DINOSAURUS! (1960)
Article #178 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 9-10-2001
Posting date: 1-24-2002

A construction crew on an island pulls the bodies of two dinosaurs and a caveman out of the ocean. When lightning strikes them, they revive and begin roaming the island.

The third collaboration between Jack H. Harris and Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr. was a major disappointment. Neither THE BLOB nor THE 4D MAN were perfect, but they fleshed out their stories with some well-developed and interesting characters; in this movie, almost all the characters are one-dimensional, dull or annoying. Also, the dinosaur special effects are subpar, though it is nice that they used stop-motion rather than going the slurpasaur route. It would have been really nice to see what Harryhausen would have done with the final setpiece of the movie, where a man fights a T-rex with one of the vehicles on the construction site. I did find one performance I really liked in this movie, though: Gregg Martell gives a wonderful little performance as the cave man. I especially like the sequence in the house, where he is quite convincing as a man dealing with a world and a technology unfamiliar to him; for me, this scene is the highlight of the film.