King Dinosaur (1955)

... aka: El planeta infernal (The Hellish Planet)

... aka: Monstruos de otro planeta (Monsters from Another Planet)

Directed by:

Bert I. Gordon

Gordon just passed away a few days ago (March 8, 2023) at the ripe old age of 100, so what better way to celebrate his legacy than to take a look at his directorial debut? At least that's what I was thinking going into this, but my initial plan pretty much backfired on me! It wasn't until afterward that I discovered, of the 20+ films Gordon made over his 60-year career, this is generally considered his very worst film. Doh! While it's still of interest in that it helped to establish a template for many of the director's size-obsessed later offerings, this not being Gordon at his best means I probably picked the absolute worst film possible for some kind of appreciative retrospective review. With that said, I'll stop right here before I get into all the negatives and point out that Gordon did make a number of enjoyable movies. I particularly liked his ghost film TORMENTED (1960) and his sleaze-filled crime drama The Mad Bomber (1975). Also, some of the giant monster films that he's mostly famous for, while not exactly "good," are at least fairly amusing. Unfortunately that's not the case for King Dinosaur. 

Shot over the course of a week in the fall of 1954 (partially at the ever-popular Bronson Canyon) on a budget of just 15,000 dollars and featuring a cast of just four people, this shows all of the tell-tale signs (stock footage, stolen footage, endless filler to stretch the running time to barely over an hour, patchwork narration courtesy of Marvin Miller...) of a film cheaply spat out with the express purpose of making a quick buck from unsuspecting moviegoers. And that it apparently did as Gordon would start churning out very similar films at a steady quip just a few years later.

In a preposterous, reality-defying plot that's certain to give science geeks everywhere a good laugh, astronomers are startled to discover that a large rogue planet has drifted into our solar system and latched right on to the Earth's orbit. It's now not only close enough to be of moderate climate but scientists also suspect it also could have an identical atmosphere capable of supporting life. A powerful telescope is used to take a closer look at the planet's surface, which uncovers that vegetation is indeed there. That prompts a space race between nations around the globe to see who can be the first to explore our new neighbor. There's only one thing that's missing: A "space rocket" capable of transporting astronauts there. Hey, this is 1955 we're talking about here! The narrator goes into painstaking detail about various tests, developing a brand new metal, etc. over boring stock footage until the craft is finally completed. Naturally, the first country to make it there is the U.S. of 'Murica.

A curiously tiny team (considering the importance of such a mission) is put together to go to the new planet, which has since been dubbed Nova. Dr. Richard Gordon (Douglas Henderson), an "expert of zoogeography" and the man who discovered the famous tar pits of Salt Lake City is the first signed to the mission. He's followed by mineralogist Dr. Nora Pierce (Patti Gallagher), physician Dr. Ralph Martin (William Bryant) and chemist Dr. Patricia Bennett (Wanda Curtis). No trained pilot? No problem! The rocket launch is successful and the quartet speed through their months-long journey to Nova. Since apparently there was little of interest to do during the trip, and space can be a lonely place, the two men and two women have paired off and are now romantic couples.

Upon landing, Ralph and Patricia slip on their suits and become the very first humans to touch ground on Nova, which they're delighted to discover is filled with trees and lush vegetation and has a pleasant temperature of 78 degrees Celsius. They first run some tests to see if the atmosphere is suitable for them. Though 40% of the microscopic bacteria detected is unknown to man they do what all highly intelligent and educated scientists would do in a similar situation: Say screw it, throw caution to the wind and remove their cumbersome suits. Early discoveries made include breathable air, potable water and identical animal species (deer, vultures, owls, bears, sloths...) that are found on the Earth. Analyzing some rock samples, Nora determines that the planet is comparable to Earth during its Prehistoric era. And you know what that means: Dinosaurs! Eh, kinda, well, not really...

After a day out in the field, our fearless foursome get lost on their trip back to the shuttle and are forced to camp out for the night. What follows would basically become Gordon's speh-see-ality later on: one animal attack scene after another. Patricia is menaced by a boa constrictor, Ralph has a wrestling match with an alligator, some kind of giant bug shows up at camp, makes some weird noise and is shot dead and the snake makes a return visit after dark. They also "adopt" a kinkajou (played by Little Joe - The Honey Bear) and spend much of the rest of the movie jerking the poor thing around by its tail.

