Tag Dinosaurs

Planet Raptor (2007)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews, ScI-Fi Movie Reviews Tagged with , , March 12th, 2013 @ 8:58 pm
  • AKA: Raptor Island 2: Raptor Planet

  • Director: Gary Jones

  • Writer: Steve Latshaw

  • Starring: Steven Bauer, Vanessa Angel, Ted Raimi, Musetta Vander

  • Run Time: 87 mins

Planet Raptor (2007)

…

An expedition on a remote, medieval-like planet and finds itself under attack by deadly prehistoric raptors. With a radiation storm cutting off communication to their mother ship and preventing escape, the expedition must bed down in nearby castle and there they uncover evidence that the previous occupants of the planet were wiped out by these dinosaurs….and they’re next.

 

Ok so that plot summary is a bit all over the place but that’s the best I could do. One of the worst Sci-Fi Channel movies of recent memory (the atrocious Raptor Island) gets a sequel here with Planet Raptor – an unrelated movie about a bunch of killer raptors which might as well have gone it alone such is the lack of any sort of link to the original. Only this time the raptors aren’t prowling around on some remote Pacific island but they’re…..in outer space. Yes, space raptors! I guess the title should clue you in that you’ll be taken out of the Pacific but the realisation that this film really is set in space should provoke some sort of groans from the audience.

Like a lot of old school low budget films from Universal and Hammer, Planet Raptor feels like it was pieced together using leftovers from other films. The space ship and ‘futuristic’ elements have been discarded by some low budget science fiction drivel, the medieval village is the remnants of some historical drama, the guns and combat fatigues seem to have been left behind by a generic straight-to-video action flick and the alien survivor towards the end…well that suit could have been lifted from any number of 70s sci-fi TV series. And above all, Planet Raptor features a plot borrowed directly from Aliens about a group of expendable marines sent to a hostile world by a shady company in order to acquire living specimens as weapons, featuring self-sacrificing heroes who blow themselves up in the face of death and slimy scientists who think running off in the middle of a gunfight in the middle of a hostile planet filled with deadly creatures is a good idea (see Burke, Aliens). Anyone familiar with how that film pans out will be immediately at home here but it’s not the sort of place you want to stay very long.

The mechanical plot slowly coasts along, no doubt assuming you know exactly where the film is heading, and thus doesn’t feel the need to provide any sort of excitement or pace. From the opening shots of the expedition exploring the medieval village (the bizarre decision to include a castle for our heroes to hide inside is clearly more evidence of the ‘recycling’ from other films the studio no doubt made at the same time), to the first attack of the raptors, running through the entire film right until the finale, there’s literally no sense of direction. In between all of the highly-convenient circumstances which direct the plot towards its next aimless action sequence (Decide to leave the planet? Well what about that handy radiation storm that will prevent escape?), the film suffers from a general lack of interesting and well-developed characters. But when the script is content to feature raptors terrorising a group of humans in a medieval village on a remote planet in outer space, the script was never really high on the consideration list to begin with.

Planet Raptor wheels out a load of usual low budget suspects including Steven Bauer, Vanessa Angel and Peter Jason as well as Sam Raimi’s acting brother, Ted. Both Bauer and Jason were in the original film and have been brought back as totally unrelated characters. Jason at least shows a bit of spark in his role as the tough-talking gung-ho sergeant who is as handy with a wisecrack as he is a shotgun. But the secondary characters are afterthoughts (some aren’t even credited!) and even the main characters are little more than talking clichés. Raimi, in particular, must have been reading up on the pantomime playbook on how to look and act as a bad guy, constantly shifting his eyes to the side, frowning a lot and generally trying to look as sinister as possible.

But forget these characters. We’re here for the raptors, right? Well they alternate between CGI rubbish and a reasonably-decent puppet-animatronic head. This looks alright and is used effectively from time-to-time to peek around corners but there’s clearly no body to it as you never see it below the neck. Instead the CGI counterparts take the brunt of the flak and they have every right to warrant it. They look purple, have about two or three different frames of animation and the same shots are used repeatedly throughout. A raptor will be killed in one scene. The camera will flash to the actors. Then back to another approaching raptor and low and behold, there is no body on the floor of the previous victim. At one point the film even borrows a few shots from the previous film of what looks like a T-Rex and the characters fail to spot the difference despite this dinosaur being significantly larger in size and able to scoop up a man into its mouth with ease. It’s not the only glaring error with the film but to continually rip it to shreds is pointless.

 

Stay tuned for the pre-end credits blooper reel which is arguably the most entertaining thing about Planet Raptor (quite funny actually), a low budget mess which seems to have been designed purely from the discarded leftover sets and props from other films. If only half as much fun had gone into the film then Planet Raptor wouldn’t have ended up the outlandish pile of low budget nonsense that it is.

 

 ★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Aztec Rex (2007)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Adventure Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , January 13th, 2013 @ 11:24 pm
  • AKA: Tyrannosaurus Azteca

  • Director: Brian Trenchard-Smith

  • Writer: Richard Manning

  • Starring: Ian Ziering, Jack McGee, Dichen Lachman, Marco Sanchez

  • Run Time: 90 mins

Aztec Rex (2007)

In 1518 A.D. only the noblest warriors survive

Arriving in Mexico in 1551, Spanish explorers led by Cortés come across an Aztec tribe who worship a dinosaur as a god and offer it regular blood sacrifices to keep it at bay. After a failed attempt to enslave the tribe for his own gain, Cortés agrees to help them rid themselves off the dinosaur if they release him and his men.

