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

Movie Review: Godzilla (2014)

There’s very few dinosaur movies in theaters nowadays. The last time I saw one on the big screen was in December, and that in turn was the first in years. So when I see a film that can be described as a dinosaur film, I must watch it. Yes, I saw Godzilla last week, and I can assume most people interested have already seen it so I can discuss it spoilers and all. Just to be safe, I’ll put a cut here before I get into the details.

Editorial: Godzilla and the dinosaurs of Toho

Today we’re not going to do a movie review, but we are going to look at a popular movie figure that has represented dinosaurs in his own way for decades. Yes, Godzilla. I’m a big fan of the Godzilla series-yes, only the first and maybe Godzilla vs Destoroyah can be taken with an iota of seriousness, but they’re entertaining sci-fi/fantasy movies that I enjoy watching. I’m an attendee at the largest Godzilla convention, G-Fest in Rosemont, Illinois, and I always have fun going.

The question always comes up; is Godzilla a dinosaur? Well, sort of. You see, the Godzilla script from Tomoyuki Tanaka’s first story outline to Ishiro Honda’s shooting screenplay never clearly defined Godzilla as a dinosaur. The name Gojira comes from the idea of the monster being a sort of gorilla-shaped whale. Godzilla, was in fact, very much inspired by King Kong as a monster itself. Tanaka, Honda, and special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya all were huge King Kong fans, and simply made Kong bigger and a metaphor for horror of war and the devastation of nuclear weapons. So ultimately Godzilla has more to do with his gorilla archnemesis (at least in 1962) than with the dinosaurs Kong fought.

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.

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: The Lost World 1960

Friday again, and again it’s a terrible movie we’re talking about. In 1960, producer-director Irwin Allen, having made very successful, spectacular documentaries, decided to cross over into thrillers, science fiction, and fantasy with two star-studded films. One was the circus thriller The Big Circus, and the other was a very loose adaptation of the Lost World. I would have skipped a lengthy plot recap if the film even remotely resembled the novelization, but this was not the case. After the recap I’ll go more into the devastating changes in the plot. Suffice to say, I can sum up what went wrong here pretty easily-

Movie Review: Monster On the Campus (1958)

Well, it’s another Friday, and thanks to problems in my personal life, I haven’t had a chance to do any blogs this week. However, I’m working on that, and I’m breaking my week-long hiatus.  The good news is that Fridays are movie days. The bad news is that every other one is going to be a bad movie. This week’s bad movie has no dinosaurs per se, but some prehistoric “monsters” and some typically terrible science. Today, we’re looking at 1958’s Monster on the Campus, directed by Jack Arnold and starring Arthur Franz in his last major film role.  It’s a fairly obscure film, neither revered classic like Arnold’s It Came from Outer Space or Creature from the Black Lagoon, nor a cheesy disaster like King Dinosaur or The Beginning of the End.

Movie Review: King Dinosaur (1955)

It’s Friday! Movie night! I’ve decided to alternate a good movie with a bad movie in terms of reviews, and this one might be familiar to the viewers of a certain television show. You see, my favorite program is Mystery Science Theater 3000, a well-written comedy series dedicated to making humor with terrible movies. A memorable episode in Season 2 was based around this week’s film: Robert L Lippert’s first science fiction disaster, King Dinosaur. Joel and his robot friends had a great deal of difficulty with this one, and it’s easy to see why.