Planet of Dinosaurs (1978)

Posted on Sep 19, 2007 under Sci-fi |

aka Planet of the Dinosaurs

Produced and directed by James K. Shea
Written by Ralph Lucas
Starring
- James Whitworth
- Pamela Bottaro
- Louie Lawless
- Harvey Shain
- Charlotte Speer
Executive produced by Stephen Czerkas

I am proud — proud, I tell you! — to own an ex-rental VHS copy of this movie from its 1985 release by Active Home Video. It’s a big rental box, the styrofoam-stuffed kind that quickly became a format exclusive to porno videos. There’s something so over-the-top in its cheesiness — a box needlessly twice the size of the tape it contains, plastered across the front with a painting that only vaguely resembles the contents (the dinosaur, at least, looks more or less like the T-Rex in the movie). It’s a prized possession, almost a holy relic.

On the other hand, I’m also very grateful for the newly restored Retromedia DVD release. The Active videotape was a murky pan-and-scan transfer that was really starting to show its age. And every time I opened the box, styrofoam beads went everywhere. (Though someone needs to help me out here. The movie was produced in 1978. The DVD is copyright 2006, and released just this year. The front of the DVD case proclaims it the “20th Anniversary Edition.” Am I just missing some fingers, or does that not add up?)

This movie is one of those hideously bad labors of love that you can laugh at and deride, but you just can’t hate. Partly that’s because it’s endowed with stop-motion animation several orders of magnitude better than any other production element. But partly it’s also… well, we’ll get to that.

“A brontosaurus? Amazing — they had paleantological mistakes on this planet too!”

The movie opens as any science fiction movie had to open in 1978: in space! A shoddy (yet earnest!) model labeled “The Odyssey” floats near an earthlike planet, as intraship communications start warning of a plot-convenient reactor problem. An escape shuttle detaches just before the main ship explodes. And what follows then is likely the clumsiest means of introducing a cast of characters ever, to wit: Captain Lee Norsythe (Louie Lawless) and his first mate Nyla (Pamela Bottaro) sit in their control cockpit, and every other survivor aboard reports in, in quick succession, on their viewscreen:

Communications officer Cindy (Mary Appleseth), whom you shouldn’t get too attached to;
Harvey Baylor (Harvey Shain), demanding Vice-President of Spaceways (and both the actor’s and the character’s names are Harvey, so you already know what his personality is going to be like);
Harvey’s “personal secretary” Derna Lee (Derna Wilde);
Ship’s nurse Charlotte (Charlotte Speer);
Navigator Chuck (Chuck Pennington);
Jim the Engineer (James Whitworth — the nearest thing to an honest-to-goodness movie star in the cast);
and Mike the assistant engineer (Michael Thayer).

Introductions over (in less time than it took you to read that), it’s time to crash! The shuttle comes in for a rough, Planet of the Apes-style water landing, and all of the characters make it out with survival gear through a porthole which would be convincing except for, well, this:

See that sunlight on his hand? That’s because the actors are jumping through a hole in a standing wall with no roof. A good idea, yes, but marred by the actors’ inability to keep their limbs in the shadow.

Once on shore, Harvey immediately starts demanding that this planet NOT be an unexplored globe and instead be a source of personal services for him. Meanwhile, Cindy remembers that the one piece of equipment she was in charge of — the emergency transmitter — is still floating in the water. Both she and Chuck dive in for it, but she ends up the lunch of some barely-seen aquatic reptile. No transmitter, sorry. (In shock, Chuck will spend the rest of the movie without the shirt he stripped off to dive in. Consider it a tribute and remembrance, if you will.)

*The Planet of Dinosaurs* Groovy Facial Hair Contestants!**
#1: Lee	#2: Jim
#3: Harvey	#4: Mike
#5: Nyla

Lee immediately takes charge and leads them off to explore and find a safe camping place in which to wait for rescue. If there will be any; an S.O.S. was sent from The Odyssey, but the ensuing explosion could have drowned it out. But thinking about that isn’t good for morale, so they take their one case of food concentrates, their handful of laser guns (which seem to break as easily as eggs), and start trooping across the landscape. And if you should happen to think that the landscape in question looks an awful lot like the place where Captain Kirk fought the Gorn, you’re right: The movie was shot in that familiar arid landscape in Vasquez Rocks Park, just outside Los Angeles.

