King Dinosaur!

As you could probably tell from my ten worst movies list, I have an abiding interest in crappy movies, and I'm always willing to put my hip-boots on and wade into new crap, or revisit some old crap that I might've forgotten about, stuff I saw when it first came out, say, in the 1950's, when I was too tiny to realize that it was crap at all. Well, I think I was about three years old when King Dinosaur was released, and I believe I saw it in a Garden State drive-in with my folks. That recollection is pretty fuzzy, but I have rather clearer memories of King D from TV in the early 1960's, and by then I was old enough to realize what a shitty job they were doing with the ostensible dinosaurs, trying to pass of iguanas as tyrannosaurs, etc. But I don't think I ever realized exactly how big a stinkbomb the movie was.

It was directed by schlockmeister Bert I. Gordon (BIG for short), and the time would come when I would start paying attention to credits, and associate his name with cinematic yellow shitstorms like The Cyclops,  The Amazing Colossal Man, and Food of the Gods,. But I hadn't gotten to that stage the last time I clapped my poor little eyes on King D. I think I thought it was just kind of a rip-off of One Million BC, and it does crib a few moments of footage from D.W. Griffith's caveman epic...but it's way way worse than a mere knockoff, indeed, deserves to be ranked with movies like Robot Monster, which also used One Million B.C. stock footage, and featured location work in Bronson Canyon.

Anyway, the other day, I saw King D listed on the Pay Per View and watched it immediately, the upshot being that I laughed my ass just about off, and made my wife watch it with me the following night...I have a couple of friends, namely Nick Prata and Sam Tomaino, who love bad movies, and I'll show it to them shortly if I get the chance. Hopefully, they'll evangelize on its behalf. It should be a whole lot more famous than it is.

The film manages to pack a huge amount of nothing much into its meager 63 minute running time. The first ten-twelve minutes are nonstop stock footage and voiceovers...one is reminded of that stuff in Ed Wood where Ed waxes ecstatic over the studio's stock-footage library. But I don't think even Saint Ed ever subjected an audience to quite such a deluge of second-hand stuff.

The story, such as it is, involves a new planet (the scientists name it Nova) that somehow sneaks into our solar system and pops up very close to the Earth...the government (represented by a shot of the Capitol Dome) decides to mount an expedition, and the depiction of the ensuing space program is a mindnumbing succession of clips of V-2 rockets, observatories, dials, gauges, oscilloscopes, ampmeters, radar dishes, guys rotating radar dishes, checkpoints, swivel chairs, loudspeakers, big ceiling fans, pipes, ladders, engines cracking off bombers that have just been dropped onto concrete floors,the Blue Angels, an air show, graphs, jet engine test #97, Rocket Test # 2, white mice floating in zero G, and all sorts of other things. Complementing this barrage of senseless visuals quite perfectly, veteran narrator Marvin Miller intones a shitload of stupid exposition with awesome, almost Jack Webbian, earnestness, either because he's a complete idiot and doesn't know any better, or because he's the goddamnedest pro who ever lived.

Just before the expedition gets off the ground, he introduces our voyageurs, two stalwart science studs,and two curvy science bimbettes.We get brief glimpses of them doing scientistic things in their respective fields, such as looking at test tubes and into microscopes. Then, after a very quick count down, a V2 rocket is finally launched, ostensibly with them on board.

The space-travel effects consist of V2 footage simply printed over starry backgrounds, with no attempt at motion-control at all, the rocket dipsy-doodling just about everywhere, because the original material was shot by some cameraman on the ground who was having a hard time keeping his lens fixed on the missile. The same crap continues once the ship arrives in Nova's atmosphere, except that the image of the rocket gets very faint and out-of-focus...we see it creeping and skulking behind some trees, going up and down and even back and forth with pines showing through, because, well...it's just printed right over them.

Ultimately, it flips its butt-end down, and lands in some woods that appear to be in the Angeles Mountains or the Sierras or whatever. Our scientists climb out wearing spacesuits from another movie....the spaceship is just barely represented by a model that's closer to the camera than the scientists are. It's kind of a hanging-miniature effect, and that's okay, but...the spaceship is way too small to have had the passengers inside, and worse, it isn't being photographed at a dead right angle, smack down on the deck, to make it look big and the people tiny. Nope, it's being photographed from above, leaving you with the impression that it's hanging some distance above the ground.

