Like Ashizawa, though, Akiko spends much of the film doing the same thing over and over again-in her case, screaming at the top of her lungs whenever the film's titular monsters (which, as we will see, are not actually dinosaurs or birds at all) come into view. The film's score tells us that Akiko is Ashizawa's love interest, but that is a bit hard to swallow, especially given the scientist's reprehensible treatment of Akiko later in the film.

Not long after we meet Ashizawa, the film introduces us to our other main protagonist-Akiko. This, ladies and gentlemen, is our hero-a smug, arrogant scientist who abuses women and becomes so preoccupied with his father's idea that dinosaurs could have survived into the present day that he spends the majority of his screen time doing little more than saying 'I know my father was right!' I'm sure he and Maston Thrust would get along famously. She soon dies at a hospital, but not before her story pops up on the evening news and catches the attention of the ambitious young geologist Ashizawa. The young woman survives the ordeal, although she receives little help from the mining crew that finds her-contrary to what this film shows, vigorously jostling a fall victim down the side of a hill is not a good way to see if she has any serious spinal injuries. Awakened by the disturbance, what I can only assume is one of Baby Huey's siblings begins cracking out of its shell, providing us with another close-up eye shot (the amount of close-up shots of characters looking offscreen so early in the film makes me wonder if the director was a Spielberg admirer). she ends up falling into a cavern in which several giant eggs are kept on ice. It sounds as if she is being stalked by the British prog-rock band Jethro Tull, but as she tries to flee Ian Anderson and Co. Our story picks up, as so many schlock films do, with an eye, apparently belonging to a young woman wandering around the woods of Mt. 'Good special effects' might be one answer, and 'a plot' is an even better one, but if 'a trippy jazz-disco musical score' was your reply, then 1977's Japanese monster flick Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds may be just what you have been looking for.

When you get right down to it, most dinosaur movies are missing something.

Legend of dinosaurs & monster birds