The Complete Cinematic History of Allosaurus (Part 1 of 2)

Dinosaurs in Film: Allosaurus 

 

The most famous meat-eating dinosaur is still Tyrannosaurus rex, but looming in its shadow has always been another more ancient species known to science since the 1860s. The Allosaurus did not grow as large as T. rex, but it was even more ferocious and frightening in multiple ways. For one, it had wicked three-fingered hands ending in talon-like claws. These were not like the tiny two-fingered arms of a tyrannosaur, they were strong front limbs built to grasp at prey and tear it apart, or hold onto it while its sharp teeth and powerful jaws did the work. Even though they were smaller than the tyrannosaurs to come (but not by much), they were faster, swifter, and undoubtedly predatory, with small crests above the eyes, creating a mean expression. They may have also hunted in packs and been able to bring down the largest of dinosaurs: the long-necked sauropods. This should have been the real king of Jurassic Park if they wanted to be true to the name.

Allosaurus did not gain the same enduring fame as the Tyrant Lizard King, but it was still a pioneer of the early days of dinosaur motion pictures, with many memorable roles in multiple decades and a long-awaited rise to stardom in the 21^st century. I’ve broken it down into just two eras for this vicious carnivore. We’ll begin with one of the essential primary examples of prehistoric cinema.

 

Underdog Era (1920’s-1970’s)

 

Author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle envisioned a world atop a plateau in the middle of the South American jungle where prehistoric life had survived unchanged for millions of years, and he would go on to write a novel with this premise called The Lost World, which became one of the classic dinosaur tales, as well as a source of inspiration for the earliest films to feature prehistoric creatures. The first film adaptation, The Lost World (1925), stayed true to the source material, right down to the main antagonist on the plateau. When Doyle wrote the novel, T. rex wasn’t as well-known yet, so he described Allosaurus as the most frightening top predator he could imagine. The design for the movie was based on a painting by famous paleo artist Charles R. Knight, and for the time, it was a pretty good debut. Sure, you can easily pick it apart today—the stop motion isn’t that smooth, the model isn’t that detailed, the posture is wrong, the arms are a bit too short—but for 1925, it was groundbreaking, and to this day the creature still exudes undeniable menace.

The Allosaurus attacks a Trachodon (duck-billed dinosaur) and within seconds of appearing it is clear this is a creature to be feared. It kills the Trachodon, which slides into a bog, then moves on to fight a Triceratops, but is chased off. Later, the Allo invades the explorers’ camp at night, and there’s a great moment with a torch thrown at it, somehow ending up perfectly in its jaws. This deters it, but the Allo is hungry and gets desperate enough to attack a spiky three-horn Agathaumus. It hangs onto its back, trying to bite its neck, but its frill protects it. The ceratopsian manages to disembowel the predator—only to be killed by a Tyrannosaurus rex immediately after. A second Allosaurus comes in to a later scene with a Brontosaurus, forcing the long-neck over a cliff. While the encounters with the ceratopsians and Trachodon would not have been possible in the prehistoric past given the amount of geologic time between those creatures and the Allo, the battle with the sauropod definitely happened 145 million years ago, though probably not quite like that.

The first time I saw The Lost World I didn’t actually realize the dinosaur attacking the long-neck was an Allosaurus, I thought it was the T. rex. In real life they look quite different, but in the movie they look pretty similar and the scale of them is hard to determine, so it’s not surprising that when effects creator Willis O’Brien went on to make the dinosaurs for King Kong (1933) there was some confusion yet again as to the identity of the big meat-eater. You see, T. rex technically did have three fingers, but one of the fingers was so vestigial it wasn’t even visible. Next time you eat a chicken wing, look for that tiny little claw near the joint. That’s kind of what the third finger of T. rex was like: present, but barely detectable. If you look at a T. rex arm compared to an Allosaurus arm, there’s no confusing one for the other. But, Charles R. Knight instigated some of the confusion when he painted his T. rex with the same number of fingers as his Allosaurus. This resulted in the T. rex’s on the Lost World plateau and on King Kong’s Skull Island having three distinct digits. It’s not quite the same case as Walt Disney wanting the Rex to have triple-clawed hands in The Rite of Spring for Fantasia because he liked the way it looked. That dino was always intended to be a T. rex, but the big meat-eater in King Kong was referred to as both an Allosaurus and a T. rex by O’Brien. To him, they were interchangeable.

This same problem happened again in The Valley of Gwangi (1969). There’s debate about whether or not the purple predator is an Allosaurus or Tyrannosaurus rex, because it, too, has three fingers, and is scaled to be roughly in between the maximum size for an Allo and the average size for a Rex. In the original script it was identified as an Allosaurus, but again, they didn’t draw much distinction between them. Ray Harryhausen, who created Gwangi was even quoted as saying “They're both meat eaters, they're both Tyrants... one was just a bit larger than the other.” But I think the case can be laid to rest. Harryhausen confirmed he used Charles R. Knight’s T. rex painting as inspiration/reference, and three fingers or two, that makes Gwangi a Tyrannosaurus in my books. Allosaurus got shafted. This would have been its biggest role thus far.

Allegedly, one of the creatures in One Million B.C. (1940) is supposed to be an Allosaurus too, but all they did was put real lizards on miniature sets and claim they were dinosaurs. They could’ve said they were any species and it wouldn’t have been any more or less convincing. The dinosaur in The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956) is unquestionably an Allosaurus, and beat Valley of Gwangi to the punch as far as mixing dinosaurs and cowboys. But, Harryhausen’s Gwangi far outshines the Allo of Hollow Mountain, which is brought to life with a mix of lesser-quality stop motion and cheap rubber suit. That being said, it’s still not bad for the time it was made, especially considering neither Harryhausen nor Willis O’Brien did the stop motion (though O’Brien did work on the screenplay).

Hammer Studios remade One Million B.C., this time calling it One Million Years B.C. (1966) and featuring much better special effects. It still mixed in some real animals using rear projection to make them appear large, but also had stop motion animation created by the new go-to man for the job, Ray Harryhausen. One of the distinct parts of the original movie was the Allosaurus attack, and this was re-imagined with a stop motion one that actually looked like a real dinosaur, not some overgrown lizard. This Allo is easily one of the best in all of cinema history. It picks a guy up out of a pond and brutally kills him, then goes after a little girl in a tree. Main caveman character Tumak fights it with a spear, eventually getting the beast to fatally impale itself. This Allo, like many Harryhausen creations, has expression, attitude, and an incredible level of detail.

As great as the One Million Years B.C. Allosaurus is, it still got the short end of the stick. It’s a young one, much smaller than a true full-grown adult, and this scene happens in the first half of the film. The centerpiece action scene is between a Triceratops and a Ceratosaurus. In real life, Ceratosaurus was smaller than Allosaurus, and probably not as good of a fighter. I don’t know why Ceratosaurus was chosen for this scene over Allosaurus. Maybe because someone thought it looked scarier with its nose horn. The Allo had a chance to replace T. rex in Toho’s reimaging of the Eighth Wonder of the World, King Kong Escapes (1967), but the Jurassic predator would not be honoured. Kong fights Gorosaurus on Mondo Island while a blonde woman screams for her life, which is essentially a mini-remake of the T. rex fight from the 1933 original. Gorosaurus is a fictional dinosaur, and in supplementary material he is identified as being an Allosaurus relative, which checks out, given his three-fingered hands and tapered snout, but he’s still clearly meant to be seen as a giant stand-in for the T. rex from the original. Gorosaurus later went on to join the fray in Destroy All Monsters (1968), starring alongside most of the big Toho monster stars, like Godzilla and King Ghidorah.

A pair of allosaurs appeared in The Land That Time Forgot (1974), but not in the sequel. Maybe that was for the best: these ones look more like lizards than dinos, for one thing, and are not stop motion or mechanical, but instead floppy puppets. The only other Allosaurus appearance from this era was in Planet of Dinosaurs (1978), but this one is at least memorable for a good reason, and looks much more appealing than the previous example. It’s another small individual, barely taller than a human, and its scene is short. We see sand thrown in its face, a spear thrown at its back, and for good measure, one character shoots it with a laser blast. Though not as full of personality, the quality of this stop motion Allo is comparable to the one from One Million Years B.C. and, just like in that movie, its role is smaller than that of another large meat-eater.  

We’ll look at the second era next time. Check it out soon!