Bert I. Gordon's directorial debut, King Dinosaur, was released upon American audiences June 17, 1955. It was the first of his "low-budget special effects extravaganza" and was not received well. Its a story of four astronauts sent to investigate a planet that has entered the solar system. They discover a host of Earth-like creatures, many of them much larger than their terran counterparts. Stock footage was included, but the quality it was as poor as Gordon's movie.
Joel and the bots riffed King Dinosaur during the second season of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
I want to know is, if they escaped from the "King Dinosaur", why blow it up? If you're already clear, and he isn't coming after you, get in your rocket and leave.
The black and white, stop motion, science fiction, action movie The Lost Continent was released in theaters August 17, 1951. It starred Cesar Romero as Major Joe Nolan in the lead role and Hugh Beaumont as Ward Cleaver Robert Philips, a minor role.
When a nuclear missile goes missing, Nolan, his crew, and a team of scientists go in search of the wayward missile. They track it down to a mysterious, uncharted island. They have to climb to the top of a mountain to reach the rocket, and the rock-climbing sequence takes up much of the movie. It became the source of critics' ire. The film could've been shortened considerably had this section been shorter and replaced with more action sequences. As one critic mentioned, you can see all the action in the trailer.
The men find the rocket in the midst of a lush tropical forest inhabited by dinosaurs. Many of the team become dinosaur food before they manage to retrieve the data from the rocket. Then, they have to climb back down the mountain and escape before the entire island blows up from a dormant volcano which has begun to erupt.
Joel and the bots skewered this one on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I remember this being fun to watch, despite the lag in the middle. I'm reminded of Congo with Laura Linney and Ernie Hudson, where they had to escape from an erupting volcano. In both movies, they ran through an abandoned village and some had to crawl over a river of lava on a downed palm tree.
Luis Alvarez, born June 13, 1911 in San Francisco, California, was an inventor, professor and a physicist, who won the Novel Prize in Physics in 1968. He worked on the Manhattan Project with Robert Oppenheimer in Los Alamos on the atomic bomb.
With his son Walter in the 1980s, Alvarez developed the theory that a huge comet is what made the dinosaurs extinct.
Alvarez passed away in September 1988 from complications from esophageal cancer.
