Kyôryû kaichô no densetsu

I watched this movie as a kid and I recently got a copy of it. Aside from obvious plot holes, this is an enjoyable film. I love the music in this movie and the dinosaurs are cool. It's a great film, just as long as you don't take it too seriously. I recommend it if you like Japanese films or monster films.

I originally saw this movie when I was five years old. It was aired on a USA network creature feature. The movie fascinated me. My father taped the movie using our crappy 80's VHS player. I watched the movie throughout the next ten years until the actual tape broke from strain.

I'm not quite sure what it is exactly that makes me so incredibly addicted to this film. The soundtrack is a awesome 70's jap-pop funk. The dinosaurs, a pleasiasaur and some pterodactyl variant, are so rubber campy they're great. The acting is absolutely some of the worst acting ever committed to film, and that's including high school musicals and Congo.

I thought that i would never see this film again after my tape broke, but two years ago I found dude on the internet selling DVDs of the original Japanese print with English subtitles.

I saw this back in the late 80s on the USA Network (when it was still in its weird, still-trying-to-find-an-identity-among-all-the-other-basic-cable-channels days) on an edition of the sorely missed "Commander USA's Groovy Movies." My dad taped this movie from that show (like he did with many Godzilla and Gamera movies on that ancient, crappy VCR we had in the 80s). I think he regretted it for some time afterwards, b/c my mom was not happy.

Basically, this is probably one of the most violent kaijus ever made, and even though I'm not easily shocked, I watched that ancient tape again the other day, and was surprised how violent this movie is, and how graphic the violence is. It's also fairly unoriginal, as it's merely one of many Godzilla knockoffs, made cheaply to make a quick buck.

Still, if you want to watch a cheap kaiju knockoff with shock violence, it's worth hunting down a copy. I don't know if I'd let kids watch this, even though I saw it when I was 6 or 7 years old, I don't know if I'd let a kid that young watch it.

Vacationers at Saiko Lake at the foot of Mt. Fuji are terrorised by aquatic and flying primeval monsters. The inaptly titled film (technically there are no "dinosaurs" and certainty there are no "monster birds") has little going for it beyond camp entertainment. The titular creatures don't appear until around the halfway point, subjecting waiting viewers to some limp attempts at building tension undermined by juvenile comic relief, lengthy musical interludes (featuring Japanese rockabilly), and a 'false alarm' scene copied almost verbatim from 'Jaws'. Things pick up a bit when the snaggle-toothed monsters appear and film turns surprisingly grisly. Also surprising is the brief glimpse of nudity before one showering victim is devoured (apparently both the more egregious gore and the nude scene is frequently edited out). The creatures might have been eye-catching in the early 1960s but for a late 1970s horror flic, the models and miniatures are unimpressive. The score is a strange mix of funk that would be at home in a Blaxploitation cop movie, generic disco-jive, the aforementioned 'Japa-billy', and an amusingly inappropriate romantic ballad accompanying the scene where the heroine is dangling over a lava-filled crevasse. The version I watched on-line was adequately dubbed in English but also included grammar-challenged voice-recognition subtitles ("pliesosaur" is rendered "policía soar" at one point). Of interest to hard-core kaiju fans and perhaps to camp followers (the latter may prefer the MST3K version although they likely won't get to see the bum of the chum). Another hard-earned checkmark on my tokusatsu life-list.

This one had potential, unfortunately it moves so slowly that it kind of shoots itself right in the explosive tank. The film is about mysterious killings in a lake and does follow a basic 'Jaws' formula for the first bit of the movie. They wait awhile to reveal the beast then it is finally shown, killing a couple of guys who played a very bad prank. The film follows a man who wants to get to this area near Mount Fuji where there has been mention of a petrified egg. He thinks that perhaps there is money to be made from this discovery. Strange though that they mention this discovery as no scientist actually sees this, but rather a woman who falls into a cave and then runs from the forest in a panic and falls into a coma shortly thereafter. Why this makes the news is beyond me. Still, he gets there and there start to be strange incidents happening such as a horse with its head bitten off. After a bit the dinosaur comes in, chomps a few people and then near the end the bird of the title swoops in and makes an impressive first appearance. Of course, the two duel in a very unimpressive battle that made me lower my initial score of six to five. This one had potential, they just needed to have more bloody kills and less banter. Sure they were copying "Jaws", but this film was not going to be in that film's league as far as acting and atmosphere so you have to go the bloody route. They did, but not quite enough. They even managed to show the naked rear end of a lady, so for the most part this one was quite different from most Japanese monster films of its day. Just needed more monster action. Though one thing I notice a lot of people saying about this is that the people in the film seem to say that the appearance of the dinosaurs causes the volcano to erupt, but in actuality the scientist is saying that if there was a dinosaur present than the conditions are such to release it from its slumber and one of the conditions is that there is going to be an imminent eruption of Mount Fuji. However, for the most part the film has way to many plot holes and such and suffers from not enough monster action.