Adventurer Ted Osborne embarks on an expedition that he hopes will make him famous, the project funded by his beautiful fiancé Carole Lane (Virginia Grey): together, they charter the S. S. Pelican, owned by unscrupulous Captain Tarnowski (Barton MacLane), to sail to a remote island in South-East Asia, where Ted spotted live dinosaurs while flying across the area during the war. Ted's plan: to capture a prehistoric animal on film. Tarnowski's objective: to capture a prehistoric animal alive!
Unknown Island was one of the first (if not the first) monster movies to be filmed in colour, but the process used isn't great, with nearly everything a dirty shade of red or green. Still, it's in keeping with other technical aspects of this film: this is one hell of a shoddy B-movie, with unconvincing studio sets standing in for a tropical island, and some of the cruddiest monsters ever to waddle awkwardly across the silver screen. Also, there is little to no interaction between the humans and the creatures, all encounters achieved using back projection, which makes the film a rather dull experience when it should be a thrill-ride.
Of course, for many monster movie fans, the clumsiness of the whole thing only adds to the fun, and there is no shortage of silliness to amuse and delight those who dig trashy creature features: toy brontosauruses swim in a model lake, plastic puppet dimetrodons are pulled through the undergrowth on strings, and men in rubber ceratosaur costumes shuffle aimlessly at a snail's pace (except for the one that falls over, the actor inside dying of heat exhaustion while filming!). Meanwhile, ape actor Ray 'Crash' Corrigan stumbles through the jungle in a modified gorilla costume, supposedly a prehistoric sloth.
As far as performances are concerned, everyone does a decent enough job in their stereotypical roles, with Barton MacLane making for a particularly fine villain (who goes crazy from jungle fever and booze), and Richard Denning suitably heroic as hunky John Fairbanks, whose prior experience with the island comes in useful. Lane is fine as the spunky heroine, but I didn't like the way she became annoyed at Ted and ran off with John, just because her fiancé was keen to capture the monsters on film. I mean, that WAS the whole point of the expedition in the first place!
Unknown Island was one of the first (if not the first) monster movies to be filmed in colour, but the process used isn't great, with nearly everything a dirty shade of red or green. Still, it's in keeping with other technical aspects of this film: this is one hell of a shoddy B-movie, with unconvincing studio sets standing in for a tropical island, and some of the cruddiest monsters ever to waddle awkwardly across the silver screen. Also, there is little to no interaction between the humans and the creatures, all encounters achieved using back projection, which makes the film a rather dull experience when it should be a thrill-ride.
Of course, for many monster movie fans, the clumsiness of the whole thing only adds to the fun, and there is no shortage of silliness to amuse and delight those who dig trashy creature features: toy brontosauruses swim in a model lake, plastic puppet dimetrodons are pulled through the undergrowth on strings, and men in rubber ceratosaur costumes shuffle aimlessly at a snail's pace (except for the one that falls over, the actor inside dying of heat exhaustion while filming!). Meanwhile, ape actor Ray 'Crash' Corrigan stumbles through the jungle in a modified gorilla costume, supposedly a prehistoric sloth.
As far as performances are concerned, everyone does a decent enough job in their stereotypical roles, with Barton MacLane making for a particularly fine villain (who goes crazy from jungle fever and booze), and Richard Denning suitably heroic as hunky John Fairbanks, whose prior experience with the island comes in useful. Lane is fine as the spunky heroine, but I didn't like the way she became annoyed at Ted and ran off with John, just because her fiancé was keen to capture the monsters on film. I mean, that WAS the whole point of the expedition in the first place!