 

Sy-Fy offers up a huge pile of dinosaur crap with this pathetic monster movie that does as little as it can within the space of an hour and a half and expects you to be thankful for it when it’s finished. Aztec Rex (or Tyrannosaurus Azteca as it is known) comes from the man who brought you such classics as Leprechaun 3 and, er, Leprechaun 4: In Space so you know that his pedigree in the realms of low budget, trashy filmmaking is as corny as it gets – though oddly enough, Quentin Tarantino cites Brian Trenchard-Smith as one of his favourite directors! Aztec Rex stars a terribly-rendered CGI dinosaur, buckets of pound shop make-up and fake limbs they sell around Halloween time, and a cast who look like they’d be better off modelling in fashion shoots than pretending to be Spanish explorers or Aztec tribesmen.

Let’s cut to the chase and talk about the star of the show first – the T-Rex. Even by Sy-Fy standards, this prehistoric protagonist looks to be about two hundred million years out of date. Using the same couple of frames of animation time and time again, the film does little to maintain the flimsy illusion that this monster shares the same intergalactic plane as everything else. Trees don’t move. Branches aren’t snapped off. There are no footprints when it walks. There are no shadows cast on it by the forests. For all intents and purposes, this is a stealth dinosaur. I have no idea where they found or created this laughable CGI aberration but it doesn’t belong here.

Even though the dinosaur effects are some of the worst you’re likely to see, Aztec Rex is at least gory. Characters are bitten in half, have intestines slit open, bodies are chewed up and left to rot in all of their gruesome glory and survivors are showered in blood. Yes it looks a bit tacky but it’s at least making the effort in this department.  The dinosaur is well fed, much to the chagrin of numerous expendable tribesmen and some of Cortés’ lesser developed crewmen who find themselves on the wrong end of a bite. The blood looks more purple in colour than red and the screen is literally engulfed with gore whenever the dinosaur decides to feast. Although there are some old school make-up effects, there are also a lot of rubbish CGI bones and entrails dripping abut which makes everything look second rate and tacky as if someone had superimposed unrelated video game footage over the top of a New World drama piece.

The script attempts to cleverly intertwine itself with historical events surrounding Cortés and the Spanish conquests but, his name aside, there’s nothing else in here that would suggest factual information. I guess the inclusion of such history was to try and raise the material above its usual type but it fails dramatically. I can tolerate the fact that the Spanish characters are played by perfectly formed English actors but the Aztecs are played by a bunch of Hawaiians who would look more at home standing  outside a hotel in Honolulu and greeting people than pretending to be ancient savages. Plus there are only about twenty people in the entire film including non-speaking extras. You wonder just how often this tribe can afford to sacrifice its population given that you only ever see about six of them.

Whilst the film contains its fair share of problems, the most fundamental one is that it’s just not engrossing enough. You never care for the Spanish (after all, they’re just after gold). You never care for the Aztecs (they do sacrifice their own kind). And the dinosaurs, whilst garnering some pity at how lame they look, are not there for characterisation. After a dull start in which the Spanish attempt to enslave the village (the notion of six or so Spanish guys attempting to ‘storm’ a village which has an equally small number of people in it is just too daft to laugh at), the film then traps itself in a never-ending cycle of characters going off into the forest to try and kill the dinosaur and end up a few characters short by the end of the scene. Rinse and repeat for the rest of the film and you have a monotonous, tedious narrative which doesn’t entertain or hold interest on any level whatsoever.

 

You get what you deserve with Aztec Rex. It smacks of Sy-Fy right from the opening scene until the final credits – the cardboard characters, the bottom dollar effects, the repetitive narrative, the overly dramatic music  and the deadly serious script which attempts (and fails) to make everything you’re watching somehow more interesting, intelligent and higher grade. It’s dinosaur dung, plain and simple. Never mind a giant dinosaur frightening off the Spanish, a copy of Aztec Rex would have been enough to make Mexico uninhabitable for millennia!

 

 ★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Jurassic Park (1993)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Adventure Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , October 3rd, 2012 @ 7:40 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Steven Spielberg

  • Writer: Michael Crichton (novel & screenplay), David Koepp (screenplay)

  • Starring: Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough

  • Run Time: 127 mins

Jurassic Park (1993)

Life Finds A Way.

Wealthy entrepreneur John Hammond has spent millions on his latest pet project – an island theme park featuring living and breathing dinosaurs created by extracting DNA from insects encased in amber. Before opening to the public, he invites a selected audience of experts, lawyers and his family to take a sneak preview. However during their tour, the security system is hacked and the power to the enclosures is shut down releasing prehistoric terror not seen on this planet for millions of years!

