Unknown Island (1948)

Being something of a sucker for dinosaur and lost world movies, I finally caught up with Unknown Island (1948) in its entirety the other day.  Interestingly, for what amounted to an independently made low budget programmer, the film was shot in colour - all the better to show off those monsters.  What's clear from early on is that Unknown Island badly wants to be King Kong (1933) - well, at least the Skull Island portions of King Kong that is.  Obviously, with its limited budget and special effects, there is no way that it could hope to emulate the New York climax of the latter.  But we do have the expedition to an uncharted island, teeming with prehistoric species, with the aim of capturing at least one example and returning it to civilisation. To this end, the hero and heroine (the former of whom had, as a wartime Navy pilot, spotted the island and its inhabitants), hire a shady sea captain who specialises in capturing and transporting exotic wild animals for zoos and whose ship is conveniently equipped for such purposes.  There are also a bunch of superstitious and murderous natives, (although these are part of the crew rather than being inhabitants of the island).  

But what makes or breaks any such movie is the quality of its monsters.  Interestingly, at a time when there were two established methods of representing dinosaurs on screen - the expensive use of stop motion models or the cheaper expedient of photographically enlarged lizards - Unknown Island instead opted to use a combination of puppets and men in monster suits.  While lacking the relative realism and anatomical correctness of stop motion, this method does mean that the creatures shown st least look like dinosaurs, rather than big lizards with latex fins and horns stuck on them.  The man-in-a-suit variety shown are the bipedal predatory dinosaur Ceratosaurus, which, obviously, lends itself to this method of depiction.  While they look rubbery and the costumes severely restrict the movements of the actors wearing them, they really aren't too bad.  Unlike stop motion models or lizards, they didn't have to be shot against miniature sets - the use of real landscapes and back projection when interacting with actors to give a sense of scale, helps give them an air of quasi-realism.

As with many such films, extinct species from several different geological periods are happily mixed together, with little regard for evolution.  While Ceratosaurs and Sauropods might have been Jurassic contemporaries, the Dimetrodon was from the Permain and not actually a dinosaur.  (In reality, it really was a big lizard with a fin - Unknown Island does get their size about right, though, unlike many other cinematic depictions).  Most bizarrely, the main rival to the Ceratosaurs on the island turn out to be giant ground sloths, a a type of prehistoric mammal from the Pliocene period, long after the extinction of the dinosaurs.  Not only were these, in reality, herbivourous, but, if their contemporary relatives are anything to go by, were hardly dynamic.  Yet the version depicted in the film leap around fighting dinosaurs, tearing great chunks of them out with their teeth.   In fact, the film version look far more like giant red-haired apes.  Which isn't surprising as, inside the suit, was Ray 'Crash' Corrigan, one of Hollywood's premier ape suit performers.  

Unusually for the genre, Unknown Island doesn't end with some cataclysmic volcanic eruption destroying its lost world, instead seeing the surviving expedition members escape back to the ship on a raft, (their boat having been stolen and wrecked by those mutinous native crewmen), after having witnessed a fight between two of the giant monsters, another genre staple.  In this case, an ape, sorry, sloth, goes hammer and tongs with a Ceratosaurus, before they both fall over a cliff to their deaths, (not only referencing Kong's fight with a Tyrannosaur, but also echoing a similar scene in The Lost World).  The closest thing to stars the film can muster are B-movie science fiction specialist Richard Denning as the heroic Navy veteran who had once been stranded on the island and veteran heavy Barton MacLane as the leery captain with designs on the heroine.  All of the regular B-movie jungle adventure tropes are present, including mutinous natives, love triangle, scuzzy dockside dive where dubious sea dogs can be hired and drunken sea captain/big game hunter and, in the final analysis, the dinosaurs and other prehistoric monsters are really only window dressing for an otherwise pretty standard adventure film.  The whole thing is moved through its seventy five minutes at a reasonable pace by specialist B-movie director Jack Bernhard.  Ultimately, it is a pretty standard B-movie adventure, lifted above the average by the use of colour and its superior dinosaurs.  It might not be King Kong, but it does provide some decent small scale entertainment.