Nora becomes infatuated with a nearby volcanic island ("What a desolate, forsaken place!") and eventually talks Richard into taking an inflatable boat over to it to check it out. There, they discover it's filled with giant reptiles, which I suppose are the "dinosaurs" of the title even though they're played by an iguana ("It resembles the Tyrannosaurus Rex of the Earth's prehistoric age" - Not!), an alligator, an armadillo and a salamander. The iguana and alligator engage in a duel to the death and the victor of that match-up then gets to battle the salamander. Nora and Richard become trapped in a cave as the "monsters" rampage outside, but manage to shoot off a flare to alert their colleagues. Can they get there in time to save them?

I'm used to the stock footage (though perhaps not the first ten minutes of a film being almost exclusively stock footage!) and the bad acting and the junk science and the laughable dialogue in Grade Z sci-fi films from this era, so none of that particularly bothered me with this one either. That said, there are few schlock movie transgressions worse than luring your audience in with the promise of one thing but giving them something else entirely. No matter how one films them, lizards (even ones with plastic horns glued to their head) and gators are not dinosaurs. And neither are armadillos. Not that this would have sucked any less had it been called King Lizard instead, but the deceptive title and marketing is certainly annoying. Had Gordon put someone in a rubber dinosaur suit or even just shot a plastic head that somewhat resembled an actual dino I'd probably have been more satisfied than what he did here. Even then, there are worse aspects to this production to bitch about...

Firstly, how these scientists decide to get themselves out of their predicament is one of the most astonishingly stupid things I've ever seen. As they're fleeing the island, one of the men has his light bulb moment. "I brought the atom bomb," he says as if he'd just remembered where he left his car keys, "I think it's a good time to use it!" They then make it back across the lake, detonate the briefcase bomb (set up to a timer!) and blow the entire island and all of its unique creatures to smithereens as if it's nothing! The crew then beam in the light of the atomic cloud, proud that they have "brought civilization to Planet Nova." There are so many logical and ethical issues with this that I don't even know where to begin!

Even worse is the treatment of the real animals. As bad as Gordon's special effects could be at times, they're certainly preferable to he and his crew mates throwing a couple of lizards together on a set and having them fight and kill one another. This is a topic that's frequently discussed in horror circles and viewers usually fall into two separate camps. There are those who argue that animals do this anyway and nature documentaries feature animals killing one another all the time so it's OK. And there are those (including myself) who believe that no animal should ever be harmed or killed for the sake of a movie and that documenting wild animals doing their thing is not the same as trapping them together to provoke conflict / fighting / death and then turning your camera on them. I mean, is that really much different than dogfighting, which is illegal in most of the world for a reason? To me, these scenes act as a dark cloud hanging over what is already a dull, stupid, poorly-made movie.

While no one is credited with doing the film's special effects (one can assume it was Gordon with assist from his then-wife, Flora M. Gordon, as per usual), the most impressive one is the brief appearance of a woolly mammoth, which was actually swiped from One Million B.C. (1940). The credits says it's based on a short story called "Beast from Outer Space" written by Gordon and Al Zimbalist (also one of the producers). Tom Gries, who'd later go on to make the excellent Manson TV movie Helter Skelter (1976), adapted the story. Many of these same people were behind another film called Serpent Island (1954), which Gries directed and Gordon produced.

There have been several DVD double feature releases for this 63 minute film. The first was from Retromedia, who paired it with the gorilla reincarnation (?) film The Bride and the Beast (1958). The second is from Kit Parker / VCI, who've paired it up with The Jungle (1952), which involves woolly mammoths in India. This was also ridiculed in a 1990 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, which itself was released on DVD by Shout! Factory.

R.I.P. B.I.G.

★

Image of the Beast (1981)

... aka: Thief in the Night III: Image of the Beast, A

Directed by:

Donald W. Thompson

A THIEF IN THE NIGHT (1973) and A DISTANT THUNDER (1978) both centered around Patty Myers (Patty Dunning), a young woman trying to survive and maintain her faith in a post-Rapture world where all True Christians™ have been swept away to heaven, leaving behind only a motley assortment of non-Christians and pseudo-Christians who hadn't yet gotten around to letting Jesus fully into their heart. Denied immediate entry into heaven for daring to be inquisitive, and losing her devout husband and most of her friends in the process, Patty and the rest of humankind were then thrust into an end-times scenario that included the rise of the Antichrist, 1984-style mass brainwashing campaigns, resource hoarding, evil military forces roaming the streets determined to collect souls for Satan, a flurry of natural disasters involving storms, hurricanes, drought, floods, earthquakes and more. 