 

Love it or hate it, there’s no denying that Jurassic Park is one of the most influential films of recent times. It was one of those big box office events in the “where were you when this released?” mould that come up every now and then (you know, Star Wars, Jaws, Lord of the Rings, etc). Well I was twelve and growing up as a big lover of anything dinosaur-related (I used to have toy dinosaur fights in the sandpit at nursery), it was like a dream come true. Watching it again after a few years and being a more mature (judge for yourselves) and experienced connoisseur of film, it was interesting to see how different my perspectives of the film have changed and how some of them have stayed exactly the same as that excited twelve year old who went to see it on a Sunday morning with his parents on opening weekend.

At a pretty lengthy hundred and twenty seven minutes, the film had a canny knack of sending you to sleep in the first forty minutes or so. This hasn’t changed a bit. Back in the day, it was bums shuffling on seats waiting for the T-Rex to show. Nowadays it’s bums shuffling on the seats waiting for the T-Rex but at least I can understand what they are talking about! The opening does contain a lot of decent information which helps a few of the proceedings later on (for instance, the whole talk of the velociraptors reveals plenty of nasty surprises of what is to come later when you see them) but for the most part it’s filler. Pure and simple. Spielberg knows where he wants his audience to be and by holding back on the dinosaurs for as long as he can, he’s got us so excited he could have thrown in a blow-up toy dinosaur and we’d still have cheered it on. The reaction on the faces of Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum are priceless when they see the film’s first dinosaurs – a brontosaurus munching on some leaves. I don’t know about anyone else but I held back my “wows” for the first sign of the meat eaters. Maybe the reaction of the audience has mellowed a bit nowadays, having been spoon-fed a diet of terrible CGI monsters over the years. But back in 1993, on the big screen for the first time, these dinosaurs were like nothing you had ever seen before.

And believe me, the wows are worth it when the T-Rex does show up. It’s gone down as one of the most famous scenes in movie history now and it’s worked to perfection. The first sounds of it stomping towards the jeeps, indicated by the flickering cups of water on the dashboard. Next you know there’s something horrific just behind the trees, as signalled by the disappearance of the sacrificial goat. But then it’s still a few moments of gradual revealing as the T-Rex slowly appears, testing the fence and realising there’s nothing to stop it from breaking free. When it finally strides over the barriers and into the picture for the first time, its earth-shattering roar sends shivers down the spine. Is this really a CGI dinosaur or is a living and breathing preservation from the past?

Say what you like about CGI but it’s never looked better than it does here because it’s not completely over-used. There’s a combination of animatronic models and CGI and it’s blended fantastically together. This is one seriously ticked off dinosaur and the film sets about proving that point. Spielberg promised us dinosaurs and he delivered big time. Big budget films with CGI in them have never been surpassed by this, over thirteen years after it was made. Why? Because it’s not the quantity of effects used but their quality and how they are used. Over-reliance is over-kill and although Spielberg was experimenting with a rather unknown quantity back then, he gets the mix perfect.

Maybe it works against the film to a degree because once you’ve seen the amazing special effect that is the T-Rex, the rest of the dinosaurs don’t seem to have that wow factor about them, as deadly as they are. Even then there are still other high points, in particular the constant threat of the raptors in the final third. If you want your action and thrills then this is certainly the place. But they’re no match for the T-Rex.

Casting is strong but unfortunately their characters aren’t. Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Richard Attenborough and particularly Jeff Goldlum (always a pleasure to watch and always ready with a quip or wise-crack) are all talented performers and do their best. It’s just a pity their characters don’t really have a lot to do after the opening scenes expect scream, run and scream a little more. I can see the logic in this – Spielberg’s target audience wouldn’t really have bothered with who is who – they just want to see dinosaurs. I know when I was younger, I didn’t really pay any attention to them. Now when you look back, you can begin to pick the film apart a little more. But thankfully the thrills and spills are just around the corner so you don’t dwell on them too much. Even the two child actors do a good job here with Joseph Mazello and Ariana Richards actually managing to put in better performances than the annoying Wayne Knight (as the nervous Dennis Nedry who is responsible for the hack job on the computers) and even Samuel L. Jackson.

 

Jurassic Park is one of the greatest monster movies of all time. It delivers exactly what it promises and given the standards of some of today’s big budget flops, it’s going to stand the test of time for a long period ahead. It has not been surpassed in terms of believable special effects and can easily hold it’s own in terms of thrills, excitement and action. Mr Spielberg, you’ve done it again. Another classic to add to your résumé.

 

 ★★★★★★★★★★ 

 

 

Raptor (2001)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , September 29th, 2012 @ 11:59 am
  • AKA:

  • Director: Jim Wynorski

  • Writer: Frances Doel, Michael B. Druxman, Jim Wynorski

  • Starring: Eric Roberts, Corbin Bernsen, Melissa Brasselle, Tim Abell

  • Run Time: 81 mins

Raptor (2001)

Fear will never be extinct

A genetically-bred raptor escapes and kills a couple of people in a small town. The local sheriff and his assistant trace the attacks back to a research facility headed by Dr Hyde. It turns out that Hyde has a secret dinosaur cloning project which is being backed by shady foreign investors. When the Pentagon finds out, they send in two strike teams to neutralise the facility.

 

Sometimes you’ve just got to give people credit where credit is due. Roger Corman, the legendary producer with over three hundred low budget exploitation B-movies to his resume (as credited producer alone, he’s also written, directed and been executive producer on hundreds of other films too) must take a bow here. After producing the Carnosaur films, a trilogy of low budget dinosaur romps, Corman is back for a fourth bite at the cherry and brought along fellow trash master Jim Wynorski to direct (though masquerading under a pseudonym).

