Yep, without the “The”, because dinosaurs in space don’t need proper grammar or explanation.
More sci-fi dinos, but this time with more of a budget, kinda, thought it’s one of those cases where the movie just will never be able to live up properly to it’s theathrical poster, which i love, it’s such a perfect sum of late 70s/80s cheese that’s kinda glorious.
I’m not even kidding, that theatherical poster kicks ass, ironically or not, it does.
The movie is actually a fairly typical mash of sci-fi and dinosaur flicks, set in a generic “future” where space travel is a thing, with the crew of the starship Odyssey forced to crashland on a planet that looks a lot like Earth, despite being many light-years away, and a prehistoric sort of Earth, ruled and inhabited as it is by many kinds of dinosaur.
The surviving members, lead by Captain Lee, try to survive in the hope of being rescued, until they encounter a mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex, that proves to be a toughie, forcing them to find a way to kill it in order to survive on the planet.
It’s The Lost World by A. C. Doyle but with a sci-fi premise/backdrop, basically, with even less to inothing too fancy, and i mean it, it’s another low budget dinosaur film, one that blew almost his entire budget on the stop motion dinosaur effects, which is a good thing for people like me making retrospective, and for Rifftrax to make a riff track since it’s pure campy non-sense….not so much for the actors, some apparently never even getting the little they were owed.
Sure as hell they weren’t spent on plot (again, this entire movie is what otherwise would be a scene or two in a regular sci-fi film) and let’s be frank, acting from another cast of unknowns… is awful, not to deserve them getting shafted on the paycheck, but hilariously awful none the less (some odd inflections, too), and their character are mostly distincted by either how much skin they show (one guy being allergic to shirts, as usual) or their body-to-facial-hair ratio, because someone clearly forgot to shave his/her mustache and the more irsute one looks like he bought his beard from a gag gift store, either that or he constructed it from the shavings left by other people in the bathroom.
Regardless, since hairyness seems to be determining the percentual of brain cells each of these idiots get, he’s basically the smartest one of the group, wherever the actual ship captain mostly whines, naps, mouths off his gayporn-stache at other actors, and too easily accepts his fellow men getting offed by the dinosaur wildlife.
Another part where the money clearly didn’t went is music, as the soundtrack feels like someone mashing random keys on a shuffleboard, and anything in the FX department that ISN’T the dinosaur stop-motion also got the shaft (SHAFT!), with the lazer gun looking like repurposed power drills, to say nothing of the “effect” for how the ship sinks into the water at the beginning. XD
On the other hand, you can tell all the small budget went into the stop motion dinosaurs, they still look and move damn good, thanks to Jim Danforth, student of the great Ray Harryhausen, here also credited for the matte paintings, shame they’re rarely scaled properly, so often there are shots where the dinos just look a tad taller than the humans even when they’re supposed to be towering over..
And yes, it’s crap, but aside from the fact it looks way better than some of the movies we’ve feature (and will feature) here, it’s actually enjoyable. Cheesy, absolutely, but i was honestly watching away with ease, almost even caring about these doofuses dressed like they were expelled from a pijama party (not so much a spaceship), it’s many things but not a total slog, at all, being perfectly watchable hokum, and the stop motion animation creatures are a treat to say, plus it’s not even 90 minutes long, so i’d say Planet Of Dinosaur makes for a decent fun “bad movie time”.
Wise Cafe (International) 