Dinosaurus! (1960) **
Movies about giant monsters changed rather drastically between the 1950’s and the 1960’s. In the 50’s, you generally got just one giant monster (or at any rate, just one kind of giant monster) per film, and it was extremely unusual for it to have any personality beyond monstrousness itself. In the 60’s, however, menageries of monsters were the norm, and each individual creature (or type of creature) was apt to approach the status of character, much as their counterparts had in King Kong 30 years earlier. The typical giant monster got weirder with the turning of the decade, too, as atomic bugs and resuscitated dinosaurs gave way to cyclopes, multi-headed dragons, and energy-eating chicken-lizards from outer space. Settings became correspondingly more fanciful, with mythic pasts, Jetsonian futures, and Lost Worlds in the style of H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edgar Rice Burroughs surging into prominence over the here-and-now as the preferred haunts of fabulous beasts. And whereas monsters in the 50’s were primarily a problem for soldiers and scientists, the task of dealing with them in the 60’s might fall upon characters in any walk of life, from legendary heroes to pharmaceutical corporation ad reps to trick riders in Wild West shows. There were exceptions, of course, both whole and partial, but I think that’s a pretty fair encapsulation of the general tendencies.
It stands to reason, however, that such a momentous shift in the assumptions of a genre would yield at least a few transitional examples, and that brings us to Dinosaurus! This film, produced by Jack H. Harris, of The Blob fame, feels simultaneously like the last giant monster flick of the old decade and the first of the new, even though it wasn’t really either of those things. Like so many of its predecessors, it concerns the accidental awakening of miraculously preserved prehistoric lifeforms, portrayed more or less plausibly given the state of contemporary paleontology. But in keeping with newly emergent trends, it has three different species of ancient creatures; it sorts them plainly into heroes and villains; and it leaves a hardhat crew in the Caribbean completely to their own devices in dealing with them all. Dinosaurus! even counts a proto-Kenny among its dramatis personae!
The hardhat crew in question is led by engineer Bart Thompson (Ward Ramsey, of Cape Fear and Maryjane), and their mission is to deepen the harbor of some obscure little island in the former Spanish Main in order to make it suitable for modern commercial shipping. This is proving harder than it ought to be, because the island’s corrupt government requires Thompson to hire his manual laborers through the quasi-official headman of the nearby village, a greedy and short-sighted bastard by the name of Hacker (The Lost Missile’s Fred Engelberg, whose idea of a Spanish Caribbean accent owes more to Paris than it does to Havana). Hacker prefers to pocket the money earmarked for wages whenever possible, leaving Thompson chronically short of manpower. Another hassle facing Thompson (and Dinosaurus! never feels more 50’s than when this subplot comes to the fore) is his girlfriend, Betty Piper (Kristina Hanson), the daughter of some notable rich expat. In an absolutely typical foretaste of what we can expect from her throughout the film, Betty makes her entrance boating across the harbor with a picnic lunch to share with Bart and the other engineers, just when Thompson and his men are clearing the reef with dynamite. This despite the multitude of signs warning all unauthorized personnel away from the area. And when one of the underwater explosions knocks Betty’s watertight picnic cooler overboard, the silly bitch dives in to retrieve it, heedless of the likelihood that there are more blasting caps yet to be set off down below.
It happens, though, that Betty’s folly sets the plot in motion, for while she’s searching the harbor bed for her cooler, she finds instead a humongous frozen dinosaur. Evidently the thing had been reposing in cyronic preservation beneath the rocks of the reef despite the warm tropical water just a few feet above it. Betty faints dead away the moment she lays eyes on the ancient monster, but Bart is able to rescue her before she drowns. Mind you, no one believes Betty at first when she describes what she saw, but there’s really no prospect of a dinosaur— correction, two dinosaurs, identified by Hacker’s pre-teen ward, Julio (The Space Children’s Alan Roberts), as a Brontosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus— remaining unnoticed for long under the present circumstances. The discovery interrupts all regular work on the harbor while Thompson and his crew drag the gigantic, slowly-thawing carcasses onto the beach, and while that’s going on, Hacker starts scheming to turn Betty’s find into the international tourist trap to end all international tourist traps. He’ll see even more dollar signs dancing before his eyes, too, when a similarly preserved Neanderthal man (Gregg Martell, from Valley of the Dragons and Return of the Fly) washes up onto the beach that evening, after all the engineers have clocked out and returned to town.
