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

Post-Apoc-A-Rama!

Hello and Welcome Back!

In our last exciting episode we were talking about bad post-apocalyptic movies from the 80's.  So that's where we start now.


I think the first movie I ever saw that could count as post-apoc would have to be The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price.
Of course, this isn't an 80's movie, and isn't at all akin to the sort of cheesy flick I wanna talk about.  But it's still the first one I ever saw.

The next one must have been Damnation Alley starring George Peppard an Jan-Micheal Vincent.  This movie was cool!  First off there was the Ultimate RV, a twelve-wheeled monster of an all-terrain vehicle designed to go anywhere in a ruined world.  There were giant scorpions and man-eating cockroaches.  This was sort of a slightly more realistic future than Thundarr presented:  no magic, no super-tech.  Somehow, though, there was enough gas to run the Super Rv and a motorcycle.

The next one that really stands out in my head is the Ralph Bakshi movie, Wizards.  This movie is just haunting and disturbing, but not really in a bad way.  The narration and the still-picture slide show in the beginning I find particularly haunting.  Then there's the weird animation style.  It's cartoony, as opposed to trying to render the weird creatures and characters realistically.  Then there's the weird rotoscoping and the subject matter itself.  Weird but cool.  

There was a movie called She, it starred Sandahl Bergman (she was Conan's girlfriend Valeria in Conan the Barbarian).  It was supposedly "based" on the H.R.Haggard story She, but the only resemblance I could see were in the title.  

In a post-apoc world survivors trade goods with one another until these raiders show up and cause a ruckus for no good reason.  They kidnap this girl, so her brother and her boyfriend go to rescue her, knowing full well they'll probably die.  But instead, they hook up with She, a powerful warrior-woman and she-who-cannot-die (thanks to her "magic" sauna in a cave in her village).  Through an episodic series of weird misadventures, including an incident with a werewolf commune, a mutant bridge guard who multiplies every time you hit him, and that standard stand-by a gladiatorial arena; our heroes find the bad guys and (spoiler alert!) rescue the girl.  It was weird stuff, seemed to have a definite Gamma World vibe to me.

Like I said, Terrible And Silly!


There were a bunch of other flicks, too.  After a while they kind of blend together.  But movies like The New Barbarians, and Land of Doom show us that people wear way too much leather in the post-apocalyptic desert.

  
Battletruck and Wheels of Fire show us that there will still be plenty of gas and bullets (and yet food and water will be scarce), and that all the vehicles will get pimped up with spikes. 

 Meanwhile, films like She-Wolves of the Wasteland and Stryker show us that there will be a great abundance of hot chicks, and a few cool guys...but apparently not enough clothes to go around (at least if you're adverse to the above-mentioned black leather).  

Are you ready for the punchline?  I've NEVER seen a single Mad Max movie.  Bits and pieces, but not the whole film.  But I've seen all of these flicks, and each one has left its indelible mark on the world I've created...or ended(?)...for the stories I'm writing.

And there were a few others, too.  But my point is this:  My post-apocalyptic world is not just drab and gray.  And there are more dangers lurking about than just zombies.  

When my world suffered its great calamity, there was advanced science.  AIs, robots, weird chemical medicines, advanced tech for daily appliances, experimental prototypes.  These things still exist and are half-understood (at best) by people trying to use them and repair the damage.  Weird chemicals and radiation have cause innumerable mutant sub-races and new hybrid species.  

Wanna know more?  Of course ya do!  So come on back next time, and I'll share some more about my upcoming science fantasy post-apocalyptic adventure series:  Mutant World!  Until then, I wish you...

Good Adventuring!
Timothy A. Sayell