210 – King Dinosaur w/Short: X Marks the Spot
éééé
Things I liked about the movie:
Joey the Lemur!
Abuse of women.
Tyrannosaurs look like iguanas.
Impressions
Short
A phenomenal lack of energy. It’s like a black hole of humor so dense even the funny from the riffing can’t escape. Ugh. Between this and Commander Cody I decided I don’t like shorts.
Movie King Dinosaur (aka Battle of the Pet
Lizards)
It’s a Bert I. Gordon movie! What sets this work of art apart from the other sci-fi b movies of its era is Joey the Lemur. I mean, if you took Joey away, you’d have just another poorly written, badly directed assemblage of stock footage and bravado. But with Joey, you have all that plus a lemur! You know how Hollywood executives think you can make everything better by putting a monkey in the movie? Well, Bert has gone one better! Or maybe I should say, “Well, Bert has gone one better.” The exclamation point was a little much. The more I think about it, the more it was like a Little House on the Prairie episode except for about 5 minutes of dinosaurs fighting.
Synopsis
Short A nearly dead guy tells us that many people die in New Jersey traffic accidents. Then we meet Joe, the most ludicrously bad driver of all time. Finally, and none too soon, he’s killed in a goofy accident at an intersection with no traffic controls. His ghost goes to the great traffic court in heaven. The judge hears all about his bad driving. In the end, we, the jury of viewers, get to decide whether he’s guilty. But are we qualified? Perhaps, but we slept through the judge’s preachy monologue.
Movie
Here are the characters you learn to desperately not care about:
Dick: Seems to be the boss. Hates Pat. Tries to prove how macho he is all the time by being a complete jerk. Main skill is manhandling lemurs and women.
Pat: Blonde lady. Screams a lot. That’s about it. I’d push her around, too. Very annoying.
Ralph: Weak guy. Lets Dick’s bravado stand out by being a weenie-head. Even though already engaged to Pat, he keeps hitting on her with the corniest lines ever devised by a dude.
Nora: “Liberated” woman. Wears culottes and demands to go explore an island. Almost as good as a man, but not good enough to stand watch or shoot a gun.
A new planet is discovered and we send a rocket. We spend billions and develop great new technologies, but then we send four cute morons and waste the whole thing. Plenty of time is used to explain how their nuclear reactor that they will use for energy on the new planet is easily blown up and may be very destructive. Apparently we skip the moon and go straight to demolishing whatever life-bearing planets happen to appear in our telescopes. When they get there, they discover that not only is there breathable air, but the planet is inhabited by stock footage from the Discovery Channel! Unfortunately, they think it’s night in the middle of the day, and decide it’s easier to build a large house than to hike back a few miles in the “dark.” The men miss no opportunity to show the women they can’t be as good as the men. Each time they look up into the night sky, the bright sun looks down. If it were me, I’d leave out the shots of the sun because it lessens the illusion of night time. Ralph fights a rubber alligator to impress his girl but it injures him and he can’t be moved. Dick decides he hates Pat and pushes her around. Later, Dick and Nora leave to get supplies and come back with a lemur who becomes their pet. They name him Joe.
Because Ralph is too wimpy to travel, Nora and Dick take a raft over to a curious island. They meet an enlarged iguana and wisely begin shooting at it instead of just hiding. Shooting the iguana doesn’t seem to affect it. It just sits there. Dick keeps shooting in a panic. He shoves Nora around for good measure. They flee into a cave. Apparently the iguana got tired of being shot at and decided to retaliate, finally. Dick, being a genius, goes back outside the cave to save the lemur and gets a bunch of fake blood on his arm, necessitating a shirt removal. They’re trapped in the cave for a while. By “trapped” I mean when they could escape, they just don’t. Finally, Dick fires a flare and the other two come to the “rescue” by which I mean they show up and Dick and Nora leave when they get there. Maybe “pick them up at the cave door” would be a better description of the action. OK, to Ralph and Pat’s credit, they do yell “come on!” a couple times, so it’s a rescue in the sense that the mentally handicapped Dick and Nora needed to be told to walk away from the cave or they probably would have starved to death.
After the “rescue,” Ralph says he brought an atomic bomb and now is the time to use it. So instead of running for their lives, they wait around for a few minutes while Ralph sets the bomb to go off in 30 minutes!! They barely get away in time. There are a million goofy scientific improbabilities in this movie, but this one seems the worst. They run and paddle a canoe for 30 minutes (and this includes stopping and shooting at anything that moves, screaming for a few seconds here and there, falling down, and finally hiding behind a foot-high dirt mound) and they somehow manage to get far enough away that they are completely unaffected by the nuclear blast.
Host Segments
Prologue: Joel is teaching the Bots about poetry and Frank is getting ready for a hat party.
