“Well now we got a monster in here too. You better learn how to start knocking real quick, Hector.”

Justin’s rating: Dumpy for President in ’28!

Justin’s review: I sometimes muse about how tough it was for a scifi/fantasy geek to grow up in the ’50s and ’60s. There were no video stores or streaming your favorite nerdy episodes and films, for starters, and the options on TV were usually schlocky and sparse. So if you were, say, huge into dinosaurs before 1993, you had to make do with whatever puppets and claymation sideshows were out there.

Oh hey look, it’s Dinosaurus! It’s a sideshow with puppets and claymation! That’s a movie title that’s confusing on at least two levels, but I do appreciate its enthusiasm. I also like that it was trying to give dino-lovers in 1960 something exciting on a minimal budget.

What I suspect was an excuse for a paid vacation to the Virgin Islands, Dinosaurus! kicks off with a crew of construction workers blowing a new harbor on a Caribbean island. One of their explosions unearths a pair of frozen dinos, which are then activated by some convenient lightning. I’ll give this movie credit: It’s a clever if ridiculous way to bring dinosaurs into the “modern” age.

However, I’m not going to give Dinosaurus! any praise for realism. The dinos — one T. Rex and one Brontosaurus — look like fiberglass statues at rest. But after the first half-hour, stop motion fun kicks in and they start tearing a path across the island.

The locals also dredge up an honest-to-goodness caveman, because why not? He’s mostly there for comic relief as he comes into contact with 20th century civilization. Then he dies in a cave. It’s an ironically bad day for him.

And if we need to check even more things from the list of “Stuff Eight-Year-Old Boys Like,” there’s a whole lot of construction vehicle porn in this movie. Like, an entire parade of them at one point. Buy the whole set at your local Toys ‘R Us!

While most everyone on the island is blandly nice, including a drunk Irishman named Dumpy (seriously), the specter of Hector overshadows them. Hector’s a power-hungry, opportunistic jerk who wants to exploit the dinos and caveman for money. He’s so evil that he even stomps and breaks a little kid’s dino toys. The horror! If only there was a giant monstrous meat-eater with low standards stomping around!

Speaking of the dinos, the stop motion is pretty decent for the time, and it’s never not fun to watch the T.Rex rampage across model sets. What doesn’t work so well are all of the rear projection scenes where model and actor are combined in the fakest possible way. That’s probably why the climax featured a fight between the dino and a stop-motion construction crane.

This short movie does try to pack in a lot of ideas, yet it also makes the audience suffer through boring “comedy” sequences, tepid planning conversations between the blandly nice folks, a little kid trying to befriend the Brontosaurus through excessive babbling, and a dearth of man-vs-dino or dino-vs-dino fights until near the end.

For the era, Dinosaurus! offers mild entertainment, which is far better than absolutely no entertainment whatsoever. Plus, it’s got a kid making friends with both a caveman and a brontosaurus, which is an apt metaphor for the global economy if I’ve ever seen one.

Intermission!

• “Island Cantina” seems like a bar name that could’ve used another pass
• What’s the point of all these underwater explosions?
• His name is DUMPY?! How bad did his parents hate him?
• “That’s no shot, that’s a delayed action charge.”
• She’s so freaked out at seeing an underwater dino that she immediately passes out
• There’s no way that a small winch could lift up a multi-ton creature
• I don’t think I’d like going to a restaurant where there’s a four-man steel drum band playing six feet from your table
• Hector smashing a bottle to use as a weapon only to have it fully break and cut his hand was a laugh-out-loud moment
• I like how quickly they jump on their “let’s retreat to the fort, widen the moat, and fill it with burning oil” plan
• That girl looks so excited to make Molotov cocktails
• Books are not for eating, Urgh!
• Toilets freak cavemen the heck out
• “Where do you think to find a caveman except in a cave!”
• Caveman in a dress is so disturbing
• What twisted mind puts bananas in the fridge
• The kid grinning at the caveman nearly setting the whole house on fire with the stove
• Julio casually riding the dino with a caveman is the whole reason to watch this
• The tiny screaming stop motion girl in the T.Rex’s hand
• Cavemen like to force women to cook them dinner
• It’s 63 minutes before the dinosaurs battle
• Lost BOTH your best friends in the span of minutes? Have some soup, kid. It’s your consolation prize.
• “I love you!” “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” OK that made me laugh
• “Dumpy, if you’ve ever prayed, pray now.”
• DINO VS. CONSTRUCTION CRANE