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.
The premise isn’t a terrible one. The concept of traveling
space to find alien planets with similar environments and life is a stolid
trope in science fiction, and one having dinosaurs in it is just irresistible.
Unfortunately, the premise is the only thing that goes right-from the lifeless
beginning to the abrupt end; this movie is one of the worst of the genre. As
you might have guessed, this was a film made with too much ambition, not enough
money, and not enough competence to end in anything decent.
The story begins with stock footage; the U.S. military’s
pride in its technology led to the wide dispersal of footage of their accomplishments,
so it was easy to make a montage out of their experiments with rocketry, air
travel, and other cutting edge technology. Said montage is narrated by the rich
and familiar voice of Marvin Miller, who tries to tie together the stock
footage into a background. The premise is that a new planet, unimaginatively
called Nova, has appeared in the solar system, and that the USA has dispatched four heavily
armed and not very dedicated scientists to land.
These four are the only actors in the film, and this is
their only starring role for good reason. To be fair, the script is simply
horrible. They almost immediately get out of their spacesuits, treat their
exploration with all the gravitas and scientific precision of a casual hike,
and have very little distinguishing characteristics. The men are stock action
heroes of the day-confident, macho, and with a modicum of common sense. The
women are the sexist stereotypes of the period as well-shrill, stupid, panicky
and utterly useless. The best way to
distinguish them is that there is a brunette couple and a blond couple, but
you’ll barely care. Instead of actual
documentation and exploration, they treat it as a casual date in a nature
preserve, then act surprised and indignant (and hysterical for the women, of
course) when they encounter uncooperative wild animals. Alien planets seem to make better makeout spots than subjects for scientific study.
The “alien fauna” tries to add interest, but the low budget
is crippling. A snake and an alligator randomly attack our explorers, but the
scenes are rather dull. A stationary mole cricket poorly composited against the
background makes an appearance to terrorize one of the women, but is quickly
and boringly dispatched by a few shots of her boyfriend’s pistol. There’s a bit of levity when they encounter a
kinkajou they call Joe (amusingly, said critter is never identified by any of
the so-called scientists but shows up in the credits as “Joe the Honey bear”)
who they promptly shanghai into being their team pet and mascot. This adorable
tagalong, nicknamed Joey the Lemur by Joel and his robot friends, will be at
their side for the remainder of the film but contribute little. Wildlife is never studied or analyzed; Joe’s a
pet and the rest are nuisances to be dispatched with firearms (quick, name a
NASA project that required any sort of weapon!)
The final act of the film sees the brunettes exploring an
island and being confronted by “dinosaurs”, including the title character. “It’s
an iguana from Pet World” sneered Tom
Servo, echoing the audience as the disappointment. Depressingly, the
“dinosaurs” are played by a variety of pet reptiles, including a skink, a tegu,
a baby alligator or caiman, and a green iguana as the Tyrannosaurus. Worse, Gordon and company did not use the
endlessly-used lizard fight footage from One Million BC, but shot original
material with their own set of pet reptiles. The lizards are starved, grabbed
by the tail, prodded with sticks, set on each other, and finally dispatched
offscreen.. Oddly enough, a costumed armadillo, ox, and elephant appear later;
courtesy of One Million BC, so they did have access to the footage. The iguana fights and kills another
slurpasaur (the popular nickname for these hapless lizards), then threatens the
couple. “It resembles a Tyrannosaurus rex. King Dinosaur!” the “Scientist”
exposits. “It’s an iguana!” Crow T Robot screamed in frustration. The “Tyrannosaurus” pushes its snout and claw
to get at the pair ineffectually, allowing the woman to take a picture of it.
Of course, being the sexist stereotype, she tears up the Polaroid and suffers
an emotional breakdown. She shrieks “Who cares what it is, nobody’s gonna believe us
anyway!”
The man “bravely” fires a flare to attract the other couple,
they reunite as while the “King Dinosaur” is fighting another lizard
(thankfully, the other lizards are not identified as Triceratops, Apatosaurus,
and so forth, sparing further stupidity), and run off, taking potshots at stock
footage from One Million BC along the way. They escape the island, dropping a
mysterious package before leaving. This turns out to be an atomic bomb, and the
film ends with them setting off the device (cue stock footage mushroom cloud
from real atomic bomb testing).
The brunette scientist ends the film with a possibly ironic
but never explained line-
“We sure have done it.
Brought civilization to Planet Nova. C'mon, let's go home."
Joel ends the commentary
with “Yeah, let's go home and raise some three-headed kids”, a much better
summation of the stupidity of the film.
Suffice to say, this film is
terrible. The effects are painful, both literally and rhetorically. People who
thought that the time and money necessary for Willis O’Brien or Ray Harryhausen
would be too much should never had tried making dinosaur films. The characters
are so flat and bland you could use them for communion wafers. The story is
episodic, poorly paced, and dull. Tom Gries, a TV writer, adopted an original
Bert I Gordon story treatment, and it seems that the fault can be laid on both.
The orchestral score is repetitive, meandering, and grating on the ears. This film is unknown outside of its
appearance on the Minnesotan puppet show, and should only be watched in that
context. Movies this awful can only be watched with Joel, Tom Servo, and Crow
T. Robot for company. Or, as an alternative, spring it on your friends as a
prank, preferably with a lot of drinks on hand.
I must give it a 15/100 on its own, only for the kinkajou,
premise, and slurpasaurs, and a 85/100 for the MST3k episode. Please buy the
MST version http://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Science-Theater-3000-XXIII/dp/B006JN87CU,
but stay away from the original unless you plan to do some riffing yourself.
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