PRE-HISTAURUS!........ ...THAWING OUT "DINOSAURUS!"

Dinosaurus! (1960)    Nobody hold their breath waiting for BQ to gang up on this cute little movie......

                   It's near and dear to my heart, coming from director-writer Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. and his hardy little band of Chester Springs, Pennsylvania filmmakers.......(working out of a converted barn in a leafy meadow.....)

                    This plucky bunch previously toiled on 16mm religious shorts for Sunday Schools until producer Jack H. Harris tapped them to produce 1958's immortal "The Blob" with Steve McQueen.....

                     One year later in '59 Harris and Yeaworth went on to make the equally iconic "4-D Man", with Robert Lansing walking through walls and terrorizing, as did the Blob, the little suburban town of Downingtown, Pa......not far from where BQ lived for many years.

                   And now we come to what you'd call the 3rd film in Jack H. Harris and Irvin Yeaworth's mighty sci-fi trilogy........for which they trooped down to the Virgin Islands.......

                  Here's what I love about Yeaworth........though supposedly shot in a tropical paradise, he makes 98 per cent of his movie look like it was made on the same tiny indoor sets as "The Blob" and "4-D Man".....(even the lush jungle exteriors are obviously done indoors).....

                 Ah well....you can take the boy out of Downingtown, but you can't take Downingtown out of the boy......

                Even laboring under poverty budgets, Yeaworth maintained his own primal visuals.......with the help of veteran cinematographer Stanley Cortez ("The Magnificent Ambersons", "The Night Of The Hunter") the director gives "Dinosaurus!"  the same ripe comic-book style of his two previous sci-fiers........not so much Color By DeLuxe..... more like Color By Crayola......

                So it's off we go to to the Caribbean, where a construction crew unearths two frozen dinos, who get quickly defrosted by lightning.......and off they rumble around, with the T-Rex's perpetual roars sounding like someone's jump-starting a pickup truck with a weak battery......

                No, you won't hear me rail and moan about the film's famously terrible dinosaur effects......(hastily constructed models, barely animated.......in some scenes,  they're just randomly shaken and pushed back and forth, much in the same way toddlers play with their own plastic dinosaur toys...)

                 The bottom-the-barrel effects end up adding to the film's innocent charm......with a skimpy story constructed like a kids' bedtime fable........complete with a little boy who flees a T-Rex, rides a brontosaurus and befriends the dinos' fellow defrostee, a caveman confounded by mirrors and waxed fruit......

                Speaking of the comedy-relief Cave-Guy, a tip of the hat to actor Greg Martell, who milks all the laughs you'd expect out of the role........he's at least as funny as they guys who use to push Geico insurance.....

                 How 'bout a thrilling climax to wind things up?  "Dinosaurus!" more than delivers......one of our stalwart heroes goes mano e mano with the T-Rex using a construction shovel........it plays like a Jurassic era pre-cursor to the "Aliens" smackdown between Sigourney Weaver and the Alien queen.......(and done with about 20 million less in special effects....)

                No mockery here. I've flat out loved Irvin Yeaworth's toy monsters ever since watching them when I was........uh....well never mind how old. 3 & 1/2 stars (*** 1/2)......Yeaworth went back to making Sunday School stuff, but BQ's memory forever remembers his oozing Blob, his dimension-bending 4-D man and his adorable Dinos......still proudly roaring like my dad's '58 Chevy that needed jumper cables to start.......