Triceratops suit, a young elephant with fake tusks and fur made to look like a woolly mammoth, muskoxen, a Dimetrodon-like sail glued to the back of a baby alligator and a nine-banded armadillo with glued-on horns.

 

Beware the fearsome waddling terror of King Armadillo!

Like any decent prehistoric world film One Million B.C. includes a climatic volcano eruption that devastates the land and one must admit that the filmmakers manage to put together quite an impressive show of period special effects and thus it’s not at all that surprising footage from this film was filed away into a stock footage library where elements from it have since appeared in dozens of other movies and television shows over the years such as in Tarzan’s Desert Mystery, Two Lost Worlds, Godzilla Raids Again, King Dinosaur, Valley of the Dragons and many many more.

 

Hell hath no fury like a tabletop diorama.

That legendary director D.W. Griffith was briefly attached to produce One Million B.C. which can only make one wonder what epic scope would have been achieved if he’d remained at the helm, sadly, issues of “creative differences” cropped up between him and Hal Roach as according to Griffith "Mr. Roach did not feel that it was necessary to give the characters as much individuality as I thought was needed, and so I did not wish to appear responsible for the picture by having my name on it." Despite the “What if” hanging over this prehistoric adventure tale the end result does have its charm and if one let's slide the animal cruelty aspect of the production, which I find hard to do, one can appreciate what Hal Roach and company were trying to achieve, and sure, this film will not be shown in schools as its version of Early Man is on par with what we see in The Flintstones but Victor Mature and Carole Landis both give credible performances in a rather thrilling romance told against a primitive backdrop.

Question: Is this final shot depicting Tumak and Loana setting forth into a brave new world or are they heading off into Heaven?

Lost Continent (1951) – Review

Making an adventure film that plummets your cast of characters into a “Land Lost in Time” is no easy task but when given little to no money and just eleven days to produce it, well, that's asking a lot and it makes things exponentially harder to pull off, which brings us to Lippert Pictures and their 1951 dinosaur movie Lost Continent, a film that suffers from too much rock climbing and not enough dinosaurs.

The crux of this film centers around an expedition to the South Pacific to find a missing atomic-powered rocket that was designed by Russian scientist Michael Rostov (John Hoyt) working for the United States Government and who is aided by Stanley Briggs (Whit Bissell) and Robert Phillips (Hugh Beaumont) his two able-bodied assistants, but when the rocket vanishes without a trace, Major Joe Nolan (Cesar Romero) is put in charge of the retrieval operation along with his pal Lt. Danny Wilson (Chick Chandler) and aircraft mechanic Sgt. William Tatlow (Sid Melton), who is this film’s idea of comic relief, but when their transport aircraft mysteriously crash-lands on a remote island things get a little dicey.  Not only are they on what appears to be an uncharted island, though inhabited by English-speaking natives – apparently there is a missionary school on a nearby island – but Nolan is also very suspicious of Rostov as he believes the man could be working for the other side, though I’d say it’s more a case of this mission having cockblocked his date and made him take his frustration out on someone.

Note: Up to this point in time Cesar Romero was more commonly known for playing Latin lovers, as well as historical figures in costume dramas, but it’s his role as The Joker in the 60s Batman series that cemented him into popular culture.

When a native woman (Acquanetta) tells the group that she saw a “Fiery Bird” land atop a forbidden mountain, a cloud-shrouded plateau that dominates part of the island, it’s clear to our heroes where they must go, sadly, the trip up the mountain takes about a third of the film’s running time and basically consists of long stretches of rock climbing where our characters are seen repeatedly climbing up and over the same Styrofoam set-prop only from different angles, which wasn’t fooling anybody and is as tedious as it sounds.  Just how bad does it get?  Well, I swear Baltasar Kormákur's Everest has less rock climbing than what we see in this movie and when one of the men comments “It seems like we’ve been climbing for days” it literally feels like that for the viewer as well.

 

I swear Dante had an easier time getting into Hell.

When the group eventually, thank God, reach the top of the mountain they discover a lush, prehistoric jungle inhabited by various dinosaurs and a large field of uranium, which is what disabled their electronic tracking equipment and caused their plane to crash. With Rostov’s assurance that the radiation emitting from this plateau is not lethal, despite it being strong enough to bring down a plane flying thousands of feet above it, they decide to proceed with the search for the missing rocket. It’s at this point that the filmmakers decided to tint the film a mint-green to give this lush prehistoric world a more otherworldly quality, sadly, any benefit this visual change could have made to improve things was quickly undercut by the film’s continued poor pacing as the endless climb up the mountain was then swapped out for endless shots of our heroes trekking through the jungle. Mercifully, we do get a few random encounters with some nice stop-motion animated dinosaurs and if it wasn't for these moments I'm sure the audience would have been in danger of falling into a coma.  This is not to say that the dinosaurs in this film make any logical sense but at least it beats rock climbing.

 

Why two Triceratops have a battle to the death is never explained.

The real interesting element to this particular script was the reveal that Nolan’s fear surrounding Rostov’s loyalties was completely unfounded as we later learn that Rostov himself had suffered in a Nazi concentration camp and his wife and child died in a Russian camp, making him not only sympathetic but a case of great casting as John Hoyt is mostly known for playing pompous jerks in such films as The Blackboard Jungle and When Worlds Collide which makes this reveal a pleasant surprise. Of course, such originality can’t last for long so the film must end with your “Lost World” ending where a volcanic cataclysm destroys everything while our heroes flee for their lives.  It seems that in these types of films man setting foot on a prehistoric land will always trigger its destruction.

Note: The destruction of this “Lost Continent” is actually well-orchestrated it’s just too bad most of what preceded it wasn’t as exciting.

Stray Observations:

• The opening shot of the White Sands Missile Base borrowed footage from Rocketship X-M which was another Lippert Pictures release.
• They were given orders to not break radio silence until they found the rocket, but you’d think crashing on an island would be a good case for making an exception and calling for help.
• While taking a break during their climbing up to the plateau Stanley Briggs pulls out pictures of his family just to ensure that he gets killed off. I guess he was just as bored climbing the mountain as we were watching them.
• Our first glimpse of a “dinosaur” looks to be a garden variety chameleon and because the filmmakers failed to put it next to anything to give it scale it looks just as it is, a tiny little lizard.
• The group comes across a set of Brontosaurus tracks but they are in a jungle area that is way too dense for a creature that size to be walking through without leaving a trail of devastation in its wake.
• In this film the Triceratops and Brontosaurus are depicted as aggressive killers that attack without provocation despite them both being plant-eaters, one must assume the writers of this film got their paleontology information from watching the original 1933 King Kong.

 

Beware the vicious man-eating herbivores.

Much of the plot of this film was clearly borrowed from Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic tale The Lost World but even back then it was understood that crux of the story was what they find on top of the plateau and not on the climb to get there, which director Sam Newfield and producer Robert L. Lippert clearly orchestrated to stretch their paltry budget, and the result was a film that only really gets going mere moments before the end credits roll. I’m a sucker for dinosaur movies and usually quite forgiving when it comes to the genre but even I had a hard time getting through this one, which is sad considering that the cast included some solid character actors and some decent animated dinosaurs. All these years later Lippert’s Lost Continent will most likely be remembered for being ridiculed on Mystery Science Theater 3000, which is the best way to view the film because without Joel and the bots this entry isn’t worth tracking down.