In my review of Teruo Ishii’s Kyôfu kikei ningen: Edogawa Rampo zenshû/Horrors of Malformed Men (1969) I mentioned that my interest in the film was initially piqued by a still spotted in Denis Gifford’s book A Pictorial History of the Horror Movie. Similarly, interest in another Japanese film was piqued by another still, possibly in Greg Shoemaker’s excellent fanzine Japanese Fantasy Film Journal, a shot of a young woman being menaced by a giant monsters head rising from the water behind her. The shot seemed both eccentric and exciting. Many years later when I finally got to see Junji Kurata’s Kyoryu Kaicho no Densetsu/Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds it turns out the film was certainly very eccentric. But exciting? Not so much…
In the prologue, a young woman falls into a cave in the Sea of Trees area near Mount Fuji and finds herself in an icy cave full of large eggs, one of which starts t hatch. Geologist Takashi Ashizawa (Tsunehiko Watase) investigates but has barely begun when an earthquake rocks the area. A young couple in a paddle boat vanish on the nearby lake and livestock begins disappearing. Eventually a large dinosaur, identified as a Plesiosaurus emerges from the lake and goes on the rampage, Meanwhile another monster, a Rhamphorhynchus, turns up and eventually the two prehistoric beasts square off against each other as Mount Fuji erupts.
Of all of the many Japanese film studios, Toei were the ones least associated with the kaiju eiga or giant monster genre and on the basis of Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds it’s not hard to see why. As wild and unpredictable as you’d expect from the genre it’s also a mess, taking far too long to get the good stuff and owing more to Jaws (1975) than to Godzilla with much of the monster action taking place in the water as the dinosaurs biting chunks out of passing scuba divers and holidaymakers while the local authorities prevaricate about whether to close the lakeshore beaches and keep people safe.
Maybe something got lost in translation but much of the dialogue makes any sense at all. There’e even some confusion about what the monster in the lake (“every lake is supposed to have a monster in it”) is meant to be, with an excitable American tourist claiming that it’s Scotland’s very own resident of Loch Ness, somehow having managed to make the journey to the other side of the world. An exchange about there being earthquakes if it’s proved that the dinosaurs are real is particularly baffling.
The monsters – the key to this sort of thing – are terrible fake. Inflexible, inexpressive and at times rather laughable, they never inspire any real terror even if their rampages are notably gorier than most other kaiju eiga. Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds was reportedly Toei’s most expensive film to date but it’s hard to see where the money actually went – it certainly wasn’t on its eponymous stars. The initial attack by the Rhamphorhynchus, a flying reptile frequently misidentified as a Pterodactyl, is reasonably exciting but the climax is awful. The two unconvincing plastic dinosaurs knock lumps out of each other for what feels like an eternity before Mount Fuji conveniently erupts (because Masaru Igami, Isao Matsumoto and Ichirô Ôtsu couldn’t think of any other way to end this nonsense), the two monsters fall into a fiery pit and everyone can go home and try to pretend than none of this ever happened.
Kurata’s direction is dreadful. The killing of the woman in the rubber dinghy – the still image from which seemed so enticing all those years before – drags on forever, the Plesiosaurus towering over its victim interminably until it finally gets around to doing something. To his credit, he stages an unexpectedly atmospheric sequence set in a misty wood near the lake which hints at a far more interesting director than the rest of the film would suggest. Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds was pretty much the end of his short career (he only made six other feature films and an episode of a TV series prior to this film with episodes on another series to follow) which was largely made of of unexceptional historical dramas.
But in a film full of eccentricities and inexplicable things, the oddest thing about it by far is Masao Yagi’s musical score, the most wildly inappropriate soundtrack to any film that you’ll ever hear. A bewildering disco-funk score, it has no bearing whatsoever with anything we see on screen and gives every impression of having been composed for an entirely different film which was abandoned and, reluctant to scrap what they’d paid for, Toei simply laid tracks over the action in Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds whether they were suitable or not. In its own right, it’s actually a decent score but you have to wonder who on Earth thought the cues were suitable for anything actually seen in the film. During a local festival a terrible J-country band turns up for a few numbers and at the climax when heroine Akiko (Nobiko Sawa) fights for her life as Fuji explodes around here, the action is accompanied by as awful song for no readily discernible reason.
Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds may have cost Toei a fortune but the film wasn’t deemed interesting or even good enough to get released in the States (where audiences were now looking to Star Wars (1977) for their cinematic thrills). It did however open in Russia where, inexplicably, it became a runaway box office hit. One can only assume that Russian audiences were starved of giant monster action so even something as dreadful as this would have seemed like a good Saturday night out.
The EOFFTV Review 