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: The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms

Last week’s viewing of Godzilla got me thinking about the origin of the kaiju genre. It’s ultimately related to dinosaurs and our awe of the huge and strange. King Kong certainly played its part, as it its own inspiration, the 1925 Lost World. However, one film tied King Kong with Godzilla, a missing link of movie monsters, between dinosaurs and kaiju. Today we’re looking at Ray Harryhausen’s  1953 opus, the Beast From 20,000 Fathoms

Documentary Review: Walking With Monsters 2005

Well, it’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally time we finish the “Walking With” trilogy. True, there’s the three Chased by Dinosaurs specials and Allosaurus and Walking With Cavemen, but this one is the closest to the original in terms of structure.  It’s very different, however, in many ways, from running time to presentation. It’s certainly ambitious and explores much-neglected times and places in prehistory. People often forget that these periods existed, and only the trilobite, Dimetrodon, and possibly Meganuera as familiar to most of the public. They’ve always played second fiddle to dinosaurs, so much that Dimetrodon is more often placed with dinosaurs than with fellow Pelycosaurs. It’s telling that in the former exhibit Life Over Time, there was a corridor visitors could take to bypass the entire Palaeozoic and go straight to the dinosaurs (thankfully, Evolving Planet does not). It’s certainly the longest in terms of time periods covered, while it’s much shorter in running time: at 90 minutes, it’s half the length of the first two.  So without further ado, let’s look at the prehistoric clip show to see how they can deal with 280 million years of evolution in one and a half hours.

Movie Review: Planet of Dinosaurs

It’s Friday again, and this week I’m going back to bad movies. Yeah, not happy about it, but I went with a movie that’s bad in a very special way. Some movies are bad because they have talent but no character or action, like Lost Continent. Others are too cheap to have anything but an idea sank by trash, like King Dinosaur. Others are simply bad decisions about the direction of the story, like the 1960 Lost World. Some are good movies crippled by terrible executive decisions, like Walking With Dinosaurs. Others have too many characters and not enough time to flesh them out, like Dinosaur.  This week’s movie has all these problems combined, but in its own way has charm and not a little bit of potential.

The movie Star Wars had a huge impact at the end of the 1970s in terms of filmmaking. Unknowns could become superstars, and science fiction and fantasy were given new fresh life.  A lot of people didn’t have the talent to pull it off, and others didn’t have the budget. One team of filmmakers, James K Shea, Jim Auppearle, and Ralph Lucas didn’t have either, but they had a great deal of ambition, and made Planet of Dinosaurs.  It’s a bad movie, to be sure, but to understand why it failed and why it’s compelling is worth an in-depth look.

Musing on King Kong

You know, my original plan was to review the 1933 King Kong. Then I reconsidered for one reason: too easy. It’s a great film. The characters are two-dimensional but never unlikable. The special effects are amazing. The direction, cinematography, and score make for a great film. The central idea is inspired. This movie changed the filmmaking medium forever, and I consider it the best-made film ever. Citizen Kane was just plain boring-it needed a giant gorilla fighting dinosaurs.

Old vs New: Dinosaur vs Walking With Dinosaurs

A long time ago, artists, paleontologists, and filmmakers came up with a visionary idea: a movie based entirely on dinosaurs. Other movies have had dinosaurs in them, but were centered on humans and their interactions with the dinosaurs.  This project, as proposed, would be a natural drama, similar to wildlife projects like the Bear where the animal did not speak but would nonetheless have their story told. Set in the end of the age of Dinosaurs, they would focus a great clash between the protagonist and his theropod archenemy.  Alas, things went sour. Executives meddled. The project is delayed and sunk in development. The original team is told that it’s all over. Then, years later,  a trailer will capture the imagination of the audience. In lush, state of the art effects, it looks like the original epic will finally arise from development hell into its glory. And then a second trailer comes out, this one with conversations and sending hopes spiraling down. Then the final product is released to mixed reviews at best, a box office failure and a very bad product.

This happened twice in my lifetime.

Documentary Review: Walking With Beasts 2001

You know, I reviewed Walking With Dinosaurs for two reasons. One was to prepare for the upcoming movie. The other, however, was because of a very happy holiday. I believe it was 2001 that it happened. Every year, usually two weeks before Christmas, I visit my grandfather so we can put up his Christmas tree and celebrate my father’s birthday with a pizza. That year we went out, and enjoyed a pizza together at a nearby restaurant. There were televisions nearby, and they always take up some attention. I had watched Walking With Dinosaurs in the past year thanks to an uncle with cable. Suddenly, when I looked up, I saw a Basilosaurus. Then brontotheres. A giant predatory mammal ate a turtle. Ancestors of elephants swam by. I was transfixed. Throughout the evening I watched the rest of the episode, and then the next happened. A giant piglike animal snarled. A Baluchitherium marched across a dry plain. A Hyenodon savagely killed another strange-looking mammal.  I stopped paying attention to the pizza or my family. It was just me and the fantastic mammals. I had to be dragged off just as a preview was shown featuring a giant prehistoric relative of the elephant chasing human ancestors.

Movie review: Lost Continent 1951

Well, it’s time for another movie review, and time for one of the bad movies. This week is a pretty obscure one, known mostly to only Mystery Science Theater fans.  Just say the phrase “Rock Climbing” to a MSTie and they’ll know what that means.  The film is the 1951 film Lost Continent.  It is one of the many 1950s science fiction films, but with strong influence from the Lost World genre of fiction.  It was one of the many collaborations between brothers Sam and Sigmund Newfeld and executive producer Robert Lippert (who also produced King Dinosaur).  Cesar Romero, already a star and only a few years after his service in the US Coast Guard, was chosen for the lead, with Hugh Beaumont (several years before Leave It To Beaver), John Hoyt  (before most of his film work), Sid Melton (part of a long series of minor comedy parts in Lippert films), and Whit Bissel (in his most prolific period of movie and TV work).  This was an ambitious film, not only with a large colorful cast, but also with expensive stop motion animation effects by Augie Lohman (who would later create Moby Dick for the John Huston-Gregory Peck adaptation and the effects for Soylent Green).

Movie Review: Fantasia (1940)

It’s Friday, and time for another film review! This week is a return to good movies, and this one is one of my first, and one of my favorites. My dad introduced me to Classical Music at a young age, and decided to nourish it with the 1940 Walt Disney animated classic Fantasia. The dazzling colors and shapes set to Bach’s toccata and fugue in D minor, the antics of Mickey Mouse set to Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the classical majesty combined with colorful creatures of classical myth set to Beethoven’s 6^th symphony, satirical slapstick animal ballet of Ponchielli’s Dance of the hours and the nightmarish demonic revelry in Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain all made impacts on me, but it was the prehistoric epic of the Rite of Spring that impressed me the most. It was at the time I loved dinosaurs thanks to this film, The Land Before Time, and trips to the Field Museum’s dinosaur hall. Thanks to Fantasia, my love of dinosaurs increased and my love of classical musical blossomed. It’s still one of my favorite movies and Stravinsky is one of my favorite composers.