The Land Unknown Revisited

I've written about The Land Unknown (1957) before and how, when I saw it as a child I ended up confusing it with the Irwin Allen produced version of The Lost World (1960) - a recent re-watch served to emphasise just how similar the films are.  Obviously, both are 'lot world' films with a group of contemporary people discovering a remote environment where dinosaurs and other prehistoric creature still flourish, but beyond these basic scenarios, there are remarkable similarities in plot details between the two films.  Most obviously, both movies see the protagonists access their respective lost worlds via helicopter in the Allen film by design, in The Land Unknown by accident.  They also both feature a fight between two 'dinosaurs' - played, in both cases, by photographically enlarged lizards - which endangers some of the characters, both films feature an encounter with a carnivorous plant and both feature the discovery of a survivor from a previous expedition.  In the case of The Land Unknown, the survivor proves to be belligerent, trying to force the others to exchange the only woman in their party for a spare part from his crashed plane that they need to repair their helicopter.  By contrast, in The Lost World the survivor is blind and helps the others escape from the South American Indians who live in the lost world.  Sure, there are still plenty of differences between the two movies -The Land Unknown lacks the fiery volcanic climax of The Lost World, leaving its lost world intact for sequels (that never came) for instance, but the similarities left me wondering if Irwin Allen and crew had seen The Land Unknown before embarking on their film, lifting several elements in order to update the Conan Doyle story to the present day.

Of course, the most significant difference between the two films is that while The Lost World is clearly a big budget A-picture, with a cast of stars including Claude Raines, Michael Rennie, David Hedison and Jill St John, shot in De Luxe colour, The Land Unknown is more obviously a B-pcture, shot in black and white with a decidedly second rung cast headed by Jock Mahoney.  To be absolutely fair, The Land Unknown isn't quite a B-picture - it clearly had considerably more resources lavished on it than the latter day B horror and science fiction movies being put out by Universal at the time.  Indeed, it apparently started out as an A-picture, with plans to shoot in colour with some outside location shooting for the 'lost world'.  Unfortunately, Universal's expensive science fiction epic This Island Earth (1955) had performed poorly at the box office, resulting in the studio deciding that future science fiction subjects would be produced as B-pictures.  Consequently, the still in development The Land Unknown was scaled back - but not quite to B-movie levels - many of the special effects, for instance, are far more sophisticated than one might expect from a B-movie.  But the 'lost world' itself was confined to a studio set, black and white film stock was used and B-movie veteran Virgil Vogel was assigned as director.  The result is actually quite impressive, with excellent photography, a decent pace, good production values and better than average for a B-movie performances from the cast.  

Budget cuts mean that the first part of the film utilises a lot of stock footage of the real life US Navy Antarctic expeditions which had inspired it, (mainly 1947's 'Operation High Jump' and 1956's 'Operation Deep Freeze' - both beloved of crazy conspiracy theorists who believe that their real purpose was to fight those Nazis who escaped to the hollow earth accessed from the Antarctic).  Where The Land Unknown really scores over The Lost World, though, is in having better dinosaurs.  Whereas in the later, bigger budgeted, film all of the dinosaurs are portrayed by photographically enlarged lizards with stuck on rubber fins and frills, apart from those two monitor lizards duking it out early on, The Land Unknown boasts of dinosaurs that actually look something like dinosaurs.  These include a flying model pterosaur, a man-in-a-suit tyrannosaur and a full size mechanical elasmosaurus.  While the latter might not be exactly realistic, it is very impressive. Not only are these creature better than those in Irwin Allen's film, we also get to see more of them - The Lost World always disappointed me as a kid as it short-changed us in terms of the actual amount of dinosaur action on view.  All of which goes to show that sometimes a bigger budget isn't always better.