Vacationers at Saiko Lake at the foot of Mt. Fuji are terrorised by aquatic and flying primeval monsters. The inaptly titled film (technically there are no "dinosaurs" and certainty there are no "monster birds") has little going for it beyond camp entertainment. The titular creatures don't appear until around the halfway point, subjecting waiting viewers to some limp attempts at building tension undermined by juvenile comic relief, lengthy musical interludes (featuring Japanese rockabilly), and a 'false alarm' scene copied almost verbatim from 'Jaws'. Things pick up a bit when the snaggle-toothed monsters appear and film turns surprisingly grisly. Also surprising is the brief glimpse of nudity before one showering victim is devoured (apparently both the more egregious gore and the nude scene is frequently edited out). The creatures might have been eye-catching in the early 1960s but for a late 1970s horror flic, the models and miniatures are unimpressive. The score is a strange mix of funk that would be at home in a Blaxploitation cop movie, generic disco-jive, the aforementioned 'Japa-billy', and an amusingly inappropriate romantic ballad accompanying the scene where the heroine is dangling over a lava-filled crevasse. The version I watched on-line was adequately dubbed in English but also included grammar-challenged voice-recognition subtitles ("pliesosaur" is rendered "policía soar" at one point). Of interest to hard-core kaiju fans and perhaps to camp followers (the latter may prefer the MST3K version although they likely won't get to see the bum of the chum). Another hard-earned checkmark on my tokusatsu life-list.