There is some doing of science in a field. The scientists have a microscope in one of those little wooden boxes that microscopes used to come in, and they look at bacteria. One of the guys says, "What era would you say this planet is?" and a bimbette replies, "prehistoric." Owls,elk, boa constrictors and tree-sloths double as extraterrestrial prehistoric critters. After being wounded in a wrestling-match with a smallish alligator, one stud has to put a bullet into a weirdly-superimposed giant mole-cricketish thing which is completely transparent wherever it has a highlight on its body. Our protagonists drift aimlessly around. They go back and forth to the ship. Spotting a lake, one of the girls says, "what I see is a whole lot of water, and that means a bath, and let's get some clean clothes and have one!"

There's an island in the lake...the other girl wants to visit it. It turns out that this is where the dinosaurs live, although we don't know that yet. I love the fact that you land on another planet and you still have to go to an island to get to the dinosaurs.

Eventually that girl and a stud row over, and find themselves in dry rocky Bronson Canyon, even though we've been told the island is all jungly. It takes us forty minutes to get to this point. You'd think that if you only had sixty-three minutes to tell your story, you'd be in rather a rush to cram it with incidents...for God's sake, try to give people their money's worth...throw in another mole cricket, or a guy in a lobster suit. Actually have the bimbettes take that bath in the lake. Or maybe even have a dinosaur somewhere in the first two thirds of the film.

I guess I'm just a starry-eyed idealist.

But just when we despair of there ever being dinosaurs in King Dinosaur, we get to the dinosaurs! Or rather, two unhappy lizards and a little caiman that we're informed are dinosaurs. The guy and the bimbette get trapped in a Bronson Canyon cave by a tyrannosaur, which is to say, a big iguana.It has an extremely tyrannosaur-like horn glued on its nose, and is held up tyrannosaurusly on its hindlegs once or twice by a wire under its armpits. It wants to eat the scientists, but it can't get in, and the guy scientist takes a polaroid of it looking in the cave, the photo (with the iguana sticking its tongue out) resembling a postcard, kinda "Dinosaur World, Wish you were here." The female scientist screams, and in a frenzied display of sheer femininity, rips the picture up. People offscreen (you can see their shadows on a supposed "cliff") hurl the iguana and the aforementioned caiman together. The poor reptiles don't look like they want to fight, but they roll around for a while, and then the caiman is dead, and some one's thrown chocolate sauce on it.

Meanwhile, a monitor lizard or some sort of big skink has been hanging about. The people offscreen throw him at the iguana, and the lizards flip around for a while, and the monitor lizard dies and gets chocolate sauce poured on him. By virtue of his two savage victories, the iguana has become...

King Dinosaur!

However, all this allows our scientists to escape from the cave. The iguana follows, but little does he know that the other two scientists have brought a nuclear weapon from the V2, one of them announcing, "I've got an atomic bomb, and this would be a good time to use it!" The earth people get on their rafts and row back across the lake...the bomb explodes...one of the scientists laments poignantly that "We've brought civilizations to Nova all right."

God, It's like being stabbed in the heart.

Bert I. Gordon went on to make a slew of other giant monster movies, and all of them were fabulously awful. One of my favorites, Food of the Gods, featured giant wasps that were simply dead curled up wasps (such as you might find on your windowsill) superimposed with astounding crudity on poor innocent backdrops that had done nothing to deserve it. At the climax, giant rats are exterminated by a dam being dynamited; the miniature effect has them swimming around in a fish-tank, with water slopping over the sides in full view of the camera. A little bit later in his career, BIG made some sort of witchcraft movie with Orson Welles, who shouldn't have lived so long...I've never seen that one though.

On a happier note, the screenplay for King Dinosaur was written by Tom Gries, who actually got his head out of his ass, and started directing good westerns, most notably Will Penny and Breakheart Pass. I cannot account for it.

God moves in mysterious ways.