Ah, yes, the parody of Roben Ostlund’s celebrated english-language feature debut. FINALLY!
Imagine that, and that how it would require some wit instead of just any lack of shame, but instead what he have is just another low budget dinosaur film, distributed by Cork’d Entertaiment, a company offering stuff like The Amytiville Murders, Monsternado… and also the quite fun italian horror The Well, but mostly dealing with mockbusters or mockbuster looking cheap flicks, think it as an Asylum adjacent kind of film distributor, just marginally above Wild Eye Releasing that pumps out Mark Polonia films and the like.
So, it’s one of those that you see the opening scene, witness the god awful CGI for the dinosaurs (especially the pterodactyls look shit and seem to have framerate issues like it’s a Pokemon Scarlet/Violet asset), and 5 minutes in, you feel done already, that it would be better to stop while we’re ahead, and we could march to our inevitable grave without deciding to eat so much garbage.
The plot is exactly what you’d expect, as some people that were flying towards a island for a team-building exercise get sucked into a portal and crashland on a island with dinosaurs that they don’t seem able to escape. The island, not the dinosaurs, they mostly will get their human prey snack, unless there’s a small stream, as i guess the T-Rex is a very old fashioned vampire/nosferatu and wouldn’t even need running water to be stopped, just drop a sack of beans and he’ll be forced to count them with his tiny T-rex, opposible thumbless “hands”.
All which sound more fun than the actual film, as these douchebags find some soldiers (or people with guns, if you prefer) already wandering the island trying to escape the dinos, and you that will inevitably mean a lot of shit actors running through the woods, shooting fake guns at fake dinosaurs, entering some caves and shit, exchanging dogshit dialogues, doing that over and over as the cast thankfully thin itself out of stupidity and dinosaurs.
So it’s another Lost World, or in this case more of a The Land That Time Forgot (the novel) style situation, just implying it’s the Bermuda Triangle causing their planet to crash into indistinct dinosaur island N°6578… but wait, the prologue with the soldiers wasn’t a random ass nightmare one of the characters on the plan had during the day, it’s actually a premonition of sorts, since we also see these guys roam around the island trying to survive its fauna. As to why these special ops were sent there, is to retrieve some valuable info or cargo that got lost around that area, but they also crashed there, are a bit jumpy around people, and reasonably just want to get the hell out of there.
It would make sense, but we don’t want that, so the big reveal is that they didn’t accidentally go there, the pilot decided to fake a malfunction so he could hopefully find his lost daughter or something on the island, it was brought up before, so it doesn’t come up from nowhere, but it’s not really explained well and it doesn’t really make much sense, and in the end it’s just fuckin stupid.
I must correct myself, because i said “dinosaurs” but there’s technically more, including a giant spider and… a crab-like monster that it’s such a random garble of features it’s the standout feature of the film. It literally appears out of nowhere 30 minutes-ish in, it’s a perfect combination of gibberish creature design and shitty ass CG that’s just depressing and boring… and never shows up again. Or actually does anything, so you’re forced to ask what the fuck was the deal with that.
Because speculating on the crab-esque (almost like a bootleg Headcrab from Half Life) thing that has 10 seconds of screentime is more intriguing than actually the actual film or characters than somehow look at a sky portal and say, offended, “it’s just a dark cloud”, without a hint of sarcasm.
That is, when “Crabby” doesn’t look like a completely different creature later in the film, when we can gander at it better. At least i think it’s supposed to be the same creature, but after a human-crab monster/abomination shows up later…. i really don’t know anymore what the fuck, or even.
You’d think the effects weren’t THAT bad judging by the prologue.. but that is “peak”, the rest of the movie has the already awful CG somehow degrade even further into low res garbage they didn’t even bother to give the dinosaurs the usual overly shiny finish, or any proper detail that fools people into thinking that maybe the CGI won’t be so bad, just because these kind of cheap dinosaur models work for screenshots, not so much when you see them in action.
That brand of deceptive trash, and inconsistent too as some models that are made to have little motion or never interact with the actors look actually finished, cheap as they are.
I did recognize a couple of actors from other dinosaur or otherwise shlock horror films, Chrissie Wunna and Danielle Scott, the first also being in other UK low budget dinosaur films like 2022’s Pterodactyl, Dinosaur Hotel, the latter being also in Pterodactyl (2022), and…. in the first Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey, i swear i didn’t plan this to be the third/fourth time i referenced that movie (or its sequel) in such a short span of time.
I reviewed dinodozens of films like these, and even fully knowing i was most likely walking into a bad one… it still hurts every time, especially when its not just bad, this is another bonafide stinker, so incompetent you can even catch some of the crew in a shot.
I really don’t know what is it with UK based low budget dinosaur films post the 2010s, but they often are such bores AND incredibly shitty, like, painfully bad, barely scraping the bottom of the barrel as at least you can see what is happening, acting is fairly subpar but the actors seem to have at least have had some professional training (or had acted before this, at the very least), and you get the feeling they’re actually trying their best to make me care about these characters.
Does these little “small mercies” matter in the end? No, they do not as this is a huge, boring, stinker, with an extra stupid plot that puts some effort in order to make little to no sense, and despite the surprising amount of weird ass monster/creatures models they thrown in the film, it’s not enough, the hilarious deaths where character are basically gibbed like it’s fuckin enemy in a 90’s FPS like Blood is shitty funny… but again, not enough for me to give it more than a hypotethetical 3 out of 10, especially when it feels like it should end at the 60 minutes mark, but it doesn’t because there are like 22 minutes left, somehow.
After all, there’s a stupid twist and the Serious Sam reject crab-man monster has to fight the T-Rex for 10 seconds. Yeah, just skip this one and see the screenshots with the weird ass shitty monsters if you’re really curious, pretty bad, boring and hard to sight through even when below 90 minutes.
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