Amazingly, most of the film is culled footage from the previous three Carnosaur films.  The audacity of Corman and his cronies beggars belief. The film opens up with three teenagers sitting in a jeep and drinking beer. As soon as it came on I thought “I’ve seen this before” but couldn’t place it. Then the dinosaur attack happened and I thought “this is similar to Carnosaur.” The fact of the matter is that IT WAS Carnosaur. But it didn’t stop there. Almost all of the major events that happen here are simply stock footage scenes from the Carnosaur films. Instead of watching a new cheap dinosaur flick, I was just bombarded with the ‘best’ bits of the Carnosaur films (using the term ‘best’ lightly) and then given some meaningless dialogue and meaningless new scenes to string them all together and pad out the running time. Hell, they even hired the SAME actors from Carnosaur (which was made back in 1993 I hasten to add) to act out some new scenes so that when their characters appeared in stock footage, unless you had seen the previous films, then you wouldn’t know the difference.

But this trick fails miserably because in one of the scenes, the security guard (played by Frank Novak) has more hair, is slimmer and appears a lot younger than he did in a prior scene. Simply because he starred in the original, he’s been re-hired to shoot some new footage – only now being a lot older, balder and fatter! The black actor, Harrison Page, who portrays the sheriff, faces the exact same problem. In the original, he met an untimely death at the hands of the T-Rex. He’s been hired back to shoot some new footage but he meets exactly the same fate, holding exactly the same gun and wearing exactly the same clothes as he did in Carnosaur. Eight years is a long time and unless you have a youthful appearance like Tom Cruise or Leonardio Di Caprio, then the results will be plain to see: trying to pass the same characters off like this looks absurd.

It makes no sense for the Pentagon to send in two different strike teams wearing different clothes to neutralise the facility either. Why did they send in two teams? Well a team was sent in to destroy the dinosaurs in Carnosaur 2 (wearing black) and another team was sent in Primal Species (wearing black and white camo). Low and behold, both teams re-emerge in this one wearing the same clothes, utilising the same tactics and inevitably meeting the same fate. Can Corman really justify making a new film by recycling his previous films? The fact that Raptor is not labelled with the Carnosaur tag shows to me he knew exactly what he was doing and tried to mask his nerve.

As the riveting sock puppet dinosaur scenes have been lifted from earlier films, the new footage included is just there for padding and to join the dots between the unrelated stock footage. Look no further than the ridiculously overlong sex scene with Lorissa McComas romping down on the back of a pick-up truck. Although seeing the cosmetically-enhanced Miss McComas naked isn’t a bad thing, the fact that the sex scene lasts for around ten minutes is a tad unnecessary but does the required job of filling up more running time in between stock footage.

 

I can tolerate stock footage being used when it doesn’t account for the majority of the running time. But when someone tries to present material as an entirely new film, it’s a dirty trick of the lowest order. Raptor is a total hack job – plain and simple. Did Corman not realise that the only people who’d pay to watch this rubbish are the same people who shelled out for his previous dino flicks and immediately regretted it?

 

 ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Pterodactyl (2005)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , September 28th, 2012 @ 4:17 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Mark J. Lester

  • Writer: Mark Sevi

  • Starring: Cameron Daddo, Coolio, Amy Sloan, George Calil

  • Run Time: 89 mins

Pterodactyl (2005)

Ptowering Pterror

A small scientific expedition head off to explore a dormant volcano in a remote part of Turkey. However they don’t realise that the volcano is host to a whole batch of prehistoric eggs which hatch out into pterodactyls. In the midst of all of this, a group of US commandos are in the area hunting down a notorious terrorist. When the pterodactyls attack, both parties are forced to team up in order to survive.

 

Don’t you just love films like this? Well you may not but I do. There is something so satisfying about picking up a film with a title like Pterodactyl because you know pretty much what you’re going to get. There’s no hiding the fact that this film is about monstrous pterodactyls which kill people. And that’s the beauty of it. Simple and effective. You can straight down to business without having to sit through plenty of character exposition and fleeting glimpses of a monster. In this type of film, it’s a simple matter of how long it takes for the monsters to appear, as opposed to finding out what the monsters actually are in the first place – the title has already done that for us! This is another release from the Sci-Fi Channel, their latest in a line of not-very-good monster flicks. Will this be any better than the others?

Let’s get straight to business shall we? Let’s talk about the pterodactyls. After all, it’s the only reason I decided to watch it. The monsters aren’t half as bad as you would expect them to be. They’re CGI and they stick out a mile away when trying to ‘interact’ with the characters (i.e. ripping them in half) but they’re no where near as bad as some of the other monsters I’ve seen. There’s quite a few of them in the film too – not just one. And they are pretty well fed too as loads of pointless characters are given some brief screen time before being offered as a sacrifice for the viewer. Unfortunately the death scenes are pretty similar in that the pterodactyls swoop down dramatically and then whisk someone off into the air or take a head with them, leaving the body behind.