Hacker missed something important about that Neanderthal, though, when he dragged him out of the surf and hid him under a heap of flotsam. The caveman isn’t just perfectly preserved— he’s alive! Awakening before Hacker and his flunkies can return to collect him unobserved, the Neanderthal slips away into the interior to embark on a series of mostly comic adventures leading him eventually into contact with Julio. You will perhaps not be surprised, however, to learn that Hacker’s determination to exploit the prehistoric man is not diminished in the slightest by discovering that his ward has befriended him. Meanwhile, an electrical storm blows in from the ocean, and a fortuitous lightning strike reanimates the dinosaurs as well. Natural enemies that they are, the Tyrannosaurus and the Brontosaurus quickly fall to squabbling, and the islanders find themselves with a bush-league kaiju fight on their hands.
Dinosaurus! is one of the few American monster movies to approximate the tonal strangeness of Gamera and its sequels. The filmmakers seem not to have been altogether sure whether they were seeking an audience of children, teenagers, or adults, and the movie toggles constantly from one setting to the next. As I said, the Neanderthal’s explorations in the wooded highlands where all the rich, white islanders live are played mostly for very broad laughs (witness, for example, the gag in which he is frightened away from one villa when he sees the lady of the house with her hair up in curlers, and her face slathered with a moisturizing mud mask), but he meets the fate of a tragic hero in the end. A comparable tonal shift happens with the Brontosaurus as well, which goes from being something like an impractical pet for Julio to getting disposed of in a perplexingly offhand manner that takes no account of the bond that the audience has been encouraged to form with it. I doubt that any child, even in 1960, would have been able to parse the antiquated ethnic humor surrounding T.J. O’Leary (James Logan, whom we’ve seen in blink-and-you’ll-miss-them bit parts in The Man with a Cloak and The Son of Dr. Jekyll), the Irishman who spends his entire involvement in the film on one neverending bender. (Perhaps Thompson hired him to dispose of spent bulldozer brake fluid by drinking it…) The portrayal of Betty Piper, meanwhile, is even further from kids’ stuff as it was understood at the turn of the 60’s. Many of her scenes make surprisingly overt use of whatever sex appeal Kristina Hanson can muster, and there’s one moment between her and the Neanderthal that could have come straight out of a pre-Code Tarzan knockoff. It truly is a puzzle whom Jack H. Harris thought this movie was for— which is enough to make me wonder if maybe Equinox and Season of the Witch weren’t more accurate soundings of his commercial instincts than The Blob after all.
Today, of course, Dinosaurus! is for aficionados of tacky old junk— but alas, its attractions even for that audience are decidedly limited. The monster material is subpar in both drama and spectacle, even though the movie ends with a fight between the Tyrannosaurus and a steam shovel. Writers Dan E. Weisburd and Jean Yeaworth take an absurdly literal reading of “natural enemies,” so that the two dinosaurs fight whenever they cross paths, but don’t seem to have any specific motivation for doing so. Certainly the Tyrannosaurus exhibits no interest whatsoever in actually eating the Brontosaurus. Nor is there ever a properly decisive battle between them in the manner of Gigantis the Fire Monster, despite all the mayhem the dinosaurs inflict on each other. The sauropod just gets up and walks off what ought to be one fatal mauling after another whenever its better-armed foe decides that it’s beaten and loses interest. Then after all that, the Brontosaurus goes out like an absolute chump, falling to a mere environmental hazard! The special effects are disappointing, too, combining half-assed stop-motion with quarter-assed puppetry.
Strangely, though, the Neanderthal’s side of the story is rather better, thanks primarily to an unexpectedly nuanced and sensitive performance by Gregg Martell. Although I’m sure Martell got the part mainly by being a big galoot who had a free week or two in between gigs playing Goon #3 in some shitty Western programmer, he turns in a creditable rendition of the “more than an animal, less than a man” routine that one frequently associates with the role of Frankenstein’s monster. He has genuinely appealing chemistry with Alan Roberts, too, which makes Julio considerably less of a pest than he would have been if his only adult foil were Dumpy the bulldozer driver (Wayne C. Treadway, from Secret Beyond the Door). Indeed, I’ll go so far as to say that Dinosaurus! might have been a better movie all around if it had been framed as Neanderthalensis! instead.
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