Dinosaur Movies: Part 6

Everybody remembers One Million Years BC (1966) as the movie in which Raquel Welsh wears the fur bikini. She also had perfect hair--apparently, female hair care was invented even before the wheel or fire.

But my inner 8-year-old primarily remembers the magnificent Ray Harryhausen animation. A caveman vs. allosaurus fight; a ceratasaurus vs. triceratops fight; an all-too-brief shot of a brontosaurus walking through the desert; a giant turtle that I used to think was real (it was too life-like to be stop motion, I wrongly assumed during my errant youth).

It's all magnificent. The movie is a remake of a 1940 film that used photographically enlarged lizards to represent the dinosaurs. The remake does have a big lizard (and a big spider) appear briefly, but it otherwise sticks to stop motion to give us "real" dinosaurs.

The plot itself is perfectly servicable. Tumok of the barbaric Rock People is exiled from his tribe. He falls in with the peaceful Shell People. Despite helping save a child from a hungry allosaur, his uncouth ways tick off the Shell People and he's told to leave. But the beautiful Loana has fallen in love with him. She tags along with him as he braves the carnosaur-filled wilderness.

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The plot, though, is really just an excuse to set up the dinosaur set pieces. Some of Harryhausen's finest work is on display here. My personal favorite scene is the fight at the Shell People village between the humans and a small (well, maybe 9-foot-tall) allosaurus. It's a perfect blend of animation and fight choreography.

But Ray Harryhausen's single best dinosaur moment would come three years later. We'll take a look at that one in Dinosaur Movies: Part 7