Quite why pterodactyl eggs suddenly roll out of the volcano at the beginning of the film after millions of years and hatch straight away is anyone’s guess. It looks like one of those sweet machines where you put in a few pence and a couple of sweets roll out of the slot at the bottom. But let’s not worry about why they’re here – the fact of the matter is that they are here. Like I said, the pterodactyls are well fed. There’s the science team, which is basically a college field trip, and consists of token nerdy guy, hot token blonde (quite how a seriously hot chick like this is studying with these nerds is beyond me – but hey, at least she gets down into her bra), two other students who don’t get a look in before they’re fodder and the two proper scientists who have a thing for each other.

There’s the commando unit which is headed by former rapper Coolio and has your generic grunt stock characters in there. Finally there’s the terrorist group which consists of a load of Eastern European thugs and their leader who looks like a young Kris Kristofferson. He has to be the most pointless character I’ve seen in a monster flick. You’d think there’d be a moment where he either a) turns good to help out the survivors by sacrificing his life or b) resorts to cheap tactics to escape and meets his demise en route. His eventual offing is more akin to moment b) however he’s not even close to doing anything worthwhile before getting killed. The acting is below par for the most but at least some of it was enough to get by on. It’s pretty sad to say Coolio gave the film’s best performance.

Director Mark Lester certainly knows how to make a film entertaining. After all, he was responsible for giving us one of the single greatest Schwarzenegger vehicles in Commando. You certainly can’t fault him for his direction here. It’s the writing that lets him down. He manages to keep the film moving at a brisk pace and there are obviously plenty of characters so that whenever there’s a bit of a lull, you know the pterodactyls are only a few swoops away to liven things up again.

The final shot of the film smacks of desperation for a sequel and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it go ahead. After all, we’ve had the likes of Crocodile, Shark Attack, Octopus and Spiders get a second bite at the proverbial cherry with sequels so why not Pterodactyl. The question shouldn’t be why not, it should be why?

 

Pterodactyl is watchable at best, pretty ho-hum at worst. If you like this sort of thing, you’ll probably get enough kicks out of this to make it worth your while. There’s enough pterodactyl action and a surprising amount of gore to keep fans happy. It’s probably about as good as a film about pterodactyls could actually get.

 

 ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Carnosaur (1993)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , September 27th, 2012 @ 11:09 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Adam Simon, Darren Moloney

  • Writer: John Brosnan (novel & treatment), Adam Simon (screenplay)

  • Starring: Diane Ladd, Raphael Sbarge, Jennifer Runyon, Harrison Page

  • Run Time: 83 mins

Carnosaur (1993)

Driven to extinction. Back for revenge.

Genetics scientist Dr Jane Tiptree has been experimenting on chickens’ eggs which eventually hatch into dinosaurs. By tampering with a batch of eggs from a local chicken plant, she aims to expose females to a lethal virus which will expose them to the effects of these eggs, causing them to give birth to dinosaurs, wiping out the human race in favour of her new breed of prehistoric terror.

 

Though producer Roger Corman’s insistence that Carnosaur was based upon a novel which was written before Michael Crichton penned Jurassic Park is founded on truth, there is no doubt that this only ever saw the light of day thanks to Steven Spielberg’s classic 1993 adaptation. But whereas Spielberg’s schmaltzy, child-safe blockbuster appealed to the masses, Corman went for the proverbial low budget jugular, turning dinosaurs into exploitative menaces and gunning for a particular adult demographic. This is the x-rated, ultra low budget Jurassic Park knock-off, only with about a tenth of the entertainment value.

Right from the ‘mad scientist meddles with genetically-engineered monsters’ theme to the inevitable Jurassic Park set piece rip-offs to even material borrowed from Humanoids from the Deep, Carnosaur just lacks anything remotely original. There’s even a bizarre mid-film switch to a sub-plot taken from The Crazies. Carnosaur is allegedly an in-name only adaptation of the novel and all of the nonsense about genetic engineering was added by Corman and his writing team. I think the correct response is “no kidding!” There’s no way anyone with a right mind would write this sort of incomprehensible rubbish and get away with selling it as a novel. The film is all over the shop, bouncing ideas around like a ping-pong ball. Lethal viruses. Genetic engineering. Cloned dinosaurs. Mad scientists wanting to eradicate the human race. It’s all thrown in to the mixer together and out comes a film which has little context, little meaning and virtually no structure. The script should have kept it simple but goes for broke and loses everything in the process.

Corman stumped up a bigger budget for this than he usually did for his derivative straight-to-video trash but it doesn’t show. Ultimately, what lets the film down is the quality of the special effects because as baffling as the plot threads are, the bottom line is that people like me paid to see cheesy monsters eating people. Yet the dinosaurs are ridiculous – an unconvincing mix of hand puppets, full blown immovable models or, quite literally, monsters-on-sticks at times. The early attacks are quickly edited together, giving the audience tantalising glimpses of the dinosaurs. But the dinosaurs are wisely kept off-screen as long as possible because once you begin to see them in all of their natural glory, the illusion of greatness wears off and you can see how woeful they are. The climactic fight between a guy driving a bulldozer and a huge T-Rex may have been better re-enacted by a child playing with some free toys that they got inside a hamburger meal.

Gore is plentiful and seems to have been thrown around with reckless abandon in the hope of papering over the obvious problems with the film. In the film’s highlight scene, a gang of eco-warriors chain themselves to some heavy machinery at night in order to protest when the workmen arrive the next morning. When they failed to realise was that dinosaurs are roaming the country and so unable to free themselves, the eco-warriors transform themselves into a dino-buffet. As expected, the gore is gratuitous and a little over-the-top but if you don’t know what you’re getting when you sit down to watch a Roger Corman film, then you have no business being on this site.

 

Carnosaur is a cheap and tacky sci-fi-horror affair which is as dreadful as it sounds. Rex the dinosaur from Toy Story is scarier and more realistic than these puny specimens. Sadly, the film was modesty successful and spawned a further couple of sequels. And footage from all three films was re-used in Raptor. There seems to be no escaping the low budget dinosaur invasion.

 

 ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Dinocroc Vs Supergator (2010)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , , August 16th, 2012 @ 12:09 am
  • AKA:

  • Director: Jim Wynorski

  • Writer: Jim Wynorski, Mike MacLean

  • Starring: David Carradine, Amy Rasimas, Corey Landis, Rib Hillis

  • Run Time: 97 mins

Dinocroc Vs Supergator (2010)

One escaped. The other is about to be unleashed.

A genetics lab in Hawaii has been injecting crocodiles and alligators with a new growth serum which they hope will benefit mankind’s inevitable future food shortages. However the two test monsters escape from the facility and go on a rampage. A highly skilled hunter is called in to deal with the situation but after exhausting all of his methods, he realises that the only thing left to do is allow the monsters to fight each other to the death.

 

Another of those almighty ‘monster versus monster’ films that have sprung up of late, it’s no surprise to find out that Dinocroc Vs Supergator is no better nor worse than any of them. Taking the title creates from the separate Dinocroc and, er, Supergator films and pitting them against each other in a totally unrelated standalone film is hardly going to be a cinematic goldmine.

Low and behold, the film is little more than another sorry excuse for CGI carnage with the same predictability as the sun rising and setting every day. When legendary B-movie maestros Jim Wynorski, Fred Olen Ray and Roger Corman get their heads together like they did here, the results should be a lot trashier, sleazier and entertaining than Dinocroc Vs Supergator.

Dinocroc Vs Supergator is a film which is all about the beginning and the ending and little in between. Talk about an opening, Dinocroc Vs Supergator has the monsters breaking out of the facility within the opening minutes. Who needs back story or any explanation of what is going on when a blonde scientist badly butchers the English language by telling her co-workers to escape right before two giant monsters burst their way out of captivity? Said monsters then make short work of many extras before escaping into the jungle. Then we’re bombarded with overly serious music to give everything some extra significance and contrived dialogue to makes things sound a lot more complicated than they are. It’s the sort of film which feels the need to say things like “we found them in Sector Two” (not actual quote but I don’t want to have to re-watch to find what the army guy said) which has no relevance to the audience whatsoever because we haven’t the foggiest clue what is going on and who these people are.

Then we come to the ending which is otherwise the norm for this sort of film apart from the fact that it’s the only time during the entire course of the film where the two monsters actually fight each other! They finally start duking it out with only five minutes left of the running time so you know it’s going to be a short fight. Even so, the fight is hardly shown as the footage is of the human characters conjuring up an ultimate plan to defeat both monsters. So in all, you’ll get maybe thirty seconds of fight time. I don’t know about you but when I see a film called Dinocroc Vs Supergator, I want to see a fight damnit!

The monsters are well fed but as is always the case nowadays, the attack scenes are done using CGI which looks rather ropey at best. Most of the attack scenes consist of the same thing where someone stands too close, or in, a large body of water and then are promptly devoured by one of the title monsters. There is a nice Jurassic Park-style moment in which a couple of characters on an escaping jeep are pursued by one of the monsters but most of the CGI scenes look to be the same footage over and over again. In fact it’s hard to tell which one is supposed to which. I don’t suppose it matters much when they eat bikini-clad honeys (sadly this is Sci-Fi Channel material therefore the women remain clothed) but knowing which, if any, monster to root for during the finale would be nice.

Even the human food they’re constantly fed consists little more of people only introduced early in the scene and are literally pointless and add nothing to the story except show a few kill scenes. Those who get more screen time are equally as uninteresting. David Carradine stars in one of his last roles before his death and it’s not the sort of film you’d want to be remembered for. He doesn’t even chew the scenery as the slimy mogul behind the experiments, he just looks bored. Amy Rasimas is the token blonde who, rather inappropriately for a Fish and Game warden, wears some teeny shorts and has her top unbuttoned down to the chest. It provides eye candy to the audience but if all Fish and Game wardens dressed like this, they’d be unable to do their job for the amount of males gawping around them all of the time.

 

With a feeble one-sided fight right at the end of the film, Dinocroc Vs Supergator at least puts up more of a fight than the majority of heavyweight boxing matches nowadays. But it’s more like two CGI monster films running alongside each other with a token fight thrown in at the end. Disappointing but I hardly expected a Godzilla-style rumble match.

 

Warbirds (2008)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , August 15th, 2012 @ 9:15 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Kevin Gendreau

  • Writer: Kevin Gendreau (screenplay & story), Christian McIntire (story), John Terlesky (story), Scott Wheeler (story)

  • Starring: Jamie Elle Mann, Brian Krause, Tohoru Masamune, Lucy Faust

  • Run Time: 85 mins

Warbirds (2008)

The Final Battle Has Begun

In the final days of World War II, a band of WASPs (Women’s Air Service Corps) are hired to deliver a top secret weapon to an American airbase in the Pacific. During the flight, a storm forces them down onto a small island where they are confronted by a small band of Japanese soldiers who have been desperately trying to survive the onslaught of attacks by giant Pterodons, flying prehistoric monsters. Now the Americans will share the same fate unless they can get off the island in time.

 

My perverse enjoyment of watching the Sci-Fi Channel churn out feeble flick after feeble flick shows no let up but after watching, or should I say enduring, Warbirds, I feel that my time of self-sacrifice is coming to an end. OK I’ll admit that the plot is rubbish but wait a minute – giant Pterodons are in it for crying out loud! What’s not to get excited about? See this is my problem – I can’t resist the lure of monsters no matter what form they come in. And 90% of the time I end up bitterly disappointed with the end product. I knew this was going to suck but it didn’t stop me from watching. Warbirds is a shocking mess from the start to the finish. Its eighty-five minutes of grinding dialogue and cringe-worthy special effects. Having your eyes pecked out by crows would be more entertaining than sitting through this again.

No offence to the female cast but I think the main problem with this film is that the main characters are all feisty American pilots. So you know they’re not going to get battered around by the Pterodons in the same way as the males in the cast are ripped apart. They spend most of the film with their hair perfectly styled and their make-up and lipstick pretty much untouched. The lead female character spends the entire film arguing with her superiors and her underlings. How did this chick ever get into a command position with an attitude like that? She also has the really uncanny habit of saving “over” more times than anyone else in the history of military combat. It also grinds on me when her crew call her “skip” a lot in reference to skipper. It just seems so forced as if the writer was desperately trying to convince us that these women are in the armed forced. Who wrote this script?

Not content with the over-use of famous military language, the writer also serves us up some clichéd Japanese soldiers who are simply there to bleat about honour and sacrifice. And the few American guys hanging around the island are purely there as fodder for the Pterodons – after all we can’t start sacrificing the women too early can we? Rest assured not all of the chicks survive which is good news.

The special effects are terrible. The shots of the plane flying through the storm are poor. The Pterodons look rubbish and the dog fighting scenes with the planes fighting them in the air looks like something out of a bad computer game from the early 90s. At least the rare moments when the Pterodons attack people on the ground look respectable enough. But there are just not enough of them. When the Americans reach the island, the remains of the Japanese base makes it look like there was an all-out massacre but alas the Pterodons must have been too full because they don’t seem interested in anybody else for most of the film.

 

Warbirds is more of the same old, same old from The Sci-Fi Channel. I honestly don’t expect any better from them now and neither should you. They have good ideas but they just don’t throw enough money or talented people at them to make them worthwhile. Over.

 

 ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Mammoth (2006)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , August 15th, 2012 @ 5:48 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Tim Cox

  • Writer: Tim Cox, Brook Durham, Don Guarisco (story), Sean Keller

  • Starring: Vincent Ventresca, Constantin Draganescu Summer Glau, Tom Skeritt

  • Run Time: 90 mins

Mammoth (2006)

We hunted it into extinction… Now it’s hunting us.

When a meteor smashes into a local museum, a partially frozen 40,000 year old mammoth is thawed and unleashed upon a small town. Two special agents are drafted in to work with local authorities to kill the mammoth within seventeen hours or else the whole town will be decimated by the army in a bid to stop an alien invasion.

 

I was expecting another of the generic monster-on-the-loose flicks that the Sci-Fi Channel has wheeled out every week but Mammoth didn’t even manage to scrape itself off the bottom of the barrel for that. It’s goofy, over-the-top and above all, a total waste of time. I know that the idea of a mammoth on the loose is ridiculous and there’s no way that even the best script writers could try and turn a turkey-laden plot like that into something to be taken seriously but at least make an effort! After all, we’ve had killer sheep in Black Sheep so it’s not like there’s a shortage of people attempting to turn stupid plots into reasonably believable films.

Instead of playing it straight, the film goes for the camp approach which was definitely needed with the subject material. But it tries way too hard to be funny, that it ends up being totally the opposite. The jokey tone of this film kills it off from the opening credits. The one-liners and gags are absolutely terrible and some of the exchanges between characters go on a bit too long but obviously someone thinks it was funny. I know it’s not meant to be taken seriously but when films try to mix comedy and horror or science fiction, they really need to nail the comedy bit or else the film bombs. Well this bombs in a big way. It’s not funny, just irritating and very annoying. Clumsy characters aren’t funny unless you’re doing slapstick. There are also plenty of inapt sound effects strewn throughout the film to remind you that no one really took this seriously.

I don’t know why a mammoth was chosen as the star attraction but it’s not in the least bit scary, threatening or even exciting. It’s hardly even the star of the show and you don’t get that much in the way of mammoth action. It just plods around the town and does an occasion bit of damage but nowhere near enough rampaging for my liking. There’s also the fact that it always manages to hide away after attacking someone – this is a huge monster in a small town for crying out loud. How can something so big be able to hide behind a tree or sneak up on someone without making the slightest bit of noise? It’s clearly been trained in the art of ninja. I know its low budget but the mammoth looks rubbish. It was going to be impossible to create something that big with practical effects but the CGI does look really ropey. Alien spaceships, shady government agents and severed zombie hands all get thrown into the mixer at some point so there’s not just a giant mammoth running around. This isn’t Men in Black but it seems to be trying hard to capture the insane feel of it at times!

Tom Skeritt must fear the day that his royalties from Alien run out as he’s looking pretty desperate for roles. His job here is to drive around the town as a slightly barmy grandfather and try and be as bland as possible and he succeeds in doing that. At least Vincent Ventresca is decent in the lead role, channeling a sort of Bruce Campbell-like heroism into his almost mad-scientist like role as an anthropologist who suddenly goes from looking after a mammoth exhibit to trying to stop the real thing. Summer Glau from Firefly is also one of the leads and her role seems to be purely to sucker nerdy fan boys into watching this dreck with the thought of seeing her again. Either that or the Sci-Fi Channel tied her down to a really terrible contract.

 

Mammoth tries to be different from the other creature feature films but it doesn’t know whether it wants to be a monster movie, a comedy, a homage to the 50s b-movies, a spoof of them – at least I’m agreed that it’s a dud. It’s just way too corny and goofy to work.

 

 ★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Q, The Winged Serpent (1982)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , August 15th, 2012 @ 4:59 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Larry Cohen

  • Writer: Larry Cohen

  • Starring: Michael Moriarty, Candy Clark, David Carradine, Richard Rowntree

  • Run Time: 93 mins

Q, the Winged Serpent (1982)

It’s name is Quetzalcoatl… just call it Q, that’s all you’ll have time to say before it tears you apart!

Quetzalcoatl, a giant pterodactyl-like monster and ancient Aztec god, takes home in New York and begins to feast on people on the roofs of skyscrapers. The cops haven’t got a clue what is going on until a dim-witted crook stumbles upon it’s nest by mistake. Feeling hard-done by the city for previous time spent in prison, he holds the city to ransom and demands protection from the authorities, with the body count piling up in the meantime.

 

I had fond memories of this when I was a kid. It was one of those films where you remember certain scenes (the window cleaner losing his head at the beginning stuck in my mind for a long time) and really wish you could sit down and watch it again and again. Fast forward till the present day when I have begun revisiting films I remember from my childhood to see if they were worth remembering. Q, The Winged Serpent is one of those films where the sum is definitely not greater than its parts. This is one pretty bizarre film or should I say two films because that’s what it seemed like to me.

On one hand you have a pretty decent schlock story about a giant monster swooping down to snack on people stupid enough to sunbathe on skyscrapers and the film gives loads of other cheap reasons for people to be atop a skyscraper. It’s a classic B-movie in every sense of the word – lots of gore, obligatory breasts and of course a giant monster. But on the other hand you have a really plodding, boring cop thriller in which the characters try to piece together what is going on with the Aztec link. None of the characters are of any interest. David Carradine is rather wooden. Richard Roundtree (of Shaft fame) does little to warrant a pay cheque and Michael Moriarty is really annoying as the dim-witted crook. They could have cut out half of this bore and given more time to the Aztec story, which was severely underwritten. Grisly sacrifices and skinning people alive was evident in this film but a little more time devoted to this part of the script and it could have become quite compelling instead of just a boring distraction from the scenes of cops talking to each other. Granted lovers of cop dramas/thrillers may be turned on by this story but I was not. In fact there is more time devoted to the crime aspect, so one must wonder whether or not the Q thing was just a gimmick to get the horror crowd to watch. Or whether they started filming the monster flick, ran out of budget and then decided to pad the rest out with cop filler.

The monster itself doesn’t look particularly great which is good because it’s not on screen for long. It’s a stop-motion model but it looks like it was made of putty – there is very little detail to it and its skin is far too smooth and blemish free. Ray Harryhausen always made his stop-motion creatures look as real as possible with texture and depth to their skins and appearance. In the wrong hands, stop-motion can ruin everything. At least the stop-motion action is done well and integrated into the scenery pretty convincingly – we even get some little stop-motion men getting attacked in the process. The finale as the cops fight the monster on the Chrysler Building is pretty enjoyable too. There are a lot of monster POV shots (obviously from a helicopter flying around New York) but someone even had the brilliant idea to throw an odd shadow onto the roofs of the buildings. There’s also a few moments where people on the streets below suddenly find themselves dripping with blood. Or better yet a scene in which a group of people are standing around staring at a dismembered foot that has fallen from the heights. You get the sense in one or two moments that there is something flying around. But unfortunately the monster isn’t on-screen long enough to make a big impact.

 

It seems too coincidental that every time the monster is on screen, the film is pretty good. As soon as it disappears for ten or so minutes (which it has an annoying habit of doing) then the film drags enormously with a mish-mash of unnecessary sub plots which only serve to prolong its appearance. Worth a look if you’re really desperate for a monster flick with a difference but Q, The Winged Serpent can be tough going at times.

 

 ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

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