The Land Unknown is a 1957 American Science Fiction adventure movie about a Lost World filled with dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. It was directed by Virgil W. Vogel and stars Jock Mahoney, Shirley Patterson (billed as Shawn Smith), William Reynolds, Henry Brandon, and Douglas Kennedy.
The movie involves a US Navy expedition into Antarctica to investigate some unusual warm-water springs. One of the expedition’s helicopters, carrying four people, flies into a storm, damaging the rotor. The chopper is forced down into a massive, surprisingly warm valley below a thick layer of mist. They soon discover the valley is home to a gaggle of prehistoric creatures, kept alive by the warm springs heating the area and keeping the Antarctic chill at bay. They also meet a survivor from a previous Antarctic expedition, named Hunter, who’s gone a little crazy from his time in the valley. He offers to guide them to a cache of supplies that’ll help them fix the helicopter, but demands that the sole woman on the helicopter crew, Maggie Hathaway, remain with him. This goes over about as well as you’d expect with everyone else, but with the radio’s battery too low to get a signal out of the valley, time is running out for the survivors...
The Land Unknown contains examples of:
- Attempted Rape: Hunter goes after Maggie, only to be stopped by Lt. Carmen, who proceeds to knock him senseless on a nearby rock after a fistfight.
- Behemoth Battle: Two massive "stegosauruses" (really giant monitor lizards) get into one.
- Blow That Horn: Hunter has one that blasts out a Brown Note against the local predators, as seen below.
- Brown Note: Hunter’s conch horn emits a very loud one of these. Unlike some examples, it simply makes them turn around and go away, and it doesn’t seem to work on humans.
- Comic-Book Adaptation: The movie received one. The dinosaurs don't look much better.
- Damsel in Distress: Maggie, a couple of times.
- Dumb Dinos: Dumber than most. A Tyrannosaurus loses track of one of the characters... because said character tripped and rolled under a log that the Tyrannosaurus walks over only a few seconds later, in wide-open terrain.
- Enemy Rising Behind: The Elasmosaurus does this to Maggie once, before going after her.
- Heel–Face Turn: Hunter is thankful to Commander Harold Roberts for chewing out Lt. Carmen for trying to torture the location of the supply cache out of Hunter. He gives them a map to the cache out of gratitude, and is much more reasonable from this point on.
- Helicopter Blender: A subdued example when a Tyrannosaurus attacks the chopper, only to receive a large cut across the belly by the rotating blades for its trouble. It immediately flees.
- Hellish Copter: A less-extreme version, the chopper goes down in one piece and only needs some minor repairs. Unfortunately, an important part is broken, and the only hope of fixing it might lie in Hunter’s cache.
- Hellish Pupils: The Elasmosaurus has odd goat-like horizontally-slit pupils.
- I Choose to Stay: Hunter seems to be trying to do this as everyone else leaves, but then the Elasmosaurus attacks him, and the chopper rescues him anyway after he's knocked out.
- Intrepid Reporter: Maggie tries to be one. YMMV on how successful she is.
- Living Dinosaurs: Naturally.
- Lost World: The Devil’s Chimney, a deep valley where volcanic activity both keeps the place warm (and dinosaur-friendly) and constantly melts and vaporizes enough glacial runoff to bathe the entire place in cloud cover.
- MacGuffin: Hunter’s cache of supplies becomes this.
- Man-Eating Plant: One of them eats a small mammal, then attacks Maggie.
- More Predators Than Prey: A particularly egregious case. The only prey item we see is a small mammal that is quickly eaten by the carnivorous plant mentioned above.
- Mysterious Antarctica: The Devil's Chimney is located here.
- Neutral Female: Maggie isn't exactly helpful most of the time.
- Ominous Fog: The Devil’s Chimney is totally shrouded in it. It also serves as cloud cover from the air, explaining why (almost) nobody knew about the place before the movie began.
- Pay Evil unto Evil: Lt. Carmen starts trying to torture the location of Hunter's cache out of him with a burning torch after Hunter hits the stranded explorers with a Sadistic Choice, then tries forcing himself on Maggie.
- Prehistoric Monster: Quite a few. All fangs and teeth, no brains at all.
- Prophet Eyes: The Tyrannosaurus has dead white eyes.
- The Radio Dies First: Or rather, loses power. Recharging the battery doesn’t give it quite enough oomph to send out a distress signal.
-
Science Marches On: The Tyrannosaurus is a textbook example of outdated ideas about dinosaurs, being slow and clumsy, dragging its tail, having three-fingered hands... - Slurpasaur: There are a lot of these wandering around the Devil’s Chimney, generally giant monitor lizards. One character calls them "Stegosauruses", which is very... inaccurate.
- Sole Survivor: Hunter is the last survivor of a 1947 plane crash, and buried three other people who were killed by the local wildlife.
- Stock Ness Monster: An Elasmosaurus acts as a particularly aggressive one of these.
- Very Loosely Based on a True Story: Hunter was one of the survivors of a crashed plane from a 1947 US Navy expedition to Antarctica. "Operation HIGHJUMP", from 1947, did indeed suffer a plane crash in a remote area in which three people were killed, but the survivors were all eventually rescued. Rumors of warm-water springs being found by the expedition were also a major source of inspiration.
