Directed by Jack Bernhard and written by Robert T. Shannon and Jack Harvey, Unknown Island has Ted Osborne (Phillip Reed) and his fiancée, Carole (Virginia Grey), looking for dinosaurs. Good news. They find them.

Along with drunk Captain Tarnowski (Barton MacLane) and even drunker PTSD-having John Fairbanks (Richard Denning), who survived a previous dinosaur attack, they head out. Maybe Fairbanks wants to cuck Ted, too. Who can say?

When they get there, Tarnowski gets into the whiskey, starts shooting crew members and won’t leave the island until he brings one of these giant lizards back alive. And you know, as much as this is about dinosaurs, it’s also about how Tarnowski, Osbourne and Fairbanks all have it bad for Carole. So bad that they continually put her life in danger, but she can take care of herself. One time, when Tarnowski passes out, she grabs his gun and blows away a dimetrodon (which is not technically a dinosaur, but instead a reptile that went extinct ten million or more years before the dinosaurs appeared).

If you see some of these dinos and feel some deja vu, this footage was reused in the American version of Godzilla Raids Again and Adventure at the Center of the Earth. When the crew is firing grenades, there’s a bit of realism in that scene. The two-legged dinosaurs were actually rubber suits worn by actors in the hot desert of Palmdale. When one of them fell, it was actually the actor passing out from heat exhaustion. He died later and the film uses the footage. This is a dinosaur snuff film.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Sally and Bob have been married a year and there’s some good news. It seems like she’s pregnant. That means they go to see Dr. West, who has no idea what HiPPA laws are or the privacy of the patient and we learn about how Sally had a baby with Bob’s best friend who died in World War II and their issues with VD and when things get weird, he makes them watch some other movies within the movie like The Story of V.D., The Story of Reproduction and The Story of Life and oh man, throw away your popcorn because you know it’s time to see diseased vaginas and penises. Let’s throw in a cesarian and regular birth, because the people demand it!

After the movie, perhaps you’d like to purchase The Mid-Century Marriage Guide?

Director Howard Bretherton made a hundred or so low budget westerns and was a master of editing in camera, a skill he passed on to his son David Bretherton, who edited Cabaret and Westworld, and his granddaughter Gillian L. Hutshing, who was on the editing team for Blade Runner, Rad, Eyes of Fire and The Monster Squad.

Between 1922 and 1954, Lewis D. Collins made around 120 films, most of them Westerns. Here’s one of the rare ones that doesn’t have horses and six shooters, set in the jungle and starring future Superman George Reeves as an explorer.

Pilot Mike Patton (Reeves) and Bob Simpson (Ralph Byrd, who had played Dick Tracy numerous times, so this is a meta comic hero team-up) are looking for Greta Vanderhorn (Wanda McKay, who played the leading lady in many a B movie) in the jungle and find her being worshipped by the natives. She begs Mike to help her escape, but Bob has gone insane and they just might not make it out alive.

Producers William Stephen and Robert Lippert would bring back the Reeves and Byrd team for Thunder in the Pines and had plans for four movies with them every year. Banana Fleet was planned, but never got made.

The white goddess trope might not have started here, but it’s definitely happening in this one. The trope probably started in W. H. Hudson’s 1904 book Green Mansions with his character Rima. The first film example is 1920’s The Jungle Princess. We’ll have a few more examples this week, trust me.

You can watch this on MovieOnline.

Originally titled The Brain of Frankenstein, the title of this movie was changed to make it less “horror” and to feature the comedy duo. Lou Costello hated the script, claiming his five-year-old daughter could write a better script.

The Universal Monsters hadn’t been in a movie in three years, with Lugosi — who is playing Dracula for just the second time and last time in a feature film — and Chaney no longer under contract. Boris Karloff doesn’t even appear — that’s Glenn Strange* in the role — yet agreed to help promote the movie.

What a set-up. Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) makes an urgent phone call to warn Chick Young (Bud Abbott) and Wilbur Grey (Lou Costello) that a shipment they’re about to get for a wax museum contains the real Dracula. Of course, they think it’s all a joke until, you know, Dracula really comes back.

Before you know it, Dracula has reanimated Frankenstein’s Monster and has Dr. Sandra Mornay (Lenora Aubert, The Return of the Whistler) on hand to scoop out Costello’s brains and plop them into the Monster’s skull. She’s feigning interest in our hero and there’s also another mysterious woman, Joan Raymond (Jane Randolph, Cat People) acting like she’s in love with him.

Seriously, this is the very definition of a hijinks ensue film. Dracula is disguising himself as Dr. Lejos, but Larry Talbot isn’t fooled. I’ve always loved the scene where the vampire becomes a bat and the werewolf just grabs him and jumps off a balcony to both of their supposed deaths.

While this is the last appearance of the big three Universal Monsters, Abbott and Costello would also meet up with Boris “The Killer” Karloff, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Mummy and the Invisible Man, which is Abbott says, “There’s no one to frighten us any more.” That’s when a voice comes out of nowhere. “Oh, that’s too bad. I was hoping to get in on the excitement. Allow me to introduce myself—I’m the Invisible Man!” You have no idea how insane I went as a kid every time Vincent Price’s voice bellowed at the end of this. They’d also met up with the Creature from the Black Lagoon on the Colgate Comedy Hour.

This was directed by Charles Barton, who made several movies with the duo, as well as 38 episodes of Petticoat Junction, 90 episodes of Dennis the Menace, 78 episodes of The Amos ‘n Andy Show and 106 episodes of Family Affair. Walter Lantz — who created Woody Woodpecker — directed the animated Dracula to bat sequence.

*Actually, Strange isn’t in one scene. He had broken his ankle tripping over a camera cable, so when the Monster throws Dr. Mornay out the window, that’s Chaney Jr. in the make-up.

Kino Lorber Studio Classics has steadily been releasing a number of classic film noir titles under its Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema series. This one, starring Joan Fontaine and Burt Lancaster, fits right into those box sets.

Former POW Bill Saunders (Lancaster) barely survived the war and is a man on the edge. This blows up when he kills a man in a bar fight and hides in the home of nurse Jane Wharton (Fontaine), telling her its all an accident. They fall in love and after some jail time for attacking a cop, he gets a straight job. That gets ruined when a gangster who saw the bar fight starts blackmailing him.

Fontaine and Lancaster would recreate their roles for the Lux Radio Theatre broadcast on February 21, 1949 under the title The Unafraid, which was much less offensive of a title. Indeed, there was a fight where this movie was almost called Blood On My Hands and Blood On the Moon. Lancaster was a producer, so he really struggled to keep the original title, seeing as how it was based on a book by Gerald Butler.

Norman Foster mostly directed Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto films, so this is one of his few chances to strike out and make something unique, which he does. Also, the scene where Lancaster is whipped with a cat o’nine tails 18 times was voted #43 in the book Lash! The Hundred Great Scenes of Men Being Whipped in the Movies.

You can grab this blu ray from Kino Lorber, who sent us a review copy. It has a new 2K transfer and commentary by film historian Jeremy Arnold.