Movie Night!

So the kids were well behaved yesterday and I decided it was time to introduce them to movies about hidden lands filled with dinosaurs. We don't have cable and so the children haven't yet seen Star Wars, any Pixar films, or really much of anything movie-wise. I'm in no rush to get any of that started but I have been feeling lately that a well rounded person should be well versed in hidden dinosaur lands.

Speaking of which, see if you can come up with four or five different routes to reach hidden regions crawling with dinosaurs. There's a good number.*

I rented The Land Unknown from Netflix based on vague childhood memories and was happy to discover it is even better that I remember. Let's run down the list: Hidden Land? Check. Tough and capable Navy men? Tough and beautiful girl reporter? Check. Dinosaurs? This movie features men in suits, stop motion, mechanical life size monsters and real lizards in close up! Lots of checks. Also a cool helicopter, footage of penguins, fistfights, torch fights, monster fights, and occasional double entendres sneaking their way through the 1950's Hayes Code monitors. What an awesome movie.

I'm not sure how every kid would respond to this movie. The effects are pushed to the limit but it's the limit of 1957. I would at least recommend it for nostalgic adults who pine for hidden dinosaur lands.

*Speaking of which: Tarzan gets to see dinosaurs in Pal-u-don in Africa and through a hole in the North Pole into Pellucidar. The Challenger expedition finds them in South America. Jerry Cornelius and Amelia Underwood travel back or forward in time to get to them. The X-Men have to visit the Savage Land. Verne's explorers find them as they travel to the center of the earth. Cowboys find dinosaurs in the Valley of Gwangi in the Southwest. Multiple rocket expeditions in the 1960's find dinosaurs on distant planets, and in one notable case strand a male and female astronaut on a distant dinosaur planet known as....Earth!