Click on a picture to enlarge it
| Lizards in Movies | ||
| One Million B.C. (1940) | ||
| Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film. |
||
| This is an adventure/fantasy movie about cave people that was remade in color in 1966 with Raquel Welch as "One Million Years B.C." (There's also a colorized version of this one.) The setting is the prehistoric era when humans lived with dinosaurs. (That never happened, but don't let reality spoil the fantasy.) The dinosaurs are all played by normal-sized reptiles that are made to look enormous by special effects that were so good at the time that they were nominated for an Oscar. The main characters are a cave man named Tumak (Victor Mature) and a cave woman named Loana (Carole Landis.) They live with different tribes that have opposing methods of cooperation and survival that are very similar to today's polarized society. Tumak's conservative rock tribe are bullies who think that only the rich and powerful should rule and prosper, and their success will trickle down to the others and Loana's liberal shell tribe thinks that everybody should be taken care of equally, leaving them all broke and and defenseless. (Don't throw me out of the tribe, I'm just joking.) Tumak is thrown out of his tribe and attacked by a woolly mammoth. Loana finds him and takes him to her tribe to rehabilitate him. When Tumak proves to be too violent for Loana's tribe, they kick him out and she follows him on a journey that ends at his tribe's cave. |
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| During their journey Tumak and Loana encounter various giant reptiles, including a monitor lizard and an anole that runs on top of it. (We also see other animals portraying dinosaurs, including an armadillo with horns glued onto its head, and elephants with fur glued on to make them look like woolly mammoths.) At the end we see several lizards struggling to escape a fire caused by a volcano. The volcano causes a giant crack in the earth that the lizards fall into. Some of these lizards appear to be actually suffering from either the flames or some other trauma. As we will see later, a lot of the reptiles used in this came to harm, including a snake scene with a snake being killed and eaten. |
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Tumak and Loanna come upon battle between a dinosaur and a giant lizard. The dinosaur is played by a juvenile American Alligator (or maybe it's a crocodile, I can't tell) with a giant sail fin glued onto its back. The lizard is played by an Argentine Black and White Tegu, (the same species that is now an invasive species in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, which makes me wonder if they actually do fight with alligators there now.) The two surprisingly hairless cave people hide in a giant crevice while the tegu passes over them. Then they watch the fight as the finned alligator gets the lizard in a death roll, then mortally wounds it and crawls away. When we see Victor Mature walking in front of the tegu, we see blood flowing out of a wound as the tegu bleeds to death that is probably not a special effect. The sequence was a real fight between two live reptiles, and the tegu lost. This is one of several examples of animal cruelty in the movie. In 1940 the American Humane Society became the official monitoring body for the humane treatment of animals in filmed media, but this movie was probably in production before they started. (You can watch the alligator and tegu fight scene on Turner Classic Movies site.) |
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Tumak and Loanna get to Tumak's tribe, where she starts to civilize them and convince them that sharing resources is good, but a man from her tribe comes and asks them for help now that his tribe is in need of some of Tumak's violence. A gigantic dinosaur (played by some kind of iguana - maybe a Rhinoceros Iguana) has been blocking the cave people from leaving their cave and they are beginning to starve. Tumak and men from both tribes poke the monster with spears but it won't leave. Finally the other men climb up above the cave while Tumak lures the monster underneath them. Then they roll rocks down onto it and bury it. You can read more about it and watch the entire movie at The Silver Scream. According to the site, this movie ended up in the public domain, which allowed stock footage from it to be used in many other movies. You can see a list of some of the movies that used it there. Silver Scream also mentions that using optically-enlarged animals to portray giant monsters is called "slurpasur." You can read more about this on TVTropes.org. You can also compare these lizard scenes to the 1966 movie. The scenes in this one are far more interesting, but at the same time, much more disturbing because of the real violence. |
||
 |
 |
 |
"UNBELIEVABLE! The World at the Dawn of Time!" "ACTUAL LIVING ANIMALS OF A BYGONE AGE RE-CREATED AND FILMED BY A NEW SECRET PROCESS!" |
||