And, naturally, there are dinosaurs. In that time-honored fashion in which alien planets and long-ago landscapes are populated solely with the most popular attractions from the Hall of Dinosaurs, this world is populated with brontosaurs and stegosaurs and styracosaurs (that’s a kind of ceratopsid, you know) and, naturally, a T-Rex around the margins of the story. Let’s ignore, for the moment, the fact that this parched hardscrabble landscape wouldn’t even support a band of foragers like our survivors, much less an ecosystem sufficient for herbivores the size of Volkswagen buses; dinosaurs are mistakenly associated with craggy deserts in the public’s expectation because that’s the kind of environment their bones are found in, never mind that the places that are desert now weren’t desert then. Let’s ignore the tendency toward one-per-species on display (okay, we do see three stegosaurs together, and two oviraptoresque things), scarcely indicative of a self-sustaining ecosphere.

“Whoa! Next time, I’ll just stick to tipping cows!”

Because the fact is, the dinosaurs are cool. Without researching the topic (what do you think I am, some kind of film journalism professional?), I tend to think that this was the last great gasp of the stop-motion monster movie; I’m pretty sure it’s the last stop-motion dinosaur epic. And maybe the impoverished flavor of the rest of the production makes the saurians stand out in comparison. But this is some good stop-motion animation here, folks. This is the kind that can still hold its own respectably against the weightless CGI critters that too often populate more recent movies. Doug Beswick, the chief stop-motion animator, and SFX contributors James Aupperle and Stephen Czerkas should still be proud, all these years later, for work that approaches the best the craft ever had to offer; and when a Rhedosaurus (the madeupasaur animated by Harryhausen for The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)) shows up late in the movie and gets chomped by the T-Rex, the inclusion doesn’t seem like an unsupportable moment of hubris affronting the work of the master; this movie’s got some spurs in that department.

(In fact, the dinosaurs were so good that you’ve probably seen the footage elsewhere since, in several other B-movies that needed only a second or two of dinosaur action. I think I’ve even seen the T-Rex in a car commercial.)

So. The dinosaurs are good. And the rest of the movie?

Well, the dinosaurs are good…

“Fine, I’ll do the hunting AND the cooking, but you do the cleaning up!”

This is a movie of good intentions and bad instincts. Unlike uncompelling flotsam like King Dinosaur (1955), there is some awareness here that compelling drama is human drama — there has to be conflict between characters, not just against the environment. Jim, the hulking and brooding engineer, feels that the best defense is a good offense, and wants to actively settle and clear land of predators for the long haul; Lee, as commander, wants to find a defensible position to hole up and wait for capture. And as Jim is the most capable person in the party, Lee can’t simply ignore or silence his objections and criticisms.

And that would be a good dramatic setup (in fact, in many movies it has been a good dramatic setup) that might have been successful here except for two factors:

“Noooo! This is my totty! You find your own!”

1) Good lord, these people cannot act. They try, heaven knows they try, and much energy is expended, but most of it ends up as heat waste instead of dramatic momentum. (Enjoy that metaphor? I thought of it myself.) True, Harvey plays a Harvey well enough that we long for him to bite it long before he does (whoops — spoiler!), and shirtless Chuck, forever in shock over the Comm officer’s death right in front of him, does a pretty good job of standing around stunned and beefcakey. But the rest… Even James Whitworth, who had enough of a career to be assumed competent in that regard, is bad in a different way — I tend to think that his monotonous scowly delivery is partly an attempt not to show up his co-stars by being notably adequate.

2) On the other hand, you could populate these roles with the most celebrated practitioners of the thespian arts, and they still would do no better than stumble awkwardly through the artless script like blindfolded lacrosse players. Every line of dialogue could be prefaced by the disclaimer: “I am about to say exactly what the plot requires me to say, at which point I will stop speaking.” The human performances end up coming across as less lifelike than the stop-motion sequences, and no less manipulated in their activities.

Oh, so THAT’S what movie that shot is from…

Lifeless dialogue, coming from the mouths of wooden actors with poofy hair dressed in godawful “futuristic” polyester, accompanied by an electronic score in the “experimental farting” style… Show me some dinosaurs again, quick!

And for all that, time spent watching this movie isn’t really time wasted. The good parts (the dinosaurs) are very good; the bad parts (all non-dinosaur parts) are bad enough to inspire jollity without much pain. I can’t say movies like this should be respected, but they can be enjoyed, and should be remembered.