King Dinosaur
King Dinosaur (1955) Rewatch? ✅
Oh, I love this film so much. It’s essentially stock footage: the movie with a bit of reptile action thrown in just in case you forget we’re supposed to be on a dinosaur planet here.
One of the most underrated film experiences is knowing that for a couple of decades, if you were in for some space dinosaur action somehow, you were actually in for some iguana footage. For me, when watching old films I’m always hoping for some iguana footage, especially if it’s that stock footage of an iguana having a scrap that appears in so many things.
King Dinosaur being a Burt I Gordon film, where oversized animals and reptiles are pretty much their thing, does not disappoint in the iguana footage stakes. It’s a bit quiet to begin with but by the time we’re in the final third and they’re using an iguana for a Tyrannosaurus Rex, it’s iguanas all the way. Brilliant stuff.
The iguana stuff is great but it’s worth celebrating the earlier parts of the film too where perfectly normal animal footage is mixed in with some folks meandering through a field doing a science. It might be unremarkable were it not for a murder of crows being described as vultures and also, inexplicably, there’s a bear sliding down a tree as well. It’s solid gold library rummaging to make a film, it really is. Turns out, you can just say one animal is another entirely different one and nobody can stop you! Why more films don’t embrace this now, I don’t know.
Instead of spending all that money on a computer generated Kong for those big blockbuster movies, somebody could have just gone and put some stock footage of a marmot in it instead and had some guy meandering through some shrubbery point into the distance and go “ooh look, an ape”. Money saved, film improved, job done. Everyone goes home early.
King Dinosaur is a bit of a luxurious, easy watch. It’s one of my go to films for when my brain has jumped the shark and I just need to lie down and engage in the lowest possible effort film ever. It cheers me up every single time because, well, I don’t want to spoil it if you haven’t seen it but during the film’s cataclysmic final moments, there’s one last roll of the stock footage animal dice and it’s incredible. I dare anyone not to smile at it. It’s fantastic.
Long live King Dinosaur.