legend of dinosaurs & monster birds 1977

Maybe something got lost in translation but much of the dialogue makes any sense at all. As wild and unpredictable as you’d expect from the genre it’s also a mess, taking far too long to get the good stuff and owing more to Jaws (1975) than to Godzilla with much of the monster action taking place in the water as the dinosaurs biting chunks out of passing scuba divers and holidaymakers while the local authorities prevaricate about whether to close the lakeshore beaches and keep people safe.

Of all of the many Japanese film studios, Toei were the ones least associated with the kaiju eiga or giant monster genre and on the basis of Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds it’s not hard to see why. Eventually a large dinosaur, identified as a Plesiosaurus emerges from the lake and goes on the rampage, Meanwhile another monster, a Rhamphorhynchus, turns up and eventually the two prehistoric beasts square off against each other as Mount Fuji erupts. A young couple in a paddle boat vanish on the nearby lake and livestock begins disappearing.

Geologist Takashi Ashizawa (Tsunehiko Watase) investigates but has barely begun when an earthquake rocks the area. In the prologue, a young woman falls into a cave in the Sea of Trees area near Mount Fuji and finds herself in an icy cave full of large eggs, one of which starts t hatch. Many years later when I finally got to see Junji Kurata’s Kyoryu Kaicho no Densetsu/Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds it turns out the film was certainly very eccentric. The shot seemed both eccentric and exciting. Similarly, interest in another Japanese film was piqued by another still, possibly in Greg Shoemaker’s excellent fanzine Japanese Fantasy Film Journal, a shot of a young woman being menaced by a giant monsters head rising from the water behind her. In my review of Teruo Ishii’s Kyôfu kikei ningen: Edogawa Rampo zenshû/Horrors of Malformed Men (1969) I mentioned that my interest in the film was initially piqued by a still spotted in Denis Gifford’s book A Pictorial History of the Horror Movie.

Legend of dinosaurs & monster birds 1977