1925 silent adventure
Rating: 15/20
Plot: Adventurers travel to an island where dinosaurs still run around doing dinosaur things.
This is based on a story by Arthur Conan Doyle, and he appears at the beginning with a quote about giving joy for an hour to a boy who's half a man. I don't know what it means exactly, but it sounds perverse enough.
I'm not sure any of the science in this science-fiction adventure makes sense, but all I need to get going are some stop-animated dinosaur action. And there's certainly plenty of that! Add in a mischievous ape man who looked a lot like Moss Man from Masters of the Universe, and you've got me hooked.
I was actually hoping that Doyle himself played the ape man, but it was Bull Montana, a great name for an actor who made his career playing convicts and monkey men.
Outperforming even Bull Montana was Jocko the Monkey, a real monkey. You might know him from Harold Lloyd's film, The Kid Brother.
I'm not sure what to think about all the phallic symbols in this one. There's a lot of Freudian dinosaur action going on here! I did love the look of these creatures, and there was quite the variety of them. Most impressive is how you can actually see the Allosaurus breathing. There's also a nifty volcano effect and a shot of a boat moving over a map that showed travel like the plane in the Indiana Jones movies. I'm wondering what movie was the first to use that effect.
Also notable is the landscape in this movie that supposedly takes place in the Amazon. This might seem familiar to fans of the best Pixar movie:
Apparently, it's based on a real place--Mount Roraima in Venezuela. Who knew?
New word learned: coleopterist, a collector of beetles.
Even though I'm really on a roll here and writing beautifully about this movie, I have to end this. It's a very good silent adventure movie, better than almost all of the Jurassic Park movies, and fans of Ray Harryhausen will likely enjoy seeing something that likely inspired his work. I'd like to think, as a matter of fact, that this movie led to Harryhausen's first experience with masturbation.
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