Go Retire Psychiatrist

I saw the Sven Squad hosted 1957 low-budget film, “The Land Unknown” last night and one of my favorite characters was Tyronasaurus Tex, Tyrone for short. This guy in a rubber suit called attention to the dinosaur’s knobby knees. Tyrone got a little too close to the expedition’s helicopter and got a superficial slice wound. You’d think the Band-Aid could have gotten better makeup blending.

The film stars include Jock Mahoney (as Commander Alan Roberts); Shirley Patterson (as Margaret Hathaway); William Reynolds (as Lt. Jack Carmen); Henry Brandon (as Dr. Carl Hunter); and Phil Harvey (as Steve Miller).

The crew including Roberts, Patterson, Reynolds, and Harvey go down in a disabled helicopter over a strange part of Antarctica where Tyrone limps over, panhandling for Voltaren pain gel to sooth his painful, swollen knees. A well-aimed slice from the copter’s rotor sends him howling back to the chiropractor’s office right next door to Dr. Hunter’s condo.

Hunter is a poor slob who got stranded in the place a decade before the team arrived and he’s done fairly well for himself. He knows how to play a mean conch shell blues song by Muddy Waters, which sounds vaguely like “Mannish Boy.”

Hunter can throw a burning spear at an Elasmosaurus, named for the snazzy stretch pants it wears, and he pitches it right in the monster’s mouth. He does this several times which, although it doesn’t kill the creature, it does eventually lead to strep throat.

The stranded explorers find a dead Pteranodon killed by climate change and they eventually encounter Dr. Hunter, who’s been stealing their food although why he does so after 10 years of surviving on reptile burgers is unclear. A cute little mammal Roberts calls a tarsier scurries around until it is eaten by what Nostalgiaferatoo calls a Ficus plant. Whatever.

Probably the funniest part of the show was Nosti’s interview of a real-life paleontologist, Professor Paul Sereno, who Nosti calls a “paleo-proctologist.” Professor has a pretty good sense of humor and debunks most of the scenes in the film which gets the whole what-counts-as-a-dinosaur thing wrong.

Roberts and Hunter fight over Margaret’s affections although she faints so often, it’s hard to keep her conscious long enough to do the romantic scenes. Tyrone tries to chase her too, but there was not enough Voltaren to keep his knees limber enough to keep it up for long.

OK, as usual, no spoilers and because the budget didn’t allow any stop-motion sequences of the monsters, and Tyrone’s pronounced limping was so distracting, I think the film was just south of OK, so I give it a Shrilling Chicken Rating of 2/5.