Yes, the ever elusive Water-Dragon type of T-Rex, because nowadays you could make fake monster movie poster art with Pokemons as a joke, and realize someone did it for real already, beat you to it years ago. And if someone had to do it, might as well be the director of cult films like Commando, Armed And Dangerous, and Class of 1984, Mark. L. Lester himself, as he eventually went back to doing B-movies for TV or the home video market after the “Hollywood years”.
Because, really, the sharks enjoyed preying on B-movie beaches for decades, it’s time to move out and let dinosaurs do it for a change. At least in some of the cover art, in this specific case it does happen, but often with movies like this the posters promise more than what the movies themselves can actually deliver.
Taking place (and filmed) in Belize, Poseidon Rex is another cautionary tale about searching for lost treasures, especially it’s mayan gold in a movie made after 2012, as you will be punished via the traditional execution method of dinosaur mauling. You just know it’s gonna end that way, but regardless, underwater explorers (forced by a criminal kingpin they owe money to) use explosives in the Great Blue Hole of Belize in the hope of the blast will uncover a lost mayan treasure, but they instead accidentally awake a prehistoric giant reptilian who can travel by sea and land.
So it’s Godzilla… ok, 1998’s american version of Godzilla, minus the radioactive angle and the fiery breath. Sadly it also lacks the orichalcum tablets or an origin tale written in ancient times for the monster, so i can’t really claim it’s an accidental rip-off of Gamera, as well, even for a joke. Pity.
There’s a bit more, just a tiny bit, as a random couple that went there to go scuba diving is caught up in this mess, there’s the big bahonkas equipped marine biologist to spout dinosaur exposition and coin the name “Poseidon Rex”, and fittingly it was gonna have Corin Nemec (Stargate GS-1, NCIS: Los Angeles, Robocroc, Lake Placid VS Anaconda, Sand Sharks)… but he suffered a near-fatal injury while shooting, so we have Brian Krause, long after he was “angel boyfriend” Leo Wyatt in Charmed.. and slightly before he also played the lead in Camel Spiders.
Honestly, i don’t get why it has such a low score on IMDB, i really don’t. Sure, it’s not good by any means, the “Titanosaurus Rex” is done with the modern kind of bad CG, so it looks like they didn’t fully tuned the color contrast on the monster, the acting features the typical shades of bad you find in these movies, there’s goofs like people seen running 1 minutes after setting up everyone left due to seeing a giant water T-Rex eat people, but i can’t say it’s a dreadful experience.
It’s garbage, but you know it is, you watched a movie called “Poisedon Rex”, you know what you’re going into, and it gives you exactly what you want out of a movie of this nature, unless you expect something really weird or original to happen on top of the same old dinosaur B-movie trash, which is still kinda enjoyable, despite everything.
It’s one of those bad movies when you actually find yourself enjoying the goofs, the random and innatural behaviour of the characters, the obvious insert of stock footage, the bad acting is enhanced by the local accents, there’s a lot of dinosaur action, some funny moments, it moves along at a reasonably fast pace and it doesn’t drag things out much in its 80 minutes, so you won’t find yourself pausing, gawking at how much runtime is somehow left. Not here, not today.
And honestly even as far production values go…. i’ve seen so much worse, so much worse. It’s not even to be nice, i have seen SO much worse.
Overall, Poseidon Rex it’s bad enough to be something worth watching with friends that share a taste for the “dino trash”, maybe opening a couple of beers, and laughing at the craptacular instead of spiralling into an alcoholic coma due to the depressing badness.
Nothing that should go down in history as a cult classic, but it does “the job” fine.
Wise Cafe (International) 