King Dinosaur is a 1955 American science fiction film about scientists sent to explore a planet and are terrorised by marauding monsters.
Directed over a seven-day period by Bert I. Gordon in what was his film debut. The screenplay was written by Tom Gries based on a story by Gordon and his co-producer Al Zimbalist. The camera and other pieces of equipment were borrowed and the four cast members worked for deferred salaries.
The Zimgor Productions movie stars William Bryant, Wanda Curtis, Douglas Henderson and Patti Gallagher. Narration was provided by Marvin Miller.
The scene of the attacking mastodon was stock footage recycled from the One Million B.C (1940). There were only four actors in this film, the rest of the band and soldiers were just military stock footage, the atomic bomb explosions was also military stock footage.
Plot:
Five years into the future (1960), four scientists (zoologist Doctor Richard Gordon, geologist Doctor Nora Pierce, medical specialist Doctor Ralph Martin, and chemist Doctor Patrica Bennett) are selected as astronauts to travel to an ancient planet called Nova that has just entered Earth’s solar system. The crew begins studying the planet to see if it is suitable for a possible Earth colony.
After first discovering normal Earth animals such as a kinkajou which they refer to as a lemur, crows which they call vultures, and an alligator (a prehistoric species called Diplocynodon), they soon encounter and battle giant insects, an enormous snake known as Gigantophis, and prehistoric mammals like a Cave Bear, a Mastodon, and a Glyptodont.
Richard and Nora paddle a raft out to an island and are trapped in a cave by prehistoric reptiles, even a Tyrannosaurus rex (portrayed by a green iguana). They fire off a signal flare. Back on the mainland near their spaceship, Ralph and Patricia see the distress signal, grab the auxiliary nuclear power supply and paddle their raft out to the island to rescue Richard and Nora.
Before they leave the island, they set the power supply to “unharness” in thirty minutes and leave it on the island. After encountering more prehistoric creatures, they reach their spaceship. The power supply blows up the island in a nuclear mushroom cloud, rendering King Dinosaur and the other dinosaurs of Nova extinct.
Reviews:
“Apart from the quaint amusement of seeing common lizards posed as dinosaurs, King Dinosaur is marvelously constructed with one thing in mind: Pad it out to an hour & three minutes striving to make it look like something actually happened despite a budget that wouldn’t cover the cost of a box of Crackerjacks. It’s fun to observe how they did manage to give this thing the general impression of almost being a movie.” Weird Wild Realm
“King Dinosaur encapsulates everything that is so ‘bad’ with 50′s sci-fi: A ridiculous premise, shameless sexism, cheap special effects, no regard for any laws of physics or nature, jaw-dropping dialog, mounds of stock footage, and of course, a goofy monster: I love it!” The Monster Shack
“Everything in King Dinosaur is engineered backwards from the idea of getting the bare minimum of exploitable content on screen to sucker the first weekend’s business. A rocket ship … animal fights … giant monsters … and the Atom bomb! The escaping spacemen blast the dinosaurs on the island for no reason at all, except to provide an ending that would allow school kids to mumble a plot description that included a nuclear explosion.” DVD Savant
The pre-production title was Beast from Outer Space
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