Saturday Monster Matinee:
The Land Unknown (1957)
by Weltraumbesty / KRP, 30th of May 2016
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A trio of naval researchers and an intrepid journalist find themselves lost in a prehistoric oasis after their expedition crash lands while investigating a mysterious warm water region in Antarctica. There they must contend with voracious dinosaurs, killer plants, and one crazed survivalist, all while trying to repair their helicopter before the endless darkness of the Antarctic winter closes in…
An alternately memorable and dull exercise in the sort of Mesozoic “lost world” archetype pioneered by Doyle and Burroughs and summarily exploited by countless pulp authors of the Amazing Stories era, Universal International’s ambitious sci-fi / fantasy romp The Land Unknown is a film that never quite adds up to the sum of its parts. Penned by frequent television scribe Laszlo Gorog (The Mole People) and directed by former editor and Universal regular Virgil Vogel (Terror in the Midnight Sun), Land was conceived as a big-deal color affair (a rarity for the William Alland-produced sci-fis), but was produced in more cost-effective monochrome after the pre-production on the expansive prehistoric sets and effects apparatus exceeded studio bean-counters’ expectations1. The resulting film, granted a little extra panache by way of Republic veteran Ellis Carter’s stark CinemaScope photography, makes fair use of its considerable effects flash, but is bogged down too early and too often by Gorog’s torpid dramatics. Out of all the science fiction thrillers produced during Universal’s mid-century golden age, this may be the one with the most lost potential.
That’s not to say that The Land Unknown doesn’t have its commendable qualities. With regards to the shear expanse of its fantasy world building it is one of the more impressive of its type and time, fondly recalling the endless studio jungles of RKO’s King Kong. Universal International’s largest production stage was transformed into a convincing primordial forest for the picture, and granted plenty of oppressive tropical atmosphere by a dense and perpetual haze of effects fog. The human cast’s Naval helicopter (seen both full-size and as an impressive large-scale miniature) makes for a tasty juxtaposition, all slick and angular and brazenly artificial, an alienated artifact of the modern industrial age lost in the film’s nightmarish prehistoric enclave.
Less effective than the setting, though certainly memorable in its own right, is The Land Unknown’s modest menagerie of monsters, realized by effects technicians Jack Kevan, Orien Ernest and Fred Knoth with a considerable assist from the fine special photography of Clifford Stine (Earthquake) and Ray Binger (The Hurricane). A scale Elasmosaurus that terrorizes the (perpetually unprepared) survivors from its lake abode is the most technically ambitious of the lot, a distant forebear to Bruce the Shark that must have been a devil to operate in its own right, though the rigidity of its mechanics prevent it from being as threatening as was perhaps hoped. Providing a lamentable counterbalance are a pair of dueling monitor lizards (billed as “Stegasaurii” in the trailer), whose interjection of real animal violence only serves to provide a cruel and tasteless distraction from the production’s legitimate merits.
Easier to appreciate is The Land Unknown’s star creature, an anatomically dubious Tyrannosaurus brought to bumbling and improbable life through a rare Hollywood application of the man-in-suit technique2. Like the Elasmosaurus, Rex is a technically ambitious creation, but fails delightfully in both its design and execution. In close-ups the beast’s considerable noggin fares quite well, with its blinking, strangely insectine eyes and massive jaws decked out with sharp and imposing teeth. Full-body shots reveal it to be rather comically outsized however, a feature absurdly out of proportion with its stubby legs and abbreviated tail. Stine and Binger’s effective process work may put Rex into reliable contact with the human players, but the overwhelming unbelievability of the thing prevents it from being much more than a lovable, ineffectual dud.
Still, Rex fares better in any of its appearances than Gorog’s writing, which shambles from one bland development to the next once the film’s promising concept is established. Beef-cake star Jock Mahoney (Tarzan the Magnificent) is a fine choice in so far as the film’s few action-oriented set pieces are concerned, but is given the dubious task of reciting flavorless chunks of scientific exposition and romantic gibberish (the two are often, and dreadfully, one and the same) in the considerable expanses between. William Reynolds (The Thing that Couldn’t Die) and Phil Harvey (The Monolith Monsters) are reliably on board, as a hunky pilot and an unstable technician respectively, while character player Henry Brandon lends some color to the character of Hunter, the alternately crazed / pitiable survivor of a previous Antarctic expedition. As dull and forgettable as the rest of the scripting may be, it’s Gorog’s writing for co-star Shirley Patterson (as Shawn Smith) that proves most disappointing. After her promising introduction as the strong-willed and liberated reporter attached to document the expedition (“I always like meeting men,” she seductively smirks as she is introduced to the rest of the crew), Gorog proceeds to dismantle the character into little more than a series of predictable tropes. Patterson screams, faints, is fought over by Brandon’s survivor and Mahoney’s crew, and is proven time and again (with much more screaming and fainting) to be incapable of looking after herself. Career be damned, by the final reel Patterson’s go-get-’em reporter has devolved into a woman-shaped puddle of submissive marital fodder for Mahoney’s hero.
Despite the irksome sexual politics, brief animal violence, and numerous other faults besides, I can’t say that I honestly dislike The Land Unknown. The mechanical monsters unleashed by Kevan and his associates are fun and memorable even as their lesser qualities fail them, the jungle sets remain impressive in both design and scope, and that helicopter is still one sweet looking piece of machinery. The Land Unknown just never adds up to much more than a handful of promising elements and a lot of forgettable filler. Awkward as he was, Rex deserved better.
1 Interview with actor William Reynolds, from I Talked with a Zombie: Interviews with 23 Veterans of Horror and Sci-fi Films and Television. (Tom Weaver, 2008).
2 With regards to dinosaurs and their ilk, I can think of only two American productions that applied the technique prior – 1940’s One Million BC, which was so proud of it’s man-sized monster that it obscured it almost entirely with shrubbery, and 1948’s wondrously inept Unknown Island, a two-strip color spectacle whose wobbling, drunken theropods are among the least believable to ever grace the silver screen.
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~ Weltraumbesty / KRP
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