DINOSAURUS! (1960)

On a Caribbean island, engineer Bart and his associate & best buddy Chuck are doing some blasting along a beach in preparation for building a new harbor that will being more tourists to the island. Mike Hacker, the island manager (whatever that means), is against the project and, as if that's not villainous enough, he mistreats Julio, his young ward, right out in public. Arriving in the middle of blasting is Betty, Bart's blond girlfriend. She and Bart frolic underwater until she passes out in fright when she seems a monstrous face in the water. Bart and Chuck harness their equipment (no double entendre intended) and drag out two gigantic perfectly preserved dinosaur bodies onto the beach: a T. Rex and a brontosaurus. At the same time, Mike discovers a third find ignored by the engineers—the mud-caked body of a caveman. He hides it under brush and plans to retrieve it that night and make a fortune selling it. 

Young Julio thinks the dinosaurs might be alive because the eyes of one of them are open, but no one pays attention to him—until that night during a storm when lighting hits them and they are both re-animated. Julio, in the woods having run away from Mike, befriends the "good" herbivore dinosaur, and when Mike returns to claim the caveman, he finds that he is gone, reanimated as well. There follows a comic sequence in which the caveman looks inside a house and locks eyes with a woman in curlers and cold cream—they both run screaming from each other, though the caveman eventually returns and has some slapstick run-ins with appliances, and even gets a Marx Brothers moment in reaction to a full-length mirror. With the T. Rex on the rampage—he crushes to death a trolley car full of people—the caveman helps both Julio and Betty escape death as Bart and Chuck rally the townspeople to take refuge at an old fortress surrounded by a dry moat which they set on fire, hoping to drive the T. Rex away. Sadly, the friendly brontosaurus succumbs to quicksand, but it takes Bart and a big construction truck to save the village.

This feels a bit schizophrenic—sometimes, when it's focused on the caveman and the herbivore dinosaur, it's a kiddie matinee (believe it or not, the bad guy even gets a pie in the face!), and sometimes, when the carnivore takes the spotlight, it's a horror thriller. It’s not as bad as its reputation would have it, as long as you're up for the differing moods and the inconsistent special effects. In the scenes using stop-motion clay figures, the dinosaurs are brought to life fairly well. In some close-ups, they substitute large puppets, or perhaps people in costumes, that are much less effective. The climax, involving what is clearly a toy truck on a miniature cliff, is a little disappointing. Some viewers may enjoy the B-movie beefcakiness of Ward Ramsey (Bart) and Paul Lukather (Chuck) who have a nice, casual rapport with each other (both pictured at right), and Gregg Martell as the caveman. Fred Engleberg is appropriately slimy as Mike, the under-motivated bad guy (he's mostly bad because there needs to be a bad guy in a movie like this). Kristina Hanson and Alan Roberts are fine as the heroine and the kid, both of whom are mostly around to be saved from danger by the beefcake men. There's a character affectionately named Dumpy, another less affectionately named Mousey, and an outrageously stereotyped Irish guy named O'Leary who becomes the dinosaur's first casualty, sparing us from hearing that terrible accent for long. The movie looks nice and colorful, though the day-for-night sequences are not good. Enjoyable for those with appropriate expectations. [YouTube]