Segment 2: Crow is burdened with the responsibility of judging Joe from the short. He rattles off a bunch of clichés about striking out and seizing the day. Impose your ideas on others! It’s easy. Then he passes the buck to us, the viewers.
Segment 3: Joel introduces Joey the Lemur. They sing the Joey the Lemur song. The lemur is native to Philippines and Madagascar, and to fictional planets like Nova. The lemur is a suitable mascot for any professional or semi-professional sports team. They do an acrostic: L is for Lemur, E is for Eat, M is for Monkey, U is for Unpredictable, and R is for Rambunctious. Joel’s handling of the lemur puppet is quite silly, consisting mostly of hopping it up and down as fast as his arm can go.
Segment 4: Joel is portraying an emotional Albert Einstein, but gives up. He tells the ‘Bots to do their own goofy sketches. Crow tries to do Madame Curie, but sounds like Father Guido Sarducci from SNL. He gives up, too. Tom and Crow cry because robots just can’t be actors. Joel is affected by their plight and agrees to try again.
Final: Crow laments that he doesn’t know anything about good films but he’s seen four Robert Lippert films. Joel points out that Lippert was an innovator and used a theremin to make sounds in his movies. Joel then runs around with a theremin and crashes into things off-screen. A fan shows in his letter how he rates the shows based on the movie, jokes, and host segments. Dr. F and Frank might go to a Kirasawa festival.
Stinger: Pat screaming as Ralph falls down. (Pretty much the entire movie in a nutshell)
Funny Riffs
Short
Tom: God sure has a crummy office.
Joel: That’s because all the decorators are in hell.
Bailiff: After that, I never had any trouble with Joe around schools. He’d crawl by at a snail’s pace.
Tom as Bailiff: Nursing homes, though! Whoa! Look out!
Movie
Sight gag – two guys are looking into what seems to be a periscope about 3 feet apart and facing each other. The illusion is that they are looking straight into each other’s faces.
Crow: You look neat!
The rocket makes a bunch of explosions before taking off.
Tom: Maybe you should take your foot off the clutch!
During a really tacky scene where the rocket is flying on the back screen with some trees in the foreground:
Mike: I believe by the end of this decade, we will land a piece of stock footage on another planet!
A tiny bear cub is shown.
Crow: I’m chirpy, the mutant hellbeast and I don’t like this film. Get away.
A sloth is shown.
Tom: I symbolically represent the pace of this film.
The four astronauts are gathered around something.
Crow: And there on the handle was some stock footage of a hook!
As in many cheap movies, it’s obviously broad daylight, but the characters are pretending it’s night.
Man 1: What do you say we fix ourselves a place and sleep here? It’d be a lot easier to find our way in the daylight.
Tom: Isn’t it daylight now?
Crow: They all have cataracts.
Tom: Oh, I understand?
Mike: Maybe it’s the planet of the midnight sun.
Dick: Pat, you do whatever work you can around here.
Crow: Yeah, why don’t you stay here and practice screaming.
Owl: Hoo hoo hoo hoo.
Joel as Owl: Who could believe this film was made?
Crow as Dick standing guard: A normal sized owl. Who’d’a thought it?
Sight gag – Dick and Nora lay out an inflatable raft next to what looks like a very scummy backwater.
Joel: Well, we’ll just put in here by the turd pond.
Pat is looking in a microscope.
Ralph: Learn anything?
Tom as Pat: Yeah. You’re the father.
Pat and Ralph are wondering what happened to the other two. They see a flare.
Pat: Look, the flare!
Ralph: A red flare, Pat!
Tom: That means lizard wrestling! Red flare at night, lizards fight. Red flare in the morning, lizards take warning.
Sight gag – the camera suddenly shows us a very cheesy shot of their rocket laid over a picture of some trees.
Tom: Meanwhile, at the superimposed rocket.
Dick is looking at a photo he took and amazingly developed while trapped in the cave. It’s of the iguana’s head.
Dick: It resembles the tyrannosaurus rex of Earth’s prehistoric age.
Tom (disgustedly): No, it doesn’t.
Crow: Sorry. No way.
Dick: Tyrannosaurus rex. King dinosaur.
Tom: Sorry. That’s a lizard from Pet World.
Joel: You know guys, lizards WE’RE hurt in the making of this film.
Ralph: I brought the atom bomb. I think it’s a good time to use it.
Ralph sets it.
Ralph: It’s set for eight.
Tom and Crow: That’s thirty seconds from now! Owwwwh!
Crow: Even the musicians are mocking this film!
Tom: I think the film on this lake is better than the film we’re watching.
After they nuke most of the life off the planet.
Tom: Well. Score one for Earth.