Boring film that is not helped by Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion dinosaur which ravishes a seagoing ship, New York City and a Coney Island roller coaster. Ray was apparently on a real tight budget here because it's some of his most uninteresting work. It's funny to feel that way since it was the first film where the stop-motion specialist had total control of his art, but that's how it seems to me. Maybe I've been jaded by Industrial Light and Magic.

The actors in the piece are more wooden than the claymation beast. I couldn't tell you the name of one of them. The lead has an accent and the rest of the players rotate around so much that no one else comes across as memorable.

A real yawn based on a Ray Bradbury short story called "The Fog Horn" published in "Saturday Evening Post." Of course, we get romance and radiation as well. The film begins with some horrendous narration that gives promise that the film will be a cheesy camp classic. But this soon ends and the film never gains any momentum. What is probably the biggest problem for the film is that it shows the beast way too early in the film and there is no build-up of tension whatsoever. Still, it's important to note that this is the first movie beast unleashed by an atomic explosion, a prehistoric rhedosaurus. It's has both it's natural destructive force as well as radiation at it's disposal. A double whammy.

This one is for fans of the genre and film students who are interested in Harryhausen and his mentor Willis O'Brien, only.

Note:

Directed by Eugene Lourie, a former set designer. With Paul Christian, Paula Raymond (in a rare independent woman 50's character) and Lee Van Cleef.

(Review written in 1997)

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