Planet of Dinosaurs (1977)

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

This movie is a mess.A group of people manage to launch an escape pod from a large space ship that is in danger.The larger ship is then vaporized and the escape pod crash lands on a nearby planet.Sounds like a good set up but it goes horribly wrong.For some reason they have chosen to have about 15 characters in this thing but that's about 10 too many.In the escape pod they do a scene where the guy in charge video talks with all of them and it's just plain silly.It seems like a joke but sadly it's them introducing more than a dozen extremely boring characters.Of course they do kill off a few of them(it literally takes them an hour to figure out to stop going places alone),but it's still too many characters.At least half of the time on the new planet is spent pretending to climb a rocky hill side and it looks suspiciously like the American south west.And the entire time they keep talking about who works for who and who is in charge.They never gave any back story but constantly expect us to understand all this babble about things that were never explained.The dialogue is terrible,the acting is worse and the special effects are a joke.Did I mention that there are dinosaurs on the new planet?No? It doesn't even matter.The best part of the movie is when a woman sees a big spider and just lays down to let it attack her.Why are there always giant spiders near dinosaurs? This movie is terrible but I can't force myself to give it 1 star.

Planet of Dinosaurs is a wonderful movie. It opens with dramatic scary music and images of dinosaurs and a spider. These people in a gigantic spaceship have some disaster in space. Part of the spaceship explodes or something. They crash land on an Earth-like planet in a lake or something. They get out of the ship and it sinks. This is like Planet of the Apes, and with the name Planet of Dinosaurs, it is obvious that this is imitating Planet of the Apes. They discover that there are dinosaurs and other animals on the planet. Some are killed by them and they kill a tyrannosaurus which had killed some of them, making them much safer. I think the idea of the movie is that the planet had life come about on it millions of years later than on Earth and was in the dinosaur stage of evolution. But it's very unlikely that humans would ever land on a planet like that because evolution doesn't have a way it always goes. Life isn't programmed to evolve the way it did on Earth. The monster special effects in the movie are probably the best of all the dinosaur movies before Jurassic Park.

I gave this sci-fi outing a 5 because of the incredible special effects. A stranded space crew must fend for itself on a primitive planet full of dinosaurs and the like. The dinosaurs are classic stop motion creatures, most probably by Jim Danforth, a student of Ray Harryhausen's and best known for his work on "The Outer Limits" and "Jack the Giant Killer." Danforth, if it was indeed he who worked on this film, obviously learned well from the master, not just the quality of the stop motion work but the blending of live and animated footage, employing a technique invented by Harryhausen called Dynamation or Super Dynamation. The human actors in this flick are pretty awful, and the plot is from nowheresville. But the dinosaurs make up for a good deal. I understand Harryhausen visited the set during production, so I'm not surprised by the excellence of the animated sequences..

Believe it or not, when I was kid, I owned a videotape of this one. Growing up, I was obsessed with dinosaurs. Read every book my tiny eyes could take in. Saw all the LAND BEFORE TIME movies. So naturally, my parents got this for me. At the time, I liked it. I was nowhere near the film-savvy guy I am now. Recently, RiffTrax came out with this one. The comments, provided by the MST3K veterans, shine with comedic gold! Revisiting the PLANET OF DINOSAURS, I now see how crappy it actually is. Cinematography is virtually nonexistent. Sometimes all the actors would be out of focus and/or out of frame. None of them can act to save their lives! A lot of the cast are sporting beards and/or mustaches (and that includes a few of the women.) Most of the time, they're either standing around awkwardly boring each other to death in conversation or walking around pointlessly in what looks like the same location. All but bare-chested Chuck wear form-fitting spandex jump suits. Yes, we're treated to gratuitous heinie shots also. And it's disturbing that a lot of the men have no visible panty lines. What? When the filmmakers place an actor ass-first towards the camera, what else am I supposed to look at?! Once in a while, a cool stop-motion dinosaur (or in one case arachnid) will thunder onto screen to terrorize and/or kill a character. But sadly they're not on-screen long enough! The rest of the time, we watch as the cast wanders around aimlessly and spouts tedious dialogue. Every so often, they'll construct something out of sticks that they claim is impenetrable, and then a large T-rex will come by and crush it all. Until at the end, of course, when the T-rex is downed by the same thing! Music is made up almost entirely of digital blips and whoops and other sounds I can't describe. It will quickly annoy, as you might imagine. Steer clear of this film at all costs, unless it's with RiffTrax or you've invited over your funniest pals. In which case, I raise my beer to you and let out a mighty roar!!!