One Million Years B.C.

1966 caveman movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Tumak can't find any friends, probably because he acts like a caveman, spending all his time grunting and fighting over food. He's thrown out of his tribe of cavemen (the rock people) and finds refuge with another group of cavemen (the cave people) who happen to include a scantily-clad Raquel Welch. The cave people end up not liking him very much either and boot him out of their home. Tumak's forced to buy a book--How to Win Friends and Influence Cavemen--and try to survive with Raquel Welch as giant turtles try to devour them.

I don't want to sound like a pervert or anything, but Harryhausen's dinosaurs are really sexy in this thing. After some embarrassing stock footage of volcano spewing, the effects do pick up with big lizards and big spiders and some stop-motion turtle action. The dinosaurs are really well done, and I was especially impressed with the human-creature interaction. Smooth. These may be Harryhausen's most realistic dinosaurs, and as always, it's fun to watch him play with his toys. The real stars of the show are probably Raquel Welch's parts though. There's one scene where she's stabbing at a fish right before Tumak falls into a lake. I'm not an expert on psychology or anything, but I'm pretty sure I know what Freud would have say about that. In a way, it reminds me of every single dream I had as a middle schooler. As a movie, this is a lot more boring than good. It's an hour and a half of dirty fur-dressed people grunting in a desert, and if I wanted to see that, I would have gone to my family reunion.

First Men on the Moon

1964 documentary

Rating: 15/20

Plot: International lunar landers touch down at the same exact spot on the moon where they'll find a piece of paper and a withered flag proving that people had actually already visited the moon seventy years before. Back on earth, they visit the elderly and likely cuckoo former writer/amatuer astronaut to get the scoop. The scoop turns out to be really silly!

Here's a movie featuring Ray Harryhausen's effects where the effects don't completely steal the show. The effects you'd see and say, "Oh, that's Harryhausen alright," are even more of a distraction than anything else. At times, the moon beings, anthropoids with bee features, are animated but most of the time they're costumed people. Kind of weird. You also get a skeleton and a pair of monstrous centipede things. With the latter, it's almost like Harryhausen said, "Hey, I still have some time. Let me throw another creature in there." Now, the space effects and the moon atmospherics are impressive. I really like this version of the moon, one that would no doubt annoy the type of person who looks for scientific accuracy in their sci-fi films. I really enjoyed the set design though. This is better acted and written than your typical B-picture, dialogue peppered with some humor and good characterization. Edward Judd and Martha Hyer bust out of what could have been pretty generic roles as a pair of lovers, and Lionel Jeffries is very good as a crazed scientist character, very reminiscent of Back to the Future's Dr. Brown actually. I figured I'd mention him since I'm seeing Back to the Future references everywhere these days. I like the story despite the goofiness (Jeffries' character has created an anti-gravity paste which he applies to a metallic bulb in order to travel to the moon; the characters wear diving outfits for the trip), and it's only a big moment and a much better ending away from being really good. That ending, which just sort of grabs you and jerks you out of the story before throwing a "The End" on the screen, really is a stinker. Definitely worth checking out for fans of Harryhausen, H.G. Wells, and creatively preposterous science fiction movies.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

1958 adventure

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Oh, snap! A bald magician with a lust for lamps has turned Sinbad's average-sized girlfriend into a really tiny girlfriend. Sinbad must return to the mysterious island where the giant cyclops lives in order to get a piece of a two-headed bird's egg so that his girlfriend can once again return to normal size. It's adventurous!

Ok, so the story is really goofy. And the acting is about as bad as it gets. But once again, Harryhausen's ingenious effects are there to save the day. A horned cyclops with fuzzy legs, a breathing and tail-swinging dragon, a four-armed green woman, two-headed birds, another swashbuckling skeleton. What more could you want? The film climaxes with a fight between a cyclops and a dragon which, along with the dinosaurs fighting in Gwangli, makes it completely obvious that Harryhausen was just an imaginative little kid who made his playtime available for everybody else to watch. My biggest gripe about this, other than the acting which is truly horrific, is that the genie is played by a little kid when a midget could have easily been substituted. Right up there with Argonauts and maybe even more enjoyable as it has just as many monsters while not being as long.

Jason and the Argonauts

1963 mythological romp

Rating: 16/20

Plot: All young Jason wants to do in life is put together a slow-pitch softball team that ccan ompete for the national title. What's standing in his way? An addiction to medication for hyperactivity and his own phallic hallucinations. Not having any previous problems with hyperactivity, the medication slows him down significantly as it makes him hypoactive and languid and forces him to pay far too much attention to things, sometimes waiting for days for somebody to finish a story that was already long finished. The hallucinations (a giant phallic bronze statue, harpies, a multi-phallic lizard, a grotesquely lopsided dildo, a talking phallic figurehead) also slow him down in his quest to find softball talent as he's thrown him trembling into the corners of his phallic ship. Can he find a starting pitcher before the big tournament begins?

It's too bad there's so much cheese on the edges of this epic. At the heart, you've got some of Harryhausen's best work. The story is pretty stupid and sprawling with that mythological goofiness. There's not a lot to love when there's not monsters on the screen. I'm not sure this story would even make a lot of sense to anybody without at least some background in mythology. The characters are also wooden, and they aren't helped by trite dialogue. But it's easy enough to forgive that when you've got classic action sequences like when the giant statue guy pops out from behind the mountain or when those skeletons start doing their skeletal thang. Bitchin' stuff! Despite its problems, it's at least as good as anything Peter Jackson's done with the possible exception of Meet the Feebles.

