Valley of the Dragons

Two of my favourite types of movies are lost world pictures and films cobbled together using bits from other films.  1961's Valley of the Dragons ticks both boxes.  Claiming to be based on a Jules Verne story, it concerns two duellists who find themselves whisked off of the earth by a comet and deposited on another planet inhabited by various prehistoric creatures and cavemen.  Except that this other planet seems to be composed largely of stock footage from 1940's One Million BC.   Although not often seen these days, (the1966 colour Hammer Films remake, One Million Years BC,, featuring Raquel Welch in a fur bikini is more popular with schedulers), One Million BC's footage of 'prehistoric' monsters has turned up in countless low budget exploitation movies which you probably have seen.  Unlike the remake, which used Ray Harryhausen's stop motion animated dinosaurs, the original, (like the 1960 Lost World remake), used photographically enlarged lizards and crocodiles to represent dinosaurs.  It also featured elephants in woolly coats and fake tusks pretending to be mammoths and armadillos photographically enlarged to portray glyptodons.   Whilst none of these are particularly convincing, the resulting footage is, somehow, still quite impressive.

That said, there's a definite dark side to those scenes of volcanic eruptions, molten lava and dinosaurs fighting each other.  The reality is that many of the poor lizards used as dinosaurs actually did meet fiery deaths in the filming of those sequences: they didn't use stunt doubles.  Also, those 'dinosaurs' were made to fight by poking them with sticks and usually ended up doing each othermortal damage.  It was all pretty cruel. but par for the course in the 1940s as far as the treatment of animals on film went.  But One Million BC isn't the only film raided for props and footage by Valley of the Dragons.  I'm pretty sure the Morlock costumes from the George Pal's 1960 version of The Time Machine can be seen in the trailer.  The re-use of props and costumes in low-budget genre films of this era was quite common - I've lost track of the number of times I've seen the spacesuits from Destination Moon turn up in other movies, for instance.  Whilst it is a cheap way to make a 'new' movies, there is undoubtedly a great deal of skill involved in integrating the stock footage with new scenes and actors to create a reasonably coherent whole - I always enjoy trying to spot the joins and love the way the stock footage is re-edited and re-ordered to fit it to a new story line.  I really need to get out more....