In this Godless new world, being a Christian, and thus refusing to be perma-stamped with a mark of the beast "identification" symbol on either the back of your hand or your forehead, is basically a death sentence. Thunder concluded with Patty and several of her uncooperative friends being kidnapped, blindfolded and led outside, where they were faced with the option of either renouncing their faith or losing their heads.

After several are executed, including her roommate, Patty is led to the guillotine and then given the ultimatum. Her now dark-sided "friends," Jerry (Thom Rachford + his fancy mustache), Diane (Maryann Rachford) and Sandy (Sandy Stevens), all of whom have betrayed her at least once previously, try to convince her to take the mark. Initially refusing to answer one way or another, Patty is strapped down but then gets scared and has a last second change of heart: "I want the mark! I want the mark!" But God has other plans. He causes the sky to grow dark, powerful winds to blow and the ground to crack wide open, sending the executioners scurrying. As opposed to allowing Patty to sell her soul for a few more years on Earth, God sends the guillotine blade down on her himself.

With our series heroine out of the way in the first ten minutes, we're then introduced to some new folks. Leslie (Wenda Shereos), who managed to escape her execution because of all of the chaos, ducks into an abandoned building, where she finds Kathy Taylor (Susan Plumb) and David Michaels (William Wellman Jr.) already hiding out. Kathy was a Sunday school teacher and computer analyst whose Christianier-than-her husband was raptured, leaving her to care for their "thwee"-year-old son, Billy. Leslie made the mistake of thinking that helping handicapped kids, believing in God and regularly attending church meant she was a good Christian. Wrong! "When we say I, I did this and I did that, like I did, well, it only proves that we left out the only thing that really matters!," she explains.

So let that be a lesson, folks. You're really just wasting your time being a halfway decent person who helps others and contributes positive things to society in your earthly existence. Might as well just be a lying, thieving, greedy, abusive, adulterous, murderous, kitten-kicking, puppy-punching, rainbow-hating asshole. None of it really matters so long as you let Jesus into your heart at some point!

Attempting to flee, David commandeers a jeep and the three speed through the country. Leslie ends up getting shot. Incorrectly thinking she's been killed, David drags her body off into the woods and leaves it. The following day, David and Kathy stumble across scruffy Reverend Michael Turner (co-writer / executive producer Russell S. Doughten Jr.). Now living the life of a hermit in an abandoned barn, Michael's been able to sustain himself all this time using just two hens for eggs, a goat for milk and an apple tree. Pretty well, too, I might add, considering the pot belly.

Other than the fact he also financed the film and likely wanted to be put front and center, Doughy is around mostly to cover the same ground that was already covered in the first two films. This time he provides new / additional information about the seven "Trumpet plagues" and makes outlandish and patently untrue claims like China having "200 million horses" (!) in the late 70s. (I actually looked this up and there were an estimated 11.5 million horses in China in the late 70s... but who's counting!) Doughten is also given a huge illustrated end times chart that covers an entire barn wall; pointing at various "facts" as he goes like some kind of mad professor. You ever see a movie about a schizophrenic where they cover entire rooms with drawings and photos and write a bunch of letters and numbers and math equations all over the place and then draw lines everywhere to connect everything? Yeah, that.

At this point in the film, we're three years into Tribulation. There's been a "one-world" global government firmly established and a singular "world church," described as a "sin-infested humanistic body" and compared to a "great prostitute" (as opposed to a terrible one?) by Rev. Turner. Saints are being killed and then resurrected by demonic possession. Christians are being executed all over the world at an alarming rate, which has driven most underground. Small factions of rebels still exist and "144,000 Israeli missionaries" are going around trying their best to save souls. I realize some of this sounds kind of amazing, but they don't actually show anything. This is information relayed to us via radio and TV broadcasts and endless babble.

