Revenge of the Ghost of the Son of the 31 Days of Cheese - Day 2 - Valley of the Dragons

Well it looks like I really got started late on this project –as the Oscars are this weekend and I am on number two. Ah well I will push on as best I can and try to get this project done at least before all the Oscar winners are out on Blu-ray.

I digress.

These days special effects are a huge part of the movie going experience – the Star Wars films being a prime example of how worlds not our own can be imagined and made to seem real and the Jurassic Park films (despite the unfortunate nature of the sequels) showed brought Dinosaurs and other creatures to seeming reality.

This was, needless to say not always the case.

Special effects were really bad laughably so some times.

And what was worse they got recycled.

This is something that doesn’t happen much in films these days but in the 50’s and 60’s it was pretty common practice for low budget films to use stock footage to expand their running times or when the script needed a monster or two folks would dip into the stock footage vault and toss any old thing on the screen then cut to the actors reacting to it.  It was the massive use of this that gave Ed Wood’s films some of its distinctive look (he was far from alone in this). To modern eyes it is painfully obvious that the poor lizard with the fin glued to it is from a different film but I guess the couples necking in the dark or kids parked for a matinee by parents didn’t care much.

This long introduction brings us to today’s film Valley of the Dragons. And no there are no dragons.  Which should give you an idea of just what a clunker this film is – that and that I’m writing about it I guess.

This 1961 film is very very loosely based on a Jules Vern novel ‘A Career on a Comet” from the 1880’s - ;it was not one of Verne’s  (the Author of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, From Earth to the Moon, Journey to the Center of the Earth) more inspired moments.

We open in Algeria in 1881 two men a French officer and Irish adventurer are going to fight a duel over a lady when they are interrupted by stock footage from It came from Out Space, which was also used in Robot Monster (nothing is telling me I really need a life more than realizing I have recognized stock footage from another film but have remember where else it had been used).

There is a general disaster and the duelist’s seconds are blown away in the wind and storm. When the storm subsides the pair realize the landscape has changed and that were there was desert there is now scrub brush –then jungle – then Neanderthals.

They fend off the Neanderthals (men in cheap masks) they as they go along realize they are not on earth anymore – and I think this is the only special effects shot specific to the movie where they are looking up at night and seeing the earth.

The French Officer then hits on the idea that they are on a comet that this comet hit the earth a glancing blow and then picked up the chunk of Algeria that they were standing on and as it had done this before there were the Neanderthals along with, they discover, prehistoric animals and stock footage mostly from the 1940’s version of One Million Years BC with a shot or two of Rodan tossed in for general surrealism I guess.

There is also a volcano , just how that is supposed to work on land dug out of the earth is not mentioned but really the less you think about the entire concept the better.

While this whole silly comet scooping up a bit of earth and flies away with it without everybody and everything on it dying instantly was taken from the Vern novel (as noted not his proudest moment) Vern wrote that in 1881 or so when we didn’t know so much about comets – that they used this stupid plot idea in 1961 is a bit more irritating yes it’s just a movie but still.

Well the two explore find two different tribes of cave men (steal their clothes so they will look like the people in the stock footage shots) watch stock footage of  two lizards fight to the death (animals were harmed in the making of One Million Years BC – it’s painful to watch ) get separated and one each ends up being taken in by one tribe where both meet cute cave women, The French men a blonde lady and the Irish Man a Burnette who they teach ‘the kiss’ to ,  Blonde lady does a swim in I guess a prehistoric bikini (and as a side note it would seem leg shaving and make up were after fire and the spear the first things developed by primitive man) there is a volcanic eruption (of course there is, ever see a volcano in a movie that didn’t erupt?) and then a struggle against more lizards in stock footage which the blow up because the Frenchman remembers the formula for gunpowder (did the guy who wrote the Star Trek episode with Kirk and the Grorn see this film and pinch the idea – who knows) and  I can’t quite place the film in this case.

In the end the two tribes who had been hostile come together in harmony the Frenchman announces that the comet will come near the earth in seven years which will give them plenty of time to boink the cave ladies and figure out a way to escape the comet.

Roll Credits

Aside from the ludicrous setting on  comet this is pretty much a paint by numbers lost world film including cave ladies and lizards – none of the acting is awful but everybody just seems to going through the motions but then so is the film.

Enjoy with French Wine and Irish Cheese.