To give us a breather from an apparently endless strain of incredibly stupid scientists who would resurrect Hitler and put his brain in a T-Rex for the lulz… this time no one is cloning anything, or tampering in god’s domain without a rubber octopus on strings.
None of that shit.
Sorry for the screenshots “salvage fest”, but despite IMDB listing it having an italian release date (which is true since it was aired on tv here… i guess once), i couldn’t even find images of the apparent UK release, let alone a UK DVD, it’s not even one of those dino flicks gated off to non-UK Amazon Prime Video users. And apparently none of the major streaming services has it.
I’m not paying extra to import it from the US or get a Japanese copy, sorry, not for Triassic Attack.
Getting back to the movie, yeah, it’s still about dinosaurs, but it’s more akin to old horror comics, as in this case they dinosaurs are fossils located into a very kitchy roadside museum (which i guess exist just in America specifically for Rob Zombie). The owner of the museum, a Native American, accidentally brings them back to life with magic, and the dino skeletons do the usual running amok they love so much through the small town and its local university.
It sounds like goofy SYFY TV movie fun, especially thanks to accidental nature of the resurrection , and the dinosaurs being just skeletons… and it is, even if it starts out a bit serious, with Native American right activists protesting a land buy-out they were basically tricked into signing by a greedy land-developer… but don’t worry, thing are gonna get silly , eventually. And i mean it, we have to see stuff like “obnoxious asshole college bros” played by actors who clearly graduated years ago, a lot of british accents for people with Native American heritage, token daughter-father character conflict (the usual uber-strict cop-dad who’s too protective, divorce, yada yada) and the usual ensemble of characters that you want to become dinosaur chow.
Granted, we don’t have to wait that much for the “Beast Of The Bone Age” action promised, even if i don’t know why a Native American roadside museum would feature dinosaur fossils…. nor why he would go from thrashing his own museum with a baseball bat in a fit of blind rage to just stop and perform a ritual with the ancient artifacts and scrolls of his people. It just happens because it’s in the script, just to make the magic bone dinosaurs happen, it’s in the contract, after all.
Acting is more composed than usual for these SYFY flicks, which is nice at first, the lead actors fare better in this regard, everyone else acts way too composed and stiff even when witnessing skeletal dinosaurs eating people… with no digesting tract of sorts. Or pterodactyls flying without This does helps because it’s unintentionally funny, the CG is bad enought to make the dinosaurs look like shit, but in a way that’s funny, even if not exactly by design. Not that the practical gore effects look that better.
Triassic Attack is typical D-tier TV movie monster action, middle-of-the-road fare for SYFY TV Originals, acting is passable overall, character mostly forgettable, direction is efficient (and nothing else), the CG effects for the monsters are crap but enjoyable in their goofiness, and you don’t have to wait to the last half-hour to see the skeleton dinosaurs in action . Seen much worse, seen a lot better, this will kill 90 minutes and provide some mild, cheap, shlocky TV movie entertaiment.
For the dino fanatics hellbent on seeing every single one of these, it’s a painless experience.
Worth noting this is the film debut of Emilia Clarke, before she got superfamous as Daenerys in Game Of Thrones, and here does a fairly decent job, not that you can do much with scripts like these. The cast also includes Kirsty Mitchell (The Hitman’s Bodyguard, Dark Hall), Steven Brand (The Scorpion King, the 2014 Teen Wolf tv series), and Raoul Max Trujillo (Apocalypto, Riddick, Da Vinci’s Demons).
If you really need to know that from a review.
Wise Cafe (International) 