This tries to get all early 80s high tech with talk of code-breaking, computers being the "new golden calf," creating counterfeit "marks" to fool authorities, passages from a book called "Computer Prophecies" and such. David (using the identity of dead U.N.I.T.E. guard "Pat Ryan") and Kathy (going by the name "Jodie") are able to integrate themselves back into society using their fake IDs and get involved with Jerry and Diane (uh oh), who now claim to belong to a top secret organization called Believers Underground Movement Squad, or B.U.M.S. (!) for short. Despite all that's been going on, dumbbell Kathy thinks UFOs (!) are responsible for the current state of the world. She also tries to hit on David and gets rejected when he tells her she should instead worry about "a relationship with Jesus Christ." In actuality, he hasn't been able to forget Leslie who, unbeknownst to him, actually survived her gunshot wound and has been nursed back to health by an old X-tian farm couple.

This is slightly better acted than the first two due to their casting of a couple of people who actually had prior acting experience. Wellman, son of Oscar-winning writer / director William A. Wellman (1938's A Star is Born), who'd done decidedly non-Christian film work (Macumba Love, Black Caesar, IT'S ALIVE...) up until now, is OK in the lead. Ditto for his two female co-stars and a couple of others. Still, it's not enough to elevate the film. If anything, this is actually worse than the first two. Scratch that, it is actually worse.

The first ten minutes are solid, including a surprisingly suspenseful guillotine scene, but the entire mid-section is one talky, preachy, proselytizing, dull, insufferable slog. What little bit of action there is here is horribly staged, the introduced tech elements, probably here to make this feel more brainy and "scientific" (fail), go absolutely nowhere and the human interest stories all fall flat. As for the "horrifying" end of the world stuff, it consists mainly of someone squirting red food coloring into a stream and stock footage of forest fires and atomic blasts. This even manages to throw in a giant insectoid monster but disappoints yet again by only showing its leg and then a shadow of said leg.

There's lots of batshit crazy conspiratorial talk that could only come from truly deranged minds, none funnier than the film theorizing that Satan will be teaming up with the United Nations and global corporations to send Russian military forces (!?) to defeat Israel (!) and then steal all of their oil (!!) That's especially hilarious considering American evangelicals, Putin, Israel and corporate interests are pretty much all aligned these days. And I seriously doubt the UN and Russia are going to be seeing eye to eye anytime soon, let alone conspiring together on something. And, naturally, this is all really the fault of "the Jews" for blindly worshiping and helping to facilitate the rise of the Antichrist. (Seeing the corporate fat cats and wholly-corrupt politicians the evangelical community has been bowing down to recently, I wouldn't be so sure of that!) The film then proclaims that the Jewish community will only realize the error of their ways as their "groaning spirits" are descending to hell to be tortured for the rest of eternity. Lovely.

So then it comes as no surprise that the big "guest star" here is former Hollywood "beefcake" actor Ty Hardin, whose career started to flounder shortly after his four seasons on the western Bronco (a gig he reportedly got from pal John Wayne pulling some strings for him) concluded. In the mid-70s when the film and TV offers were drying up, Hardin became heavily involved with radical right wing politics both as member of the militia group The Arizona Patriots, an Aryan Nation affiliate known for stockpiling illegal weapons and distributing anti-Semitic literature, and as an extremist fundamentalist preacher who - at one time - ran his own ministry and was sometimes featured on the Christian cable network TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network).

Hardin (who passed away in 2017) used to have his own website / blog (since taken down, though archived), where he went on various bizarre rants. He called for an armed takeover of the government by “Christian patriots,” railed against “world globalists” and espoused views that were anti- government, immigrant, Catholic, Jew (referring to them as “sub-humans”), gay (he thought same sex unions would destroy “the sanctity of marriage” despite being married eight times himself) and black (he refused to refer to Barack Obama by name but instead as “our Black President”). I guess what I'm really trying to say is he fits right into this particular world in his brief role as a missionary giving a sermon in a papier-mâché cave.

Self-distributed on VHS by Mark IV Pictures Video in 1987 and now available on DVD and on numerous streaming services, this is 20 minutes longer than either of the previous entries, and it certainly feels it. The finale of the tetralogy was The Prodigal Planet (1983), which also stars Wellman, Thom Rachford and Thom Rachford's fancy mustache.

★