I’m not a fan of the Ice Age movies. OK, I like the little squirrelly guy who continually risks severe bodily injury in search of a nut, because I can relate to that. But it seems to me the minute Ray Romano and Denis Leary open their animated mouths to earn their paychecks for a day and a half’s work, the air drains out of the entire enterprise.

This week marks the opening of the third film in the Ice Age series, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, which — in a signal of the level of desperation among the marketing specialists herded into a room to come up with these movies — adds the aforementioned dinosaurs to the mix, despite their extinction 25 million years before the Ice Age movies take place.

Now, I don’t expect cartoons to be realistic, necessarily; I know most prehistoric sloths didn’t talk like John Leguizamo either. But this seems particularly bald-faced: Why not add in a contingent of robots and space aliens while you’re at it? (That sound you just heard is a marketing specialist belching out a draft of Ice Age IV.)

With that in mind, I thought it would be appropriate to revisit five films that earned their inclusion of dinosaurs honestly, by making no bones (bones – get it?) about being completely historically inaccurate, or terrible, or both.

Godzilla’s Revenge, a.k.a. All Monsters Attack (1971): I will grant you that Godzilla is not, technically, a dinosaur; scientists have yet to discover a species of dinosaur that bloated and rubbery, and with such large thighs. But he’s close enough for government work.

If you’re going to revisit a Godzilla film, I think it defeats the purpose to choose one with even an air of respectability, like Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956). That’s the American version of the original Japanese Gojira (1954), in which Raymond Burr (as American journalist Steve Martin, the wild and crazy guy) is inserted into every other scene to look all authoritative and white.

No, seems to me you’re better off with an installment like Godzilla’s Revenge, in which a little boy falls asleep and dreams he’s gone off to Monster Island, where he helps Godzilla teach his son Minilla to blow cute little smoke rings. Eventually there is some fighting, and the boy’s Godzilla training winds up enabling him to foil two bumbling robbers, confirming my theory that Home Alone 3 is one movie that actually would have been a lot better with dinosaurs. (more…)