I do not know why this got a 3.9. It is a 7. It is just very underrated. I think there are to many sciences fiction that underrated and this is one of them. This movie has a great story line. It also has great acting. It is very scary. It is scarier then The silence of lambs could ever be. This is scarier then A Nightmare on elm street and that is not easy to do. This is scarier the Friday the 13th V a new beginning and that is not easy to do. This is scarier the Halloween resurrection could ever be. If you like monster movies then you should see this movie.

Wow. Sexism, racism, monsterism, ridiculism, this movie has it all.I've seen many Japanese "man-in-a-rubber-suit" monster movies. Yup, got hooked as a kid. And this is the worst I've seen. To be fair, I saw it on one of the late night Monster, Horror, Chiller Theater showings, and it was the English dubbed version that had been edited down to just over an hour, so I could be missing some of the more subtle points and nuance.But here are the parts I DID see- The little Japanese boy, playing a "native" that went through the entire movie in black face (a subtle touch I managed to catch).The female scientist, who spent the whole movie cold-shouldering her suitor in order to pursue her career, only to decide at the end to give it all up to go home, become a woman, and wash diapers (a wholesome family message I was happy to see).Monsters that can't decide how large they are. Are they 10 feet tall, 100 feet tall, 1000 feet tall? The answer is YES! The version I saw did not explain how these flying, swimming, fire breathing lizard-birds (called Gappa) came to be. It also made no mention how a scientist with no prior knowledge of Gappa's immediately knew they were hypersensitive to certain sounds. But I'm sure that was all explained in the unedited version of the movie. Oh, and at the end of the movie, as the monsters flew off into the sunset, they blew up (huh?).This is not the worst movie ever made (Can you say "Monster a-Go Go"?), but it IS a really bad movie. I'm not sure how MST3K missed it.

Okay, first of all, the "Prehistoric planet" of the English title is Earth. "Monster from a Prehistoric Planet" is, in fact, yet another Tokyo rampage style big monster film with lots of buildings being crushed, planes shooting rockets, and hysterical Japanese people running around aimlessly for hours on end. It's also, in my humble opinion, not only a lot of fun but good in it's own way, despite the fact that it definitely fits the MST3K style interest.Really, the movie is about familial piety in traditional Japanese society. The nervous explorers take the child Gappa away from the pious traditional family, and as a result they send Tokyo into flames. Their boss, who is shown refusing his daughter the opportunity to have a mother, never learns his mistake because he's blinded by greed. The woman explorer sums up the movie by stating, "I should be like other women and stay at home." Yes, it's sexist, ridiculous, and absolutely bizarre. But considering it holds on to those values while glorying in the imagery of men in rubber suits crushing models of cities, it seems more like the camp of this movie is a result of it coming from a perspective that has changed in society, both East and West. At any rate, it's not really that much worse than Godzilla.On the other hand, yes, mostly the reason why I like this movie is because I couldn't stop laughing during its entire play-length. Some of the most absurd situations are shown in this movie, one of the most bizarre being the, "This sound is hurtful to HUMAN ears..." dialog. A little girl running around a corner saying, "Wow, it's really big!" A comedic relief foolish person who constantly trips over everything. A "cannibal" parade on what is so obviously a sound-stage. The fact that the heroes decide that when rockets don't work, they should try again, this time with, you guessed it, rockets. It's all very laughable, but charming in its b-movie way.At any rate, I enjoy it.--PolarisDiB

A group of intrepid explorers is sent on an expedition to find exotic animals (and people) for a new theme park to be built by a magazine tycoon who also happens to publishes Playmate Magazine. Soon, the group lands on an island in the South Pacific, where they discover an isolated tribe of natives who worship a mysterious God named Gappa. When the land is ruptured by an earthquake, the explorers come upon a cavern containing a reptilian egg. They take it back to a Japanese research center, where the creature hatches and is studied by a group of not too bright scientists. Unfortunately, the parental Gappas show up to claim their newborn lizard, trashing most of Tokyo in the process.I had a great time watching this piece of nonsense. Just about everything in this film is a complete riot. After a somewhat slow first half, the action is almost non-stop and there's plenty of stupendous dialog to keep you entertained. The production values consist mostly of hilariously cheap-looking scale models, the story and the acting are ridiculous and most of the characters are empty-headed idiots, especially for a group of scientists. The monster, Gappa, is a kind of bird-lizard, basically a ridiculous looking over-sized chicken. When it flies, it sounds like an airplane, but that's probably the result of a slip-up in the sound effects, because the creature gets attacked by fighter planes a couple of times.Made by the Nikkatsu Studios to make a late cash-in on the success of Godzilla- and many other monster movies and - what I understand - it was also meant as a kind of satire on the monster movie craze. Well, that aspect of the film was a bit lost on me, or probably got lost in time or translation, but then, I'm hardly an expert on Japanese old-school kaiju-flicks.Camera Obscura --- 6/10