Clearing up some of the last year’s releases with Hatched, a 2021 dinosaur film about a woman and her family moving to her reclusive brother’s farmhouse to check on him, only to find out he moonlighted as Dr. Alan Grant, resulting in many living dinosaurs that trap the family inside the house.
Yes, the dinosaurs are coming from inside the house, hur hur.
I’ve heard this one described as “Michael Myers but if dinosaur”, for some reasons that don’t really make much sense when you think about it for more than 3 seconds, but i would say we’re more in Carnosaur or Raptor Ranch territory, because we’re yet again talking about someone doing clonosauruses around chicken coops and shit.
At least we’re not in space?
Actually this one does remind me a lot more of Dinosaur Hotel, since it’s also set and shot in the UK countryside, the main bulk of the movie takes place inside a building (a hotel instead of a house, but whatever), this time without the battle royale thingie, but it’s also one of these that – bless them – tries to go for a serious tone… with sophomore acting and dinosaur CG that looks almost good…. only when it’s not moving at all.
Also, hope you didn’t count on actually seeing the kills, we’ll just cut away before and then cut back when the T-Rex has just finished ingesting all the giblets or its performing an eating animation, with barely any drop of digital gore or blood,
None of these people act that much human, as they adapt to this situation a bit TOO fast and don’t seem THAT surprised or bothered after seeing a living T-Rex in the UK countryside.
As of why it’s basically due to the backstory being half-Sharkman… a lot Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom, come to think of it, and it’s as random as it sounds.
To be fair, the CG for the dinosaurs it’s far from the worse i’ve seen, but this one of those where they completely opted to make them look as better as possible for their low budget… so they look not that bad in screenshots, and surprisingly not 100 % awful when they gotta move through space and shit, even though they often stand out a bit too much from the enviroment because they’re excessively glistening.
At least they still look a LOT less fake than the ones in Dinosaur Hotel.
Cinematography isn’t as shabby as one might expect, i have to admit, and its definitely more professionally put together and presented than a good number of cheapo direct-to-video dinosaur films i’ve featured here, even more if we’re talking about the surprisingly many UK based ones.
Acting too – from the expected “no name cast” – could have been far, far, worse, even though it’s undeniably quite bad, there’s effort put into it, undeniably so.
Problem is, at the end of the day…… it’s just very boring, and very bloodless too, the kills are all off-screen and sure, the post-kill gore it’s bad but could be worse, but that doesn’t change the inavoidable fact that Hatched it’s just very boring and dull, pity because it doesn’t look that cheap, the characters aren’t completely unlikeably and the actors are earnestly trying, but this is some plain subpar low-budget dino drivel we have here.
Just another slighlty disappointing dino flick for the pile, no more no less, as it looking better than most of these low budget UK dinosaurs movies, having the plot make sense without obvious holes or so on… doesn’t really makes it proper intertaining and stuff.
Only for when you’ve seen everything else in terms of dinosaur movies and need a new “fix” no matter what.
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