The Valley of the Gwangli

1969 dinosaur western

Rating: 15/20 (Abbey: 20/20)

Plot: Somewhere just south of the Rio Grande, a cowboy circus manages to procure a special new attraction--a miniature prehistoric horse called an eohippus. Female cowgirl/circus performer T.J., whose act jumping with a horse into a pool of water has become stale, trains the eohippus, despite warnings from the gypsies that this will lead to the deaths of everybody involved. Meanwhile, her ex-boyfriend/circus colleague turned entrepreneur Tuck Kirby rides back into her life with a business proposition. An archaeologist, a midget, and a Mexican child called Lope also get into the mix as they travel to the Forbidden Valley and find out that there's more there than just itty-bitty horses.

Cowboys fighting dinosaurs? Hell yeah! You can almost imagine the meeting where this idea was pitched to executives. "Wait a second. Did you say it would be cowboys fighting dinosaurs. Let me stop you right there because I don't need to hear another word. Let's roll!" This is the movie for you if you've ever wanted to watch a T-Rex eat a midget. The special effects (Harryhausen again) are great even though the dinosaurs do occasionally change colors. There's an amazingly well-done shot involving the cowboys lassoing the dinosaur, and I have no idea how that was pulled off. The placing of the stop-motion animation within the landscapes amongst the actors is nearly seamless, and there's a couple nifty fights between the T-Rex and another dinosaur and later between the T-Rex and a performing elephant. The music's a bit much at times, but the sound effects are really impressive--lots of great screams, screeches, and dinosaur roars. The story is super-goofy and a little too reminiscent of King Kong except the T-Rex doesn't seem interested in having sex with the leading lady. Writer Willis O'Brien did work on King Kong. This dinosaur movie is superior to Jurassic Park despite the lack of Jeff Goldblum. At least it's more fun.

It Came from Beneath the Sea

1955 science fiction monster movie

Rating: 11/20

Plot: When Commander Pete Mathews' submarine is attacked by the unknown in the depths of the Pacific, a pair of marine biologists who just happen to sleep together are hired to investigate. They use B-movie science to figure out that the attacker was a gigantic radioactive octopus. Well, of course it is! The Navy and scientists have to act fast as the monster destroys other ships and plunges toward San Fransisco. But there's also time for a really awkward love triangle.

First off, the Harryhausen animation is, as expected, excellent stuff. Watching the creature destroy the Golden Gate bridge, tear down a building, and squash San Fransicoans is a lot of fun. Unfortunately, there's a lot to trudge through to get to the good stuff. There's not even a tentacle until the 27 minute mark and after that, there's not another octopus sighting for another 30 minutes before the assault on the bay area begins. Now I'm not the kind of guy who is easily aroused by the sight of tentacles and must have constant tentacle action in order to enjoy a movie, but the rest of the movie should at least give me a little something. The stock characters are the exact opposite of interesting, the writing's trite, and that aforementioned love triangle is just a bizarre distraction. And there's so much talking. All-too-typical and a little on the dull side. My advice would be to keep a finger on the fast forward button until you catch a glimpse of one of those sexy, sexy tentacles.

Note: I do like that the title is a complete sentence. I think I'm going to seek out movies with complete sentences as titles. I welcome suggestions.

Note: Ok, I probably am the type of guy who is easily aroused by the sight of tentacles.

Ray Harryhausen: The Early Years Collection

2005 anthology

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Early works of special effects maestro Ray Harryhausen, some of which was filmed in his garage or backyard. Contains Mother Goose stories, fairy tales, some military instructional films, a pair of commercials, and sketches and experiments for projects barely conceived.

Love this stuff. There's such a charm to stop-motion anyway, but with Harryhausen, there was such character and personality in the animation. Lots of "How's he doing that?" moments here, and lots of subtle touches (slight head movements, a little twitch of an ear, a hand on the hips) that leave no doubt about the genius of this guy. It's impossible not to watch this stuff and not see the amount of love that goes into these effects. Magical!

20 Million Miles to Earth

1957 science fiction monster movie

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Following an expedition to Venus (which as all you astronomers know is 20 million miles away from earth), astronauts crash land off the coast of Sicily. Some fishermen and an annoying little boy come to the rescue, but all but one of the astronauts perish. That lone survivor manages to escape with only a scratch on his arm. Later, the annoying little boy discovers a giant (plastic?) tube of green slime. He does the smart thing--opens it, plays with it, and sells it to an old man with lots of cages. Havoc ensues when the Venus creature begins to rapidly grow and threaten to destroy Rome. Oh, snap!

Hokey dialogue, very obvious blue/green screen effects, an incomprehensible disregard for science (and common sense), and a plot parallel to King Kong in far too many ways. . .all overshadowed by the awesome stop-motion effects of Harryhausen as the giant lizard thing busts through walls and bridges and wrestles with people and elephants. Sure, I'll continue preaching that special effects can not make a bad movie good. I can live being Mr. Double-Standard. I'll take these stop-animation effects over CGI and other modern tricks any day! My biggest gripe: My hope that the monster would fight Chuck Norris near the end of the movie left me slightly disappointed. Was that a faux-Wilhelm in there? Fun, fun movie.