“On this world you have two choices, be cruel or die.”
Survivors from the space ship “Odyssey” crash land in a lake on an Earth-like planet. The survivors are Captain Lee Norsythe (Louie Lawless), Jim (James Whitworth), Nyla (Pamela Bottaro), Charlotte (Charlotte Spear), Chuck (Chuck Pennington), Derna Lee (Derna Wylde), Mike (Max Thayer), Cindy (Mary Appleseth) and Harvey Baylor (Harvey Shain). As the ship sinks into the lake communications officer Cindy realizes that she forgot the radio in the ship and attempts to retrieve it. While Cindy is swimming to the ship she is attacked and killed by an unidentified aquatic dinosaur. With no radio to contact the 'outside world' the group begins to explore the planet.
They run into lots of different dinosaurs. They decide that the best thing to do it to get to high ground and set up a defense perimeter. There are lots of climbing montages in between dinosaurs. Once they are high enough to evade most of the predators the crew builds a stockade and crude weapons to defend it. Unfortunately more lives are lost. Finally they come to the realization that in order to make a life on the planet and survive they will need to kill the big predator that has been plaguing them since their arrival, the T-Rex.
“Planet of Dinosaurs” was released in 1977. The movie was produced and directed by James K. Shea. Filming took place in the Vasquez Rocks area of California's desert, in an area previously used to film several episodes of Star Trek as well as every other science fiction movie ever made.
The polyester costumes look like Burger King and McDonald’s uniforms. The actors look like porn stars. They aren’t really, they just can’t act. Although Chuck Pennington goes through almost the whole movie shirtless and more than one of the actors has acting credits that are for exploitative movies. The only person who has any decent acting credits is James Whitworth for “The Hills Have Eyes”.
The dialogue is boring. The first draft of the script was written in three days. It shows. The music is basically a synthesizer. A lot of whaa, whaa and whoo whoo. Again porn music. The plot is basic. I’m OK with that. I can handle a lot of crap when it comes to low budget “B” movie fare. This movie has basically everything bad in it, except one. The dinosaurs are good.
The animation was done by Doug Beswick. The matte artist was Jim Danforth and special visual effects by Jim Aupperle. All three are well known in their fields and have a long list of credits to their names. A big coup for a low budget bad movie. Most of the small budget for the movie went toward the stop motion dinosaurs. Good call. Included amongst the dinosaurs was a model that paid homage to Ray Harryhausen’s Rhedosaurus from “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms”. Although the stop motion is not quite Harryhausen it is one of the last movies to use the technique before CGI started taking over. Dinosaurs include Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus-Rex, Compsognathus, Styracosaurus, Allosaurus, Rhedosaurus, Centrosaurus, Polacanthus, and Big Spider.