During an excavation, professor Morey (Dick Welsbacher) finds a human
body that's waaaay prehistoric - actually from around 60 million years
ago, the age of the dinosaurs, long before the first humanoid creatures
are even believed to have walked the earth - ans still, it's in a very
fresh condition. This discovery is so groundbreaking that he doesn't want
to share it with the museum which grant he's working on but wants to
commercially exploit it himself. So why he's picking up John (Ralph
Seeley) and Paul (John Froome), archeologists from said museum, he tells
his associates Randall and Henderson (Webb Smith) to hide the body -
titular beast, played by director Tom Leahy (as Nelson Strong) himself. Of
course, when he returns with John and Paul, Henderson is dead, Randall
seems to have gone off the rocker, and the body of the beast is found
quite a few hundred yards away from the excavation site, still dead but a
lot fresher than it was before. Now everyone in his sound mind of course
blames the death on Randall and he's subsequently arrested - and his
insistance that the beast did it doesn't help him one bit, either ... but
John and Paul come to the conclusion that he might be right. After
falling out with the head of the museum (Henry Harvey), Morey decides to
leave the place for good but smuggle the beast out of it with him, which
is, triggered by thunder and lightning, the beast comes to life again,
kills Morey and a few other people, is cornered by the police but proves
to be impervious to bullets ... but ultimately John and Paul figure a
prehistoric creature can only be killed by something prehistoric, and the
stake him with a dinosaur bone ... Extremely rare sci-fi/horror
from Wichita that on a pure quality level doesn't have all that much going
for it - but it's fun in that typical no-budget campy way, where leaps of
reason, long-winded stilted dialogues and a total misunderstanding of
science actually add to the enjoyment of a film rather than distracting
from it. And while the monster itself might look a bit ridiculous (but is
at least kept out of sigh until late) and most of the direction is
functional instead of atmospheric, at least one scene, that of Henderson
nailed to a wall by a pitchfork, is actually shocking to this day. Now
granted, you really have to be a low-to-no budget horror afficionado to
like this one, but if so, you probably will.
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