Quite the functional, generic-ass title, i must say.
This one has TV movie and genre actor Corin Nemec of Stargate SG-1 and Beverly Hills 90210‘s fame, whom also was in Dragonwasps, Sand Sharks, Dracano/Dragon Apocalypse, and many more, including… Robocroc, which it’s exactly what it sounds. And will be quite likely reviewed here in a double feature with Roboshark. Eventually.
It was supposed to be the usual tale of soldiers coming home after rescuing a hostage from terrorists and stop them from creating a bio-chemical weapon.. but the helicopter (one of those “movie helicopters”, made of spatulas and cheese sticks) is hit by a bazooka shell, so they crash into one of these jungles that have been so popular lately, containing the usual, boring, “lost world” of scaly creatures thought to have been long extinct. Odd how no one thought to marry this trope with the Bermuda Triangle one, so we can have Amelia Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa face down raptors.
Because my brain is now beyond any repair or recovery, i asked myself: “Is this gonna be worst than 100 Million B.C. ?” I don’t even know why, since this one doesn’t feature time travel, so it just can’t fuck that up, but i have been surprised before, you never know what shit a movie like this could pull out of nowhere.
And i kinda wish this one did.
While i often complain about these movies just not bothering to explain why dinosaurs are present, this movie is also a reminder that you don’t always have to explain everything, because said explanation it’s so tacked on i’d be better to not have it at all, as it’s cliched as hell, doesn’t fit anything else in the movie, it’s just totally counterproductive, as it makes the whole thing even less believable..
But i guess we need to pad things out to 80 minutes somehow, since the “war movie” part just takes up the first 20 minutes, so the chemist-scientist lady explains that it could be due to a meteor landing in the Amazon forest and creating a primeval ecosystem. Even she doesn’t really seem to believe it! It’s even worse because they namedrop The Lost World book (and movie), and shrug it off AFTER having all found some evidence to the existence of dinosaurs in that forgotten jungle.
While most of the movie is the usual slop of senseless rivarlies and random betrayals, bad acting, unconvincing or too accentuated accents (see the “british soldier” and the “columbian-mexican-hispanic rebel leader”), stupid characters, crappy CG elicopters, crappy digital effects for almost everything, even worst practical FXs, rebels that fight and react like Time Crisis’ enemies, most kills are never shown (and it’s kinda better that way), quite shitty CG dinosaurs that aren’t that bad looking… until they move, never seeming to be really there or even make contact with the actors.
This is shit, but nothing really out of what accounts for “ordinary” in movies like these.
What is worth noting is that, for some reason, this one decides to show how a fight between a fully armed military squad and a T-Rex would realistically go…. so a T-Rex pops up, and it’s almost killed by just the squad leader alone in less than one minute.
It’s so anti-climactic and just no fun, almost makes you wonder that’s the reason why nobody else goes down that route. Almost.
I do like the final exchange in the helicopter, thought.
“How do we explain this?”
“We don’t.”
Yeah, even if it’s just 80 minutes and it’s not that badly produced (seen worse)… i wish they cut it down even further, would have been an improvement.
Very sub-par and boring, just skip it, there’s better crap AND better movies about dinosaurs, even for the die-hard trash connoisseurs.
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