UNKNOWN ISLAND (1948)

Nature photographer Ted has gotten his rich fiancée Carole to pay for an expedition to a previously unexplored South Seas island; as a Navy pilot during the war, Ted had snapped a picture of what looked like a living dinosaur on the island, and he's hoping to take better pictures of them. At a bar in Singapore, they meet with the roughneck Captain Tarnowski to charter his boat, used to transport wild animals, to visit the island. Tarnowski brings along John, a former sailor who was trapped on the island during the war and saw giant monsters kill most of his fellow soldiers. No one believed his stories and, traumatized by his experience, he became a broken-down drunk. Once our cozy crew get to the island, they do indeed see dinosaurs and gorilla-type things. Ted gets his pictures, but Tarnowski decides he wants to take a creature back to civilization and get rich with it. Of course, mayhem follows, as creatures kill people, people kill people, Tarnowski assaults Carole, John falls for Carole, Carole falls out of love with Ted, and the natives abscond with the launch so everyone is stuck on the island. 

Anyone who comments on this inevitably compares it to both THE LOST WORLD (dinosaurs) and KING KONG (island with killer gorilla), though as this is strictly B-moviemaking, this will always lose out in direct competition. Coming out as it did in the late 40s, it’s interesting mostly as an odd outlier: too late for the mid-40s monster movie revival, too early for the sci-fi boom of the late 50s. It's in color, but it’s a cheap-looking process. The effects are not exactly terrible considering the era, with a mix of people in costumes, stop-motion models, and puppets; the creatures probably passed muster for younger viewers in the past. The final battle gets a bit gory with the gorilla-thing biting a hole in the dinosaur's chest. Between monster attacks, human melodrama takes center stage and it's difficult to care about any of the humans. Ted (Phillip Reed) is weak but not evil; John (Richard Denning) is a broken-down wreck but gets healthier; Carole (Virginia Grey) is bland, and all of them have murky motivations. That leaves only the brute captain (Barton MacLane) who does provide someone to root against. It's hard to like or dislike this film much, and I kind of enjoyed the dinosaur/monster scenes as I do with Gamera movies. [YouTube]