When Dinosaurs Walked the Soundstages

THE VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969)

Here's one dino movie that doesn't try to pass off Gila monsters as dinosaurs, so it's ironic that there's a Gila in the flick anyway: the leading lady. She is the monstrously bad European starlet Gila Golan, acting in that "I cannot talk-a so good maybe but you look-a dese!" way so dear to the hearts of connoisseurs of Starlet Cinema. Ray Harryhausen created the other prehistoric goodies, which are the most convincing ones ever made--especially Gwangi, the eponymous Tyrannosaurus rex--so it's too bad for Harryhausen that the script, set in Mexico at the turn of the century, is crammed with unintentional laughs from start to finish.

The story grafts together a cowboy flick, a circus movie and a dinosaur yarn. Since Golan plays the circus-owning cowgirl anxious to capture a dinosaur as the main attraction, the movie really ought to have been called Annie Get Your Gwangi. There's a moment of blissful camp when Golan does her best circus trick, riding her horse up, and then off, a tall diving tower into a tub filled with water--what other film has ever gone to such lengths just to get a bimbo into a wet swim-suit? The hilarity moves into high gear when Gwangi stomps into the film, killing cowboys and other dinosaurs (but not, alas, Gila Golan).

Though a fight between the T. rex and a triceratops is remarkably like the same sequence--by the same special effects wizard--in One Million Years B.C., and the scene where Gwangi breaks free of his cage in a crowded stadium is exactly like the finale of the King Kong remake, made seven years later, we're happy to report that the big finish of The Valley of Gwangi is like nothing else. With Gwangi on the rampage, frightened extras hurry into their village's cathedral and so does Gwangi. The film's other bimbo, cowboy James Franciscus, shouts to Golan what priests have been saying about sinners since time began, "Quick, out the back way! I'll try to lock him in!" Go ahead and laugh, ye of little faith, but it works: When the utterly unrepentant Gwangi tries to eat the church organ, Franciscus brings a new twist to the old movie cry "Torch the monster!" by burning the cathedral to the ground.

AT THE EARTH'S CORE (1976)

This film is to the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel of the same name what its star, Doug McClure, is to acting: a hilariously awful also-ran. From the opening scene, where "geological engineer" McClure and his buddy, scientist/inventor Peter Cushing, hop into their invention "The Iron Mole"--a phallic-shaped ship with a giant corkscrew on its front--to drill deep into Mother Earth, the unintentional laughs never let up. When McClure extinguishes his big cigar before the voyage, and then relights it when they get to the earth's core, we half expect him to ask Cushing, "Was it good for you, too?"

What do they find in the center of the planet? Some guy in a terrible Tyrannosaurus rex suit, wearing a face mask that includes, of all things, a giant parrot's beak. "Have you ever seen anything like this before?" wonders McClure, who's apparently never viewed a Japanese monster movie. Cushing just waves the creature away, muttering "Shoo! Shoo!" Every time the fellow in the dino suit returns, he's wearing a different mask, or wings, in hopes of convincing the audience that there are lots of dinosaurs on the prowl. "How enormous!" dithers Cushing about one of the dinos. "The largest remains we ever discovered have never indicated a size much larger than an ordinary crow!" The only one swallowing this crow appears to be McClure, who somehow keeps a straight face when a bevy of fellows in winged dino suits take him prisoner and (you guessed it) force him to remove his shirt.

Things pick up during a sacrifice of comely starlets, because after McClure has rescued the film's other bimbo, Caroline Munro, he has to square off against a stupendously silly dinosaur--not a guy in a suit, but what appears to be a large-scale version of a three-year-old's pull-toy apparently made the night before, out of still-damp papier-mache. What have we learned when the fabulously tacky At the Earth's Core is over? Why, that dinosaurs were felled not by meteors, not by the ice age, but by bows and arrows! Too bad that no stray arrows slayed the moviemakers, for they survived to make The People That Time Forgot, before becoming forgotten people themselves.

THE LAST DINOSAUR (1977)

You'll realize you're in for something special during the titles, because this movie boasts a theme song with these lyrics, crooned by the once respectable thrush Nancy Wilson: "His time is up/There are no more/He is the last diiiino-sauuuur." From the movie's outset, Great Game Hunter Richard Boone, the richest man in the universe, pooh-poohs the very notion of one-of-a-kind animals: "They haven't even found the Loch Ness monster," he intones hammily, "but it's already on their endangered species list!" As Boone's manned oil drill, the "Polar-Borer"--a duplicate of the phallic-shaped corkscrew ship in At the Earth's Core--has discovered a prehistoric valley, he quickly rounds up a group to "safari" there with him: a male starlet, a Nobel Prize winner, and a "Masai tracker." Boone insists, "No women!" but liberated photojournalist Joan Van Ark changes his mind by first dressing up as a submissive geisha girl, then doing a striptease so we can see how she looks in a clingy evening gown! Boone makes cracks like, "Here's to a giant step backward for mankind!" but he can't help responding to Van Ark's ploy--his character's name, after all, is Thrust.

The aptly named "Bore Expedition" corkscrews its way to a land that's teeming with such fearsome inhabitants as dinosaur puppets and an elephant sporting a prehistoric toupee. Van Ark befriends a cave woman and helps to civilize her by showing her how to cook a chicken, then how to rinse out Van Ark's hair after it's been washed. The cave woman is such a help around the campsite that the cast starts calling her "Hazel the maid."

When, at last, the "last" Tyrannosaurus rex shows up and is just another guy in another bad monster suit, one of the actors says exactly what we're thinking: "Unbelievable!" After the dino eats the Nobel Prize winner--a warning to intellectuals everywhere--Boone wants to kill it, and when Van Ark says he shouldn't, Boone snarls at her, "You ding-dong!" then later thunders, "It will continue to plague us until we are chewed and swallowed!" However, it's Boone who's chewing--the scenery. Though they stone the T. rex with papier-mache boulders and hurl insults at it--"You punk!" and "You pea-brained nothing!" are our favorites--the group can't seem to kill the dino. In the demented finale, Boone bids adieu to his safari and stays on to battle the "last" T. rex till one of them drops. Oh, did we mention that Boone plans to settle down with the cave woman? Alas, a sequel was never made.

BABY... SECRET OF THE LOST LEGEND (1985)

"Downright Jurassic," observes scientist Patrick McGoohan about an old fossil, but "downright Dumbo" would be the more accurate call on this film's old plot, the meant-to-be-heartbreaking-but-we're-afraid-it's-sidesplitting saga of a baby brontosaur whose papa is killed, and whose mama is stolen, by villainous paleontologists. That, however, is the least of the baby dino's problems, for it has the dispiriting task of acting opposite Sean Young. It's impossible to say which of these creatures gives the more artificial performance. Cast as a good paleontologist, Young demonstrates her knowledge of all things dinosauric when she says, about Baby, "Isn't her skin nice?"--at precisely the moment you'll be asking, "Jeez, what's this thing made out of, recycled Hefty garbage bags?"

But you won't be thinking about how the bronto looks for very long--not with a plot that includes such unintentionally funny howlers as Baby kicking Young's hubby, William Katt, in the groin, or Baby rescuing Young from a bat attack, or Baby getting its head stuck inside a pair of Katt's jockey shorts, a moment so preposterous that a monkey in the scene pulls them off Baby's face in disgust. There is, of course, more. Captured by a fierce tribe of West African natives, Young befriends them by taking Polaroids of them and, yes, getting them to pose in yearbook-style group shots. When Katt, the star of this film's bimbo sequence, strips to take a swim in the river, Baby sneaks up from behind and appears to goose him. This is topped by the scenes where Young and Katt start to make love, and Baby horns in on the action with his little head and long neck, like a sexually curious E.T. We're not making any of this up: one smooch scene winds up with Katt wailing, "It kissed me!" (He's talking about the dino, not Young.)

Although the movie seems to end with McGoohan killing Baby, no such luck. Baby's mother comes along to chew McGoohan to death-- which is patently ridiculous, since she's so obviously made by the same people who turn out all those Macy's Thanksgiving Day hot-air balloons--and the sound of the viewer laughing out loud apparently revives Baby from a near-death experience (but it's too late to save the movie).

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Brian Hirsch wrote "Be Careful What You Wish For" for the March issue of Movieline.

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