They’re on a date. Bestiality will occur later.
For science nuts, Dinosaurus! (1960) is an abomination and a blasphemy – if you also don’t have a sense of humor. For the rest of us, it’s an agonizing stop-action / sock puppet movie set in the Virgin Islands. A crew of Americans are dredging out a bay at an island when they encounter two frozen monsters. In the interests of paleontology, they drag them up on the beach, much to the delight of the local cute kid, Julio. In the meantime, the local equivalent to a mob boss has been menacing the waitresses of the restaurant and Julio (the Americans are not impressed), but during the night, he inadvertently discovers the frozen body of a caveman. Smelling a cash cow, he pulls the body off the beach and into the woods.
The incoming tropical storm of the evening features lots of lightning, which functions as a giant automated external defibrillator (AED) for giants, and soon enough the monsters, a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Brontosaurus, are up and tromping about, making dinner out of the watchman (who, in a touch of humor, happens to be reading a comic book named Rip Van Winkle) and then charging off into the forest.
An unusual and, sadly, unfortunate element of this movie is the recovery of the caveman, who invades a local house and proceeds to puzzle over the sputterings of the short-wave radio, tries on the lady’s frilly dress (it doesn’t suit him), and is eventually discovered and befriended by Julio, who serves him a bit of pie after teaching him how to sit in a chair. In what’s otherwise a survival tale, the humor is ill-fitting, if earnestly presented, but has little function in this story.
The mob boss refuses to let go of his dream of riches, and despite the shrieks of the T. Rex in the forest, he and his minions (another couple of farce-specialists) track down the caveman. However, he proves hard to handle and escapes with Julio into the forest. Pursued by the mob boss, the T. Rex, and the leader of the Americans, Julio gets a ride on the Brontosaurus before he and the leading lady, who has little function beyond being cute, take refuge in the abandoned mine from the T. Rex. (We’ll skip over the uncomfortable near-sex scene of the caveman with the leading lady.)
T. Rex proves impervious to the Molotov cocktails dreamed up by the Americans, but soon enough the refugees escape and end up at the ruins of the colonial fortress of the island, where a moat of oil-fueled fire holds the T. Rex off until the leader of the Americans hits on the idea of forcing the T. Rex off a cliff and into the sea below using construction machines.
I shouldn’t have wasted my time reciting the plot. While the comedic element of the caveman was unusual and unwanted, it was otherwise the typical dinosaur survival story, or, to misquote Jurassic Park’s Ian Malcolm, a screaming and running movie. The Rip Van Winkle bit made me laugh, but otherwise it was all fairly boring. Perhaps in 1960 it was thrilling, but in the context of today’s CGI effects, it’s more a historical curiosity.
