Film Review: SAURIANS (1994)

Nothing is worse than watching a ‘90s film that looks like it was shot on VHS by a novice filmmaker but that’s exactly what you get with Saurians (1994).  This home-made movie of two prehistoric creatures being resurrected after a construction demolition gone wrong is beyond awful to behold.  Written and directed by Mark Alan Polonia this film follows a group of “novice” archeologists searching for the remnants of dinosaurs just in time to see real life ones come to life and terrify the neighboring town and people. 

What makes the film so awful is not just the pedestrian direction and abysmal screenplay but the bad acting and horrendous creature FX.  The audio is also horrendous as the levels never seem to even have been mixed properly (even though much of the film has been noticeably dubbed and/or ADR). It was a chore to get through this entire film because in addition to all these negative aspects of the film it wasn’t even entertaining in a bad-movie way.  It was just plan horrible and a film that should be avoided at all costs.

Film Review: DINOSAURUS! (1960)

It’s hard to pick on a film from the ‘60s as the visual FX are not as good and the plots usually pander to young audiences but if they have a charm then sometimes you can enjoy them regardless of all their faults which is how I look at Dinosaurus! (1960), a film I’ve always heard about but never really seen until now. 

It’s a really simple plot as an underground explosion near a Caribbean island unearths the remains of two dinosaurs and a friendly Neanderthal Man.  Bart Thompson (Ward Ramsey) and his construction crew remove the bodies of the two creatures from their underwater grave while the unscrupulous island manager Mike Hacker (Fred Engelberg) finds the body of the Neanderthal Man and tries to hide it in order to make a profit.  During a nighttime lightning storm the bodies are resurrected by the lightning and the two creatures and Neanderthal Man run loose on the island.  The Neanderthal Man befriends a young boy by the name of Julio (

Alan Roberts) who helps them all put an end to the