MovieChat Forums > The Land Unknown (1957) Discussion > Universal's other dinosaur film....

Universal's other dinosaur film....


It's not exactly a precursor to Jurassic Park, but it is a fun little excursion into the realm of lost worlds and hollow earth stories. It's probably for the best that the film was made in black and white. I think it suited the scenery better to have it done that way and I think that the special effects would have looked far worse in color. That shot of the elasmosaurus reaching its head up to the cave entrance was cool, but it really had to be done in black and white.

Also, I'm not sure that they would have been able to show the fight between the two monitor lizards if it had been in color. That was a rather brutal mismatch. It's a damn shame that so many productions felt that animals needed to die whenever somebody went to an exotic location.

Lastly, I'm kind of suprised that everyone survived. Nobody got eaten. Nobody got trampled. Four people went into that tropical world and five returned. That's pretty uncommon for films like this, though I suppose there have been times when everybody made it out alright. If this were done today, there would have been a few casualties unless it was a comedy.

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I gather this film was supposed to have been shot in color, but Universal decided to cut costs and left it in b&w. But they did retain CinemaScope, making it the studio's only 'Scope sci-fi film of the 50s. (This Island Earth is its sole color sci-fi movie from the 50s.)

The idea of filming it in color came from the fact that the actual Antarctic footage used in the movie had been shot in color by Admiral Byrd's 1947 expedition and incorporated in the 1948 MGM documentary, The Secret Land. (A title which is not dissimilar to The Land Unknown, come to think of it.) I think this film might have worked in color, even with the variable quality of the monsters. Certainly it wouldn't have been any worse than other color dinosaur films of the period, such as Unknown Island (1948) or The Lost World (1960). Neither of those won any points for realism, but the use of color didn't detract from them either, and the effects in TLU were superior to both those films. The film was probably good enough to have survived the use of color, though I don't regret its being made in b&w.

(By contrast, Them! was also to have been shot in color until Warner Bros. pulled the plug on that two days before production began. But in that case, b&w added immeasurably to the story, and made it far more realistic. I don't think color would have been detrimental to The Land Unknown's special effects, or that b&w really added anything to the movie's mood or plot.)

But I agree that one of the more interesting aspects of the film was that everyone did survive, including the rather craven pilot whom you'd expect to see killed. Movies like this back then, not just today, usually killed off somebody the audience either liked (for pathos) or hated (for satisfaction). I wonder how many people even thought about this when they saw the film.

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Them! Was far better off in black and white than it would have been in color. And while it would have been interesting to see the Antarctica footage in color, I still think that the dinosaurs would have looked even shabbier in color. The scenery might have looked good, but I really couldn't see being impressed or even forgiving of the T.rex in color. But who knows? Maybe it would have been the same either way.

I think that the 1960 version of The Lost World was mildly entertaining, but I wasn't impressed with their use of lizards as dinosaurs or their need to pit them against one another in combat. I much prefered the silent film version with Willis O'Brien's stop motion effects. It's kind of interesting. The original was the first feature length dinosaur film, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself was said to have liked it, but it has yet to ever receive a worthy update.

And you're right about films of this variety looking for pathos or satisfaction with the casualties of films like these. In the scene where the Elasmosaur attacked Hunter, I expected it to be a "death equals redemption" moment for him. He tried to force himself on Maggie, and he may have been responsible for the death of one or more of his crew mates, but he saw the error of his ways and gave his life to save those of the exploration party. Instead, his attempted assault was forgiven because he failed at it and it was an act of isolation (not to mention that he received a beating as well) and his willingness to commit murder was relegated only toward defending himself against dinosaurs, not competing with other survivors for food and shelter.

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You can see the Antarctic footage in color whenever TCM runs The Secret Land, which they do maybe every 12-18 months. The copter crash was the real deal, also shot in color, and was too good to omit from the fictional The Land Unknown. In fact, I almost wonder whether the film was built around that shot: Hey, guys, we have this great color footage of a helicopter crashing into the Antarctic Ocean, what kind of movie can we make around it?

Although, in the movie, I don't know how they survived the freezing water after the crash, especially being as under-dressed as they all were!

Though it might seem likely at first glance that Hunter (too obvious a name) would be killed (probably herocially), it would probably have been seen as unfair, given the near-insanity that had overcome him in ten years of isolation and darkness, as well as his efforts to save the crashed crew from the dinosaurs, and showing them the wreckage of his old copter for spare parts.

I think The Lost World (1960) isn't as bad as its general reputation, either, but its big mistake was insisting on calling the lizards dinosaurs, something any 8-year-old knew was baloney. If they'd just said "monsters", it might have worked better.

But the 1925 version is so good that Harry Houdini asked to borrow reels of its dinosaur footage to show to a society of magicians (or maybe it was paleontologists), passing it off as actual footage of recently discovered living dinosaurs. It fooled all of them, and still amazes 87 years later.

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I could have possibly forgiven The Lost World for referring to the supposedly giant lizards as dinosaurs or prehistoric monsters, but they really shot themselves in the foot when they started referring to them by specific names. Referring to a monitor lizard as a brontosaurus is like calling an exotic equestrian animal a giraffe. Hey, yeah, isn't that thing supposed to have a long neck?

If I'm not mistaken, it was actually Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself who requested the footage in order to show it Houdini and his contemporaries. Following the death of his son, Doyle had become interested in mysticism and Houdini, a non-believer in magic, hoped to shame him out of it. Doyle decided to counter by proving that not all things in life could be explained. So, he brought the footage before Houdini and his peers and presented it as actual safari footage. While Houdini disputed the claim, he was at a loss to explain the methods used in making the dinosaurs move and function. It made good publicity for the film, stumping the master magician.

Thanks for the info on the helicopter crash. I wondered why they decided to throw that in at the end. I thought it was that they felt that the ending lacked energy and that a crash would add some drama and excitement. I had no idea that it was real.

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Your story about Houdini sounds more likely than the version I've heard, and it's doubly neat to find that Houdini himself was stumped by something. Magic!

I always realized the copter crash was real but had no idea of its provenance until I saw The Secret Land, decades after first seeing TLU. It does seem like some irrelevant plot development inserted into the film at the last minute, but as I said I guess they had to take advantage of such rare, real footage. I think what's surprising is they didn't include a scene in the copter just before the crash, where they realize they're running out of fuel or whatever and have to brace themselves for a possibly fatal crash, just seconds away from rescue and after surviving live dinosaurs for weeks (or, in Hunter's case, years). Simply using the real footage didn't generate much suspense, and it did both come out of, and go, nowhere.

Since the crew all survived, and must have told everyone on the expedition that they'd found living dinosaurs, it's also surprising that no one seemed to make anything out of what would be stupendous news, maybe the most astounding scientific discovery of the age. The last thing we see is Jock and Shawn romantically talking about their plans for next year: sex or another expedition? If you deem marriage a compromise, I suppose that would mean a sexpedition.

Hey, it's late.

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Yeah, they did kind of shoehorn that footage into the film without explanation or acknowledgement. They crash, they're saved, and then they talk about their future. The end.

As for the expedition options, I would have gone with the former rather than the latter. The compromise doesn't sound bad either though.

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Well, if they went back to the valley to check out the dinos, that would also serve as an excuse to get Shawn back into something scanty -- you know, to cope with the heat, swim with the pleiseosaurs, and so on. Not bad, for an Antarctic excursion.

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OP, did U notice that elasmo looked much like Reptilicus? Delicious with a little vinegarette.

Nil mortifi, sine lucre. No killing without payment. And then give a receipt.

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Heh. I didn't notice the comparison.

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