Film Classics, Inc. were formed in April 1943, initially to pick up “the better type pictures produced independently, both in this country and abroad, which were distributed originally by the major film companies” as one of the company chiefs, Bertram A. Mayers told The New York Times on the day the company incorporated. Though they picked up studio films for second runs in their earliest days, they were soon acting as distributors for independently shot low budgeters and one of their clients was Albert Jay Cohen Productions, Inc. whose only film seems to have been this ultra-cheap lost world romp.
Adventurer Ted Osborne (Phillip Reed) and his fiancée Carole (Virginia Grey) are looking to charter a boat to take them to remote island said to be inhabited by dinosaurs. In Singapore, they fall in with the untrustworthy Captain Tarnowski (Barton MacLane) and John Fairbanks (Richard Denning), the survivor of a shipwreck on the island who’s had first hand experience of the monsters, who agree to help them. Tensions run high as Denning makes his intentions towards Carole clear, Tarnowski tries to capture one of the prehistoric creatures alive for monetary gain and the expedition is attacked by a variety of monsters including brontosaurs, allosauruses, a dimetrodon and something that the characters keep referring to as a giant sloth but which is in fact Ray “Crash” Corrigan inside one of his ape suits.
Unlike many of the strap-cashed denizens of Poverty Row, Cohen aimed for something a bit more up market than the usual black-and-white fare, shot in tiny sound stages for a pittance. On the first score he was able to raise enough cash to shoot Unknown Island in colour, albeit in the less than optimal Cinecolor process which was cheaper and quicker and easier to use than the 2-strip Technicolor on offer at the time but which left the film with a strange, chalky complexion that hasn’t stood the ravages of time particularly well. The advertising promised us a film “so spectacular – it took one year produce!” In fact it started shooting in May 1948 under the title The Unbelievable and was on the screen five months later.
There wasn’t enough cash however to escape the scourge of cramped studio space and Unknown Island suffers terribly in this regard. Everything is shot in medium close-up to disguise that fact that the available space was not much bigger than someone’s front room and even the beach and jungle scenes are clearly shot indoors. What money there was available was spent on sending a second unit to the deserts area around Palmdale and Corrigan’s own Corriganville Movie Ranch to shoot the dinosaur scenes but the cast are either only seen unconvincingly matted against the monster action or else are left stranded in that studio space trying to look concerned as they supposedly watch the creatures slugging it out.
A film like this stands or falls on the quality of its dinosaurs and sad to say the beasties in Unknown Island a sorry looking lot. Full marks to Cohen and director Jack Bernhard (who later oversaw Gigantis the Fire Monster (1959), a US re-edit of the second Godzilla film Gojira no gyakushû/Godzilla Raids Again (1955)) for not going down the optically enlarged lizards route but sadly they couldn’t even dream of finding the necessary funding to employ a Willis O’Brien or a Ray Harryhausen so instead they resort to dressing up stuntmen in dreadful rubber dinosaur suits (watch for one of them falling over when the explorers launch grenades at them – the actor inside apparently fainted from the heat and they left the take in the film). The actors/stuntmen/monster wranglers had no control over the suits whatsoever so tend to either stamp about feebly as the suit heads wobble alarmingly, ineffectually bash against each other in what are supposed to be fights and stagger around as if they’ve been on a heavy drinking binge.
Sadly with the sorry menagerie of drunken wobblysaurs letting the side down, the film is forced to focus on the human characters and although the game cast are mostly fun and engaging, the characters are so thing as to be virtually translucent. At least Barton MacLane is having a great time as the treacherous Captain Tarnowski, leaving no piece of scenery unchewed as he attacks his role with a lot more gusto than it really deserves. If the film entertains at all, it’s due in no small part to MacLane’s antics. He helps a little in distracting away from the fact that the plot is really nothing more than a retread of King Kong (1933) and The Lost World (1925). Elsewhere, Virginia Grey and Richard Denning are as good as you’d expect from such veteran troopers though Philip Reed struggles with his hopeless romantic lead who does little put harp on about the photographs he’s desperate to take of the monsters for reasons that the script never makes clear.
Despite the terrible dinosaurs (one of them, supposedly a dimetrodon, is very clearly a barely mobile model being dragged along the studio floor by just-out-of-shot stage hands), unconvincing sets and second hand plot. Unknown Island has a certain amount of charm. It’s certainly more interesting than its sometime double-bill mate Two Lost Worlds (1951) though that’s not saying much. It was just too early for the 50s boom in monster movies and by the time Toho made the first Godzilla film in 1954, suit technology had advanced sufficiently to sell the illusion of the eponymous creature far more effectively than Bernhard was able to do here. Godzilla rarely convinced us that s/he was anything other than a man in a rubber suit but the craftsmanship that went into building that suit and Ishirô Honda’s expert direction went some way to helping us suspend out disbelief. You’ll get nothing like that here sadly but for a lazy Saturday afternoon time-waster there’s a lot to enjoy in this impoverished but agreeable load of old tosh.
The EOFFTV Review 