I used to keep green iguanas as pets.
I hate the moviemakers use green iguana as a form of dinosuar in this film. Such cheap deed will mislead people to believe green iguanas are evil or dangerous.
Green Iguanas are not dangerous, they are great animals, and million of people in the world keep them as pets
the Triassic era dinosaurs looked like Iguana's. They existed 250 million years ago for that era.
But its stilly to call any movie 1 million BC and have ANY dino in the film as quite simply its ridiculous. The producers could have had big cats and scary furry beasts instead more in keeping with the time frame.
The iguana worked in this film because they also had stop motion puppets of actual dinosaurs. Iguanas may not be evil, but I think they would eat a bug-sized human. The size comparison between the giant iguana and Tumak was pretty close to that of a normal iguana and a cricket.
As for the film being set One Million Years B.C., it's supposed to be a dead giveaway that this wasn't an actual period in time and that we're supposed to take it with a grain of salt. No one is going to be mislead by this film into thinking that man and dinosaur shared the earth. If you can't let go of the absolute truths of life, then this isn't the kind of film for you. There is no accuracy to the film and was never meant to be, it was an excuse to show off dinosaurs and women in prehistoric bikinis. Anything else is just filling.
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"Attempted murder? Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel Prize for attempted chemistry?"
Green iguanas do not eat meat, they eat vegetables or fruits or loaf of bread or leaves. As I had kept one for 3 years, whose size was about 100cm (from 15cm up), I can tell you they are vegetarian.
Other species of iguana or even cameleon might eat meat, or insects, but not green iguanas, the green one you see in petshop.
The green iguana in the movie was a tip of the hat to the older movie in which lizards (and some mammals like an armadillo) were used as prehistoric beasts.
Be thankful that they didn't use the old method of starving carnivorous lizards and reptiles and photographing them killing each other as they did in One Million B.C. as well as LAND UNKNOWN(1957) and Irwin Allen's The Lost World(1960)
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There's a tarantula used as a monster in this film as well. When I first saw it as a small child I was terrified of it, but now I keep tarantulas as pets I think it's kind of cute.
why should they do that? It's fantasy for crying out loud, why bother 'keeping with the time frame' to please a few knit pickers.
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shareI think they ran out of time or money. Hammer films often don't have the budget of US Harryhausen films. According to a book I read, the iguana kept falling asleep under the studio lights and had to be more or less operated like a puppet by its handler. I can't help wondering how many people walked out of the cinema when that iguana appeared. I did think the spider was scary as a child, but now I just think it looks a bit pathetic and it sits there doing nothing. Apparently they gave it a grasshopper (which can be seen in the film) in the hope the spider would attack it, providing some action, but it wasn't interested.
The problem is a lot of film producers don't understand how long stop-motion takes, and they want everything finished on time. It's a shame, because I'd love to have seen that unmade Apatosaurus scene, and I think if they'd had longer Tumak could have been chased by another meat-eating dinosaur or maybe a territorial stegosaurus or something instead of the iguana. There was also originally a planned scene involving some large flightless prehistoric bird or other which is kept by the Shell people as a source of eggs. In the original storyline it ran away and was eaten by the Allosaurus which then attacks the village. I think Ray Harryhausen felt that would have given the dinosaur a better entrance. He did get to use the idea in "Valley of Gwangi" with an Ornithomimus instead of a bird.
Cool, I would LOVE to have seen that, so tempting.
Got any sources or concept art for these ?
"Hammer films often don't have the budget of US Harryhausen films" I saw this film on television afew days ago and was amazed by how good it looked, the scene of the giant archelon on the beach looks so real, like it was really there. And the battle of the Ceratosaurus and the Triceratops was so fluid and real.
There is a moment in the allosaurus scene where I'm always stunned at how realisticly it moves, it's a shot when the cavemen are driving their spears at it, it just moves like it were a real living creature, or atleast in such a way that looks like a really fast anamatronic that was live in the studio and not a stopmotion prop.
It goes without saying that this film includes some of Harry Hausen's finest work, perhaps even his best. Suprising when you remember what you pointed out; that it WAS a Hammer horror picture and therefore not as high a budget as Harry Hausen would have been used to. I always find it wierd how films that look absolutely real and atmospheric sometimes turn out to be very inexpensive; Escape from New York, Aliens, THIS, and several old stories of Doctor Who such as Frontios, all old Doctor Who stories were made on a tight budget mind, which makes them all the more amazing achievements).