12 Days Of Dino Dicember #36: A Sound Of Thunder (2005)

Since we’ve looked at a LOT of low-to-no budget dinosaur films this year (maybe even more than usual), let’s end with something that actually released in most english-speaking cinemas, had some actual movie studios and actually known industry faces attached to it, with A Sound Of Thunder.

Based on a short story of the same name by Ray Bradbury and set in the still “distant” future of 2055, it tells the story of a company, Time Safari, that offers to rich customers the possibility to travel back in time and hunt dinosaurs.

Due to the huge risks involved with the “space-time fabric and whatnot”, the company regulates the safari by hunting species of dinosaurs that would have eventually died anyway of natural causes and keeps the clients from stepping off the designated path of the safari experience.

While on a hunt, a gun malfunctions, forcing the team to scatter and flee from an Allosaurus, and even if they eventually regroup, when they come back to their time with no harm done… they soon find out their actions had consequences, like a sudden increase in global temperature and the over-night instant, abudant growth of plant life, with further trips resulting in even more messing with the space-time continuum and endangering the existence of humanity as a whole…

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember #35: Walking With Dinosaurs 3D (2013)

Figured we would eventually feature a dinosaur documentary film into Dino Dicember somewhat…. not yet, because we’re not talking about the BBC’s prolific and historically signifcant series of dinosaur documentaries, we’re talking about the movie based on those.

Which doesn’t mean much since i didn’t grow up seeing that BBC miniseries, quite odd given i was interested in dinosaurs as a boy, and you can bet by me making a recurring yearly rubric about the dinos, i still am.

Though doing some research on the BBC series made me wonder why the fuck was the point of making a movie when the series’ main appeal, one that would influence later prehistoric life documentaries, the idea of making a traditional nature documentary but using advanced state of the art CG to recreat the extinct creatures that once romped n stomped on planet Earth.

Exactly the kind of concept that really doesn’t need to have a plot attached, but i guess because any IP of some success has to have a movie, even just to remind people that the series still exist.

And to make some movie tie-in videogames, because dino moolah.

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember #34: Dino King: Journey To Fire Mountain (2019)

I was a bit anxious when i saw the poster for this sequel to The Dino King pushing the Lion King vibes even more obviously, let alone the very “Land Before Time”-feeling cover for the UK DVD release, implying a more kid-friendly sequel.

And my fears were kinda confirmed when i noticed the cast… as in, the first movie had a “fake cast” at the end listing the various types of dinosaurs appearing in the film, since the creatures didn’t speak and the dialogues were offered as a post-humous narration by the titular protagonist.

It was a fairly unique thing for these dinosaur movies also aimed at kids, the combo of mostly non-humanized animals that don’t actually talk like people, even with the narration acting as a compromise… which is dropped entirely by the sequel, Dino King: Journey To Fire Mountain.

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember# 33: Pterodactyl (2005)

There’s no more Carnosaur movies for me to review, and while this isn’t directly related to that series, nor comes from one of his companies, it’s directed by another prolific director versed in both cult classics and huge big box blockbuster successes, Mark L. Lester, here clearly in his “TV B-movies” phase, decades after his adaptation of Stephen King’s Firestarter , Roller Boogie, good ol’ Commando or Class of 1984.

As one could simply guess, this is indeed a dinosaur TV movie made for the Sci Fi Channel, produced by Lester’s American World Pictures, and apparently was the highest rated tv movie of this type commissioned by and for “SiFy”. At least according to Mark L. Lester’s bio on IMDB.

The plot it’s that pterodactyls have survived and thrived to the present day, nesting into a dormant volcano within the forest of Turkey, preying on whoever and whatever they come across.

So of course that’s exactly where a group of teenagers are led for a science expedition by Professor Lovecraft (pretty much all the characters are named after science fiction and fantasy writers, that’s cute), but worry not, there are also US commandos led by Captain Berge (played by Coolio) hunting Russian terrorists that supposedly are hiding inside the nearby dormant volcano.

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember #32: Bikini Girls VS Dinosaurs (2014)

It was either this or Picha’s The Missing Link, this won out due to snags in the schedule, either way we’re gonna talk about banging and dinosaurs, not the two together because no thanks, not this year anyway, not feeling it.

Decided to review this one hoping for a modern throwback to old cavemen/dinosaurs movies like The Wild Women Of Wongo, heck, even the similarly titled but not actually related soft porn spoof/parody Bikini Girls On Dinosaur Planet, but this is not the case.

We’ve entered the “Polonia-sphere” equivalent of such ideas, as in it dresses itself in all the post-modern meta self-deprecating facade of disinterestinly using the Star Wars text crawl to vaguely explain but actually not the premise, just so we can cut to a very Turkish Star Wars levels of production sequence of the three protagonists fighting rebels, as in if Star Wars was made with some of the cheapest effects free video software from the early 2000s could afford and was basically an e-girls with Logitech flight controllers vs Sith streamers standoff of DIY cockpits.

All rendered with the computer graphics of a mid 90’s console game 3D cutscene, and that is being generous, since the Wing Commander series existed.

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 31: The Dino King AKA Speckles The Tarbosaurus (2012)

Time for a little trip to South Korea, though this time we aren’t going back to the 90s like for Tyranno’s Claw, just back to the early 2010s, where after the success of a two parter documentary movie about dinosaurs in the Korean peninsula, Tarbosaurus: The Mighiest Ever, director-writer Han Sang-Ho decided – helped by Avatar making popular the 3D fad again – to follow that up with a computer animated feature film

I actually own the UK DVD release, going under The Dino King title, and at least this specific release has the english dub only on it, no korean audio with english subtitle options.

One of my few gripes with the movie actually lies there, as the movie opts for no talking animals in the Disney stile, BUT we have the main protagonist narrating over the events of his life, but in the english dub the voice for him as a youngling tarbosaurus (which is in the same family of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, FIY) has that “4KIDS dub of a toy anime from the late 90s”, like i’m fully expecting to hear a secondary dinosaurs explain some obscure effect of a Yu-Gi-Oh card to the viewer for no diegetical reason whatosver.

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 30: Jurassic Prey (2015)

In case you ever wanted Dino Dicember to crossbred with Shark Month, here’s your goddamn unholy wish granted, because not even dinosaurs are immune to papermacie.

As luck (or lack there of) would have it, there is a Mark Polonia produced (and directed) dinosaur flick, once again brought into the world by Wild Eye Releasing.

I could have ignored this one, but i feel like i would be haunted somewhat if i didn’t cover it this year… and my appetite for punishment it unsatiable as ever, plus this one has an even worse metascore on IMDB than i expected, below the 2 out 10, what are we waiting for, LET’S GOOOOOOOO!

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 28: Kingdom Of The Dinosaurs/ Dinosaur Valley (2022)

More relatively fresh dinosaur meat, because the grind never stops even for these.

And nope, this is not another Jurassic World : Dominion mockbuster…. kinda, it’s pretty much that, as it comes from prolific and fairly fresh GB-based low budget C-D grade movies supplier Jagged Edge Productions, better known for the recent Winnie The Pooh slasher film (and its sequels), many “Curse Of” movies about some random public domain-fairytale character turned slasher villain, Bunnyman rip-offs (i’m not joking), but also behind a lot of pretty obvious mockbusters, including releasing something called something called Freddy’s Fridays the very same year of the Blumhouse FNAF movie being out in theathers, so yeah, shame was never an option.

Among these and others, they also pump out dinosaur movies, like the previously featured Dinosaur Hotel, which in the meantime got a sequel and a third entry on the way. So yeah, this company is clearly set on being the new Asylum, or Full Moon Pictures, for better or worse.

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 27: Planet Raptor (2007)

Raptors: the second fiddle of the dinosaur orchestra.

(The third being the pterodactyls, btw)

Nothing beat the word “raptor” as a way to get your attention when scrolling through the channels in a boring saturday afternoon, or while searching trashy TV movies that just couldn’t come up with a weird or catchy title able to shoehorn a pun with “t-rex” or “dinosaur”, so “raptor [noun]” it is.

This also happens to be the “sequel” to another SyFy Channel mandated dino flick, Raptor Island, which we covered last year, so it’s no wonder it has alternative titles like Raptor Island 2: Planet Raptor, and shit like that, but it’s also unsurprising how sketchy are its claims of being a sequel to that other movie. It’s just part of the package to lie in this regard for this TV dino movies.

And it’s also “a sequel but not really” in the same way these usually are, with one or two actors from that previous one and it being shot in the same – kind of cheaper foreign country (this time the woods of Bulgaria take a rest so the Romanian ones can “swap in”), that’s all in terms of thing carried over, as the director is different (this time at the helm we have Gary Jones, of Mosquito, Spiders and some episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess fame) and the plots don’t really connect.

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 26 : Jurassic Domination (2022)

In a way, there’s little i can complain about a movie like Jurassic Domination, because i pretty much known what i’m going to get from a modern Asylum mockbuster of a dinosaur film, even down to them not really marketing them anymore so even trash buffs and cinema shit seekers like me end up finding out about them years after they came out, undermining the point of a timely release dor the mockbuster to leech off a big budget tent-pole release, in this case Jurassic World: Dominion.

And yet everytime i come out slightly disappointed because i’d like for The Asylum to at least try more with the plots, since their mockbusters are even more and more detatched from the movies they allegedly exist to profit off indirectly with their bootleg low budget offering, they could try to go utterly insane with the plots if they will never improve budgets and effects to any significant degree, but why would they put any more effort if people still watch their garbage regardless?

They know people like me will start combing the internet for these kind of movies, sooner or later, so why bother? They’re so cheap to be worth it from a financial standpoint regardless, so until the well dries up completely, they won’t stop, and it’s hard to fault them for that when the Jurassic World series exists and the difference between the contenders and the “champions” is how much money they can throw at the fx budget to cover up botched or flawed scripts.

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