Unknown Island

There you are!  I've been waiting for you because it's Time for Another Safari! 

So get this:  I was over on YouTube, minding my own business; when I spied this suggested video.  It was an old adventure movie from 1948 called "Unknown Island".  I had never heard of it before.

It stars a bunch of people I don't know who are, but then I found a point of reference for a couple of them.  Virginia Grey was in "Another Thin Man" (great series of mysteries starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles) and also in "The Big Store" (a Marx Brothers vehicle).

Richard Denning will go on to be in the classic Universal Monster movie "The Creature From the Black Lagoon".  And later in the less prestigious films "Creature With the Atom Brain" and "The Black Scorpion"; a pair of really bad B-movies that are in my vast collection.

So here's the story:

In Singapore, a formal WWII pilot named Osborne and his fiancée Carole (played by Virginia Grey) want to charter a shady ship's captain to take them to an island well off the shipping routes.  During the war, Osborne was knocked off course by a storm and found the island to be inhabited by dinosaurs!  He wants to go back and get a bunch of pics so he can make a ton of money.

 The ship's captain informs them of another man who knows about the island:  a local drunkard named Fairbanks (played by Richard Denning).  Fairbanks was once on a boat that also got lost in a storm and shipwrecked on the island.  He and his fellow castaways built a raft to escape, but Fairbanks was the only one who made it...the rest of the castaways were eaten by dinosaurs.

Since the two stories seem to corroborate the other, the shady captain agrees to the voyage.  The trip is long and arduous, and his crew of natives tries to mutiny...but fails.  Then they get to the island...and things start to get dangerous!

Yes!  There are cheesy dinosaurs!  Some are stop-motion brontosaurus-types, others are rubber-suit T-Rex wannabes.   And some...I guess are just some kind of puppets.  

But that's not all!  The crew are still mutinous, Fairbanks is falling for Carole, Carole is getting disillusioned with Osborne who wants more pics, and the shady Captain vows he won't leave the island until he captures a dino alive!  

In addition to all of this, there is another creature on this island.  They call it a Giant Sloth, but it looks more like a guy in a gorilla suit.  In fact, according to the all-knowing Wikipedia, it's supposed to be none other than Crash Corrigan in that gorilla suit!  He played a LOT of cowboys and a LOT of gorillas and he went to the Undersea Kingdom!

This was a fun bit of cheese!  It mostly went the way I expected it to...thought one guy lived that I thought was gonna die and another guy died that I thought was gonna live...  I tried to go in with low expectations, but it was surprisingly good!  

Is it the best movie ever?  No!  But it was an enjoyable way to kill an hour-and-a-half.  There's a pretty good chance I would sit through it again, and I recommend you try it out, too, if you like those cheesy old movies with rubber-suit monsters!  Like I said, a simple search on YouTube will lead you right to it!

Or maybe you've already seen it?  If so, what did you think about it?  Tell us down in the comments below!

Until then, I wish you all...

Good Adventuring!
Timothy A. Sayell