The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Blistering performances.

Unknown Island was a film often shown when I was a kid on Saturday morning. Being an independent film it was probably sold to television very early before the big studios started selling off their libraries. For the time the special effects were pretty good, especially when you realize that this is an independent without big studio special effects department available.Philip Reed and Virginia Grey go into a Singapore dive looking for the notorious Captain Tarnowski played by Barton MacLane. They're looking to charter his tramp freighter which is primarily used by trappers for the wild animals they capture. There's this Unknown Island reputed to have prehistoric beasts on it and Reed wants to photograph them.Of course with Grey around everybody's hormones go into overdrive. Among those others are Richard Denning who has been to the island before and has barely drawn a sober breath since. As for MacLane he develops plans for the dinosaurs and for Grey.Not too much research was used as prehistoric animals from all eras get to appear here. Including the giant megatherium sloth which was one of the largest prehistoric mammals. Of course the fact that they were primarily vegetarian didn't get in the way. I suppose they had to learn to eat meat especially with all the T-Rexes around. The fight between the giant sloth and a T-Rex is a beauty.And of the human players Barton MacLane looks like he's having a ball doing a fabulous job of overacting as a man gone crazy with chronic malaria and drink. The other humans in the cast also get in the spirit of the project.Unknown Island is not bad for an independent film and it's a lot of fun.

This modest budget independent movie could teach today's filmmakers a few tricks. The first is to begin with interesting characters and a good story. The second is to keep the suspense rolling along.Blessedly free of today's stupid-looking computer animation, the prehistoric animals are nowhere near as excellent as in 1933's KING KONG, but light years better than Spielberg's bag of tricks. If you see the new Indiana Jones movie, stay for the credits and notice that hundreds and hundreds of technicians were involved in that movie (as it is in most 2008 action films), too many cooks spoil the stew. All that excess in staff does nothing to make a movie better.Remember that Indy is inspired by the far superior movies of 50 or 60 years ago. Unknown Island is a pretty decent example. See it on DVD.

A lot of this movie looks like a re-do of some elements of King Kong, which had been released 15 years earlier. The stop-motion technology of Kong was here replaced by a forced-perspective split-screen approach to animate the ferocious gigantic beasts. Compared to today's CGI, the effects may seem as primitive as the dinosaurs it shows, but it's a fun movie to watch.There's a bunch of tough sea dogs, one pretty girl, and some others introduced in pre-adventure bar room brawls and so on. Some explorer guy hears legends of the existence of the mysterious uncharted island, where prehistoric life has somehow avoided extinction, and books the sea dogs for a voyage to the island. Sound familiar? Apparently, this guy had heard about horrible deaths in the earlier film, and had aspirations to get killed in the same way.I love the creatures in this film. They're not as scary as others you've seen, but they're certainly a novelty to see. They move slowly and stare with curiosity at panicky human characters who like to shoot at them. In a couple of scenes, one of the grinning dinosaurs even looks like he's about to sing the Barney song, "I Love You, You Love Me." Be on the lookout for Kong's toothy cousin, who stages the obligatory rematch with one of Barney's more vicious relatives.It's all some good dinosaur fun, which was probably quite cool for its time, and it certainly can still entertain today, if you look past the cheap effects. The actors approach their characters with enthusiasm, and there is a good balance of character development, action, and plot development. A decent watch, for some fun drive-in nostalgia.

No this is no masterpiece, it isn't even all that good really. But it is entertaining enough to occupy 72 minutes of your time if you have some time to waste. The acting is fine and the special FX have a certain surprising charm except for the disappointing giant sloth. I enjoyed the romantic interest undertone of the film centering around Carole Lane(Virginia Grey) and the three men who desire her. All in all, this is a fun time waster.