Don’t worry, this one has dinosaurs in it.
Most likely, anyway.
Didn’t think about that being a required feature, but that’s why you should do some research first, just in case, otherwise you get duped into watching a cannibal movie, somehow.
No my friends, this time we’re in for some semi-notorious lower case Z-grade filet from France, with Norbert Moutier’s Dinosaur From The Deep.
After all, the success of Jurassic Park wasn’t an USA thing only, at all, so here comes a low budget film done to capitalize on Spielberg’s dino opus and hopefully trick enough people (especially younger dinosaur enthusiasts) into renting or buying it on VHS, only to realize it’s basically a “shot in shitteo”/”home video film” of French people with no budget.
What were they gonna in 1993/4, look up the metascore on sites that didn’t exist yet, or required anyone in the household NOT to use the phone?
I mean, i would have rented the shit out of it if a 10 yo me would have read the synopsis on the back of the VHS box, which is as follows.
It’s the vaguely but not really distant future of 2004, and since the death penalty has been abolished IN THE FUTURE, the FBI and judicial system at large does find the solution for dealing with a recidive ultracriminal: go back to a time where the death penalty did exist and let the fucker fry on the electric chair or something.
But since time travel is expensive, this stupid endeavour will have to share a space in the time travel pod/capsule/bus seats alongside a scientific expedition to the planet Terra with the goal of documenting/finding the first dinosaurs. As luck has it, the dinos do exist, but the criminal escapes, so the crew not only has to survive the prehistoric menace of the dinosaurs, but…. also search for the uber criminal, God forbid the giant lizard creatures deal with him instead.
As you can tell, the plot doesn’t make any fuckin sense even at a rapid glance, but that won’t stop the writer shooting for the stars and stir the trashcan soup with oregano and time travel death sentence shit. XD
Honestly i’m already giddy, that sound like the recipe for some primo so bad it’s good homegrown cinema… and that is indeed what you get, some poverty magic of the bargain bin kind.
it has everything… as in everything i wanted/expected, from the future being some abandoned and crumbling building that were most likely factories of some kind for people in cosplay-unworthy levels of get ups (the “if you have some masks left over from Halloween, please bring em in because we ain’t got props” kind) to do a giant LARP about, while the camera operator forgot how to fuckin focus most of the shots and angles during the “action scenes”.
Again, the future is made up of a random abandoned block of run down buildings, a spaceship interior and exterior that makes a regular MST3K episode look a Michael Cimino production, a random park or natural reserve in France, gore that could actually be exchanged for a botched italian pasta sauce, the dialogues (my french isn’t great but definitely good enough to catch a good chunk of the dialogues, but then again i speak stupid plot twist fluently, and stupid indeed is far from lacking in this movie.
or the criminal being outright laughable from the get go, acting like a menace but looking like a villain from a forgotten actionxploitation film that most likely has been tackled by Rifftrax and had a Carradine in it, with his laughable karate headband and it being just a random middle aged man, like he decided to audition 20 years later for a role in Miami Connection or something, he gives me that vibe.
He’s in good company though, as the wife of the main scientist is also on board to be a bitch and also trying to go all flirty with random human skeletons they find, maybe she wanted to be noticed by Buttgeireit or something, who can really say.
Don’t forgot the weird, sketchy soundtrack that often feels done by letting a cat on a piano, mixer or a theramin, but something can be kinda catchy or fitting (even if in a stupid way), i’m not gonna lie.
And of course the dinosaurs, which are as cheap as expected, as in it’s often a toy dinosaur (Ted V. Mikels ghost approves) or puppet shot against a white background with “doodled trees and clouds”, but there’s also stopmotion, shitty stopmotion (somehow still better than in modern Polonia Bros films, which IS embarassing), but i’ll take it over them using the same footage from One Million BC or some other old dinosaur films from the 50/60s.
Also, i love how the final act is “we shot our Aliens at home” with a puppet hand dinosaur ambushing people around, why the fuck not? Still can’t afford a proper ending, though, as the final resolution/outcome of the movie is told via a wall of text on screen. (chefs kiss)
Editing is a mess too and might actually been done by a dinosaur, with inconsistent color tones between the scenes, the backgrounds changing, the obvious insert shots of people reacting to stuff that might or might not have been added in post, sometimes cutting from actors reacting in a darkened location that doesn’t match the lighting of what it’s cutting to and from, the works.
Some primo home video garbage that’s so bad it’s actually mesmerizing, fairly entertaining for its awfulness and amateur hour everything, especially because it plays it goofy but sincere, a delicacy for the dedicated big game trash hunter in constant seek of more awful, truly bottom-of-the-barrel terrible movies to laugh at and get a kick from, and its 72 minutes long (plus credits), so it doesn’t overstays its welcome.
All hail the toy dinosaur king (of space)!
Wise Cafe (International) 