Click on a picture to enlarge it

Lizards in Movies   Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   In this Oscar-nominated CinemaScope family adventure fantasy based on a novel by Jules Verne, a Scottish university professor and his student, a Swedish woman, and an Icelandic man and his duck, climb down a volcano in Iceland, and hike through caves down to the center of the earth where they find the lost city of Atlantis, then they all get in a giant Atlantean saucer and shoot back to the surface through an erupting Italian volcano. The end. (The center of the earth is an ocean!) Seriously, this movie wraps itself in a reverence for the great teachings and achievements of science, but it's mostly fantasy. It ignores more than a few basic scientific truths - lava will burn you to death, intense pressure will crush you to death, water will drown you to death, and a lack of oxygen will suffocate you to death. Just about the only scientific fact we see in this movie is the uncontroverted truth that there are gigantic lizards living at the center of the Earth. That's as certain as gravity! The first lizard scene. After months of wandering underground in caverns illuminated by luminescent algae, bathing in underground waterfalls, falling down through quicksand pits made of salt, and not dying from suffocation, dehydration, hyperthermia, falling, starving, drowning, being crushed, or being driven crazy by Pat Boone's accordeon music, (his fiance gave him one for the trip) the explorers discover a field of giant mushrooms. We see the face of a gigantic lizard hiding behind some mushrooms, and that prepares us for the lizard nonsense that happens later. As they discover the ocean at the center of the earth (you won't get a tan on that beach) the professor and the evil villain (it's too complicated to say more about him) discover that there are gigantic flesh-eating monster Dimetrodons who would like very much to eat them. (Of course, if they eat flesh, that must mean that there are other animals down there for them to eat.) (Fun fact, the Dimetrodons are actually Rhinoceros Iguanas that have huge sail fins glued to their backs.) The men run into the ocean because Dimetrodons can't swim. Then they collect the rest of the people and drag a raft they made out of the stalks of gigantic mushrooms into the ocean. But several other giant Dimetrodons start coming out of huge holes and chase after them. The woman falls and needs rescuing from one of the monsters. The Icelandic guy throws one of their walking staffs (which have spearheads for some reason) and kills the beast. The other dinosaurs rush up and start eating the dead one, which allows the people to get away on their raft. I know that these are supposed to be dinosaurs, not lizards, but they did use real Rhinoceros Iguanas dressed up to look like dinosaurs, so I consider this a scene with lizards. The second lizard scene. When they get to the true center of the earth, the magnetism sucks all of their things off the raft (even things that are not made of metal - science wouldn't like that.) They get sucked into a giant whirlpool in the ocean and somehow end up on the ocean shore next to the lost city of Atlantis, which fell into the center of the earth. (Through the same whirlpool? You figure it out.) All I'm concerned with is the giant killer lizard that finds them. We see shots of a huge gray lizard tail and head, but the tail quickly glows red, and the lizard's color also turns to red. (This shows that it has warmed up, though I don't know why it suddenly warmed up just because a few people arrived.) Whatever, like most of us, it wakes up hungry and does what all lizards do (again, this is a scientific fact!) it shoots its long pink forked tongue out at the professor and wraps it around his leg. (There's a nice shot from inside the lizards's mouth.) (OK, even though the Tegu does have a long pink forked tongue, this is another lie - lizard tongues are not prehensile - they can't be used to grab and pull someone's leg.) The professor's student grabs a hammer and pounds a large spike into the lizard's tongue. That's enough to make the monster run away and free the professor. Later, when all four survivors are hiding in the giant saucer that they ride up out of the volcano when it erupts (seriously!), we see the red hot lava cover the giant red lizard. The monster lizard is actually a live Tegu (lizard) that was painted red. Then, using motion picture trickery, it was superimposed in a way to make it look much larger than the people. The same trick was used with the giant Iguana dinosaurs. A little paint and camera trickery earned this movie a special effects Oscar nomination in '59. Today it takes at least a hundred million dollars worth of computer work to earn a nomination, but I'm not entirely sure that today's effects look a hundred million dollars better.