Top Ten Dinosaur Movies Never Made

As you’ve noticed, dinosaurs have been featured in a lot of terrible movies. From Lost Continent to Jurassic World, from King Dinosaur to Ice Age 3, not to mention any Asylum movie on the Sci Fi Channel, it’s easy to put a dinosaur on screen, but it’s hard to make the experience worthwhile. Sometimes the effects are terrible. Sometimes the dinosaurs are cliched. Sometimes the film is just plain badly written and shot.  So it’s a shame to find out about great movies that were never made. 

In Hollywood, it takes a lot of luck for a project to see work, especially one with an ambitious 

 premise or one demanding expensive special effects. Even filmmakers like Kubrick or Spielberg have had projects die before seeing light.   Fortunately, big ambitious projects are remembered, especially if they’re by people who have made other hit films but somehow were thwarted other times.  In this case, Mark Berry’s excellent Dinosaur Filmography came very much in handy.

These projects all sound like a lot of fun-it’s not often dinosaur movies get made, simply because of the limitations in budget, writing ability, and marketability inherent in the genre. Frankly, if we had these made, they would have turned out far superior than most dinosaur films that actually saw light. These were dream projects, vast in scope and ambition. Some of them were salvaged and recreated into excellent films. Some of them turned out into disasters. But it’s fascinating to learn about them, and dream about what could have been. Who knows? We may see them someday even after their originators have long been dead. Anything can happen in Hollywood, and they love to remake and revisit. Maybe someday these will be made. 

Movie Review: Behemoth the Sea Monster/The Giant Behemoth

One of the most interesting filmmakers when it comes to dinosaurs was Eugène Lourié. A Franco-Ukranian who fled the country after making the anti-Revolutionary film The Black Crows,  he revived his career in France as an artist for the film industry, acting as production designer for directors Jean Renoir and Rene Clair, and art designer for Rene Sti, Georges Marret, Jean de Limur, Marcel L’Herbier, Georges Lacombe, and fellow exile Viktor Tourjansky. As a director from 1953-61, he dabbled in American television, the high concept sci-fi film Colossus of New York, and three films about prehistoric sea monsters.  After his brief directorial stint, he returned to art direction, this time in Hollywood, doing such films as The Battle of the Bulge, Crack of the World, Confessions of an Opium Eater, and more TV work. His interest in special effects led him to work in the spectacular Krakatoa, East of Java. He retired after 1980’s Bronco Billy, and his only speaking role was as a doctor in the 1983 erotic thriller Breathless. He died in LA in 1991. 

His first, best, and most successful of the three Sea Monster films was The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. I’ve already discussed it but needless to say, his excellent eye combined with amazing effects by the master Ray Harryhausen to make a blockbuster. Godzilla was born of both the Beast and King Kong (the favorite film of both Harryhausen and his Toho counterpart Eiji Tsuburaya), proving to be just as successful as his parents. Both Godzilla and his Beastly progenitor proved to be decisive for Lourie’s next films.

The epic producer Ted Lloyd partnered up with thriller-focused David Diamond with Lourie to make a new science fiction epic. The rising interest in science fiction about atomic radiation prompted writers Allen Adler (who also wrote Forbidden Planet) and the obscure playright Robert Abel  to consider making a film about an amorphous bloblike being resembling a flying, glowing ball of light, that ravaged London with horrifying radiation. However, the distributors Eros Films and Allied Artists knew of Lourie’s dinosaur blockbuster, of course, and the 1956 Godzilla was an international smash as well. So, they insisted to change it to the more visually interesting, kid-friendly, ever popular dinosaur.