Featured Audience Ratings

• Keiko A

  
  Directed by Virgil W. Vogel and staring Jock Mahoney, Shirley Patterson and William Reynolds Eirin Rating-Not Rated The Land Unknown is one of those rare and very unknown dinosaur films that I just happened to love unlike Meany. Despite the flaws and how we later copied It to… More
  Directed by Virgil W. Vogel and staring Jock Mahoney, Shirley Patterson and William Reynolds Eirin Rating-Not Rated The Land Unknown is one of those rare and very unknown dinosaur films that I just happened to love unlike Meany. Despite the flaws and how we later copied It to make The Last Dinosaur. But still yet again another 50s dino flick using men in dinosaur suits god why do they copy us. And remake our movies. Navy Commander Hal Roberts is assigned to lead an expedition to Little America in Antarctica to investigate reports of a mysterious warm water inland lake discovered a decade earlier. His helicopter and its small party, including beautiful reporter Maggie Hathaway, is forced down into a volcanic crater by a fierce storm. They find themselves trapped in a lush tropical environment that has survived from the Mesozoic Era. Fighting carnivorous plants, dinosaurs, and a limited time window, they struggle to survive and repair the helicopter, their only means of escape. They are both helped and hindered by Dr. Carl Hunter, a megalomaniac survivor of an earlier expedition, who has learned to adapt to the hostile environment. Looks expensive but its not rather very well done low budget stuff. 70% for story it's still interesting and good. 70% for acting not very strong but it pulls right throw. 70% for special effects there not fantastic and they don't use stop motion animation but they do get it right with our inventions. 60% for characters there bad but we get to know the heroes and villains. 80% for everything else. It has got some very well done sets. Any dinosaur film liker like myself would like it. Keiko's score. 72-100

• AJ V

  
  If we find one more unknown island with dinosaurs on it, I'm going to scream! Not one of these kinds of movies is any good.

• Randy T

  
  One of those campy little low-budget gems I keep tucked away in a dusty corner of my DVD collection. If I started a list of films with really crappy looking dinosaurs this would be #1.

• The Movie W

  
  Universal studios are currently celebrating one hundred years in business and are boasting, quite rightly, of producing movies like "Jaws" and "Dracula". When it comes to monsters, the studio is synonymous with their great horror output of the thirties which saw… More
  Universal studios are currently celebrating one hundred years in business and are boasting, quite rightly, of producing movies like "Jaws" and "Dracula". When it comes to monsters, the studio is synonymous with their great horror output of the thirties which saw them give us definitive versions of "Dracula", "Frankenstein" and "The Mummy". In the fifties they returned to the horror genre and produced a series of monster movies but for every classic like "Creature From the Black Lagoon" there was a dud like this one. The creatures on display here range from the good (a Loch Ness type swamp monster model), the bad (a guy in a rubber T-Rex outfit), to the ugly (lizards standing in for dinosaurs). The latter would cause serious upset for the American Humane Association if attempted today, those lizards really go for one another. The prehistoric set isn't so hot either, resembling one of those garden centres you find out the back of large hardware stores. Aside from the rubber Tyrannosaur, there are a few guilty sniggers to be had at the good old fifties style sexism. Patterson (listed as Shawn Smith in the credits) is introduced as a bit of a slut. When informed she'll be alone with eight hundred men she appears to lick her lips and retorts "Well I do love meeting men". Her performance is terrible, as is that of her love interest Mahoney; to say they lack chemistry is putting it mildly. Had this been made twenty years earlier I suspect a lot more care would have gone into it's production. By 1957 monster movies were sadly seen as a way to make a few quick bucks. Don't spend yours on this.