Unknown Island (1948)

Unknown Island (1948)

Directed by: Jack Bernhard

Starring: Richard Denning, Virginia Grey, Barton MacLane

Man, I like IMDb and all, but I’m starting to get pretty fucking tired of the obtrusive pop-ups they’ve got recently (and firefox won’t even block them, dammit). Also, why the hell would I care that Mamma Mia! is coming out tomorrow when I’m looking up 40’s monster movies? Do people who like really lame rubber dinosaur outfits also like musicals about being a 40 year old woman? …Okay, don’t answer that, because there’s a demographic I want to stay far, far away from.

In Unknown Island, a photographer and his wife (Grey) charter a rough big game hunter/ steel ship captain (MacLane) to take them to an island that they found that apparently has dinosaurs on it, so he can take pictures of the dinosaurs. To lead them to this island (despite the fact that they’ve already taken pictures of it from the air and know where it is), they recruit a survivor from an earlier expedition to the island (Denning). At first he’s an alcoholic with massive PTSD, but after about five minutes he inexplicably turns into a completely different character and becomes a paragon of values.

Anyway, they go to the island and see a lot of guys in really cheap plastic dinosaur costumes and one guy in a sorta orangutan/yeti getup. They look shocked and shoot at them, but never really accomplish anything. Because of this, the captain decides they aren’t leaving until he catches one alive, much to the chagrin of the rest of the crew who don’t really want to get eaten by dinosaurs. About this time the captain catches “jungle fever,” which is some flimsy plot device to make him go crazy and drink a lot. He waffles a bit about whether he’ll let anyone else off the island until he gets eaten offscreen and our heroes can escape.

Oh, did I mention that this movie is King Kong without good effects or the whole cool part at the end? Someone took the first twenty minutes of King Kong, added a drunk pirate, and stretched it out to an hour and a half. Easily the best part about it was… well, the bad effects, haha. You can almost just see the suffering guys sweating their asses off as they wobble towards the scene in a tight sorta plastic-bag-ey dinosaur outfit. If thinking about people suffering to make an effect that’s just awful doesn’t make for good cinema, then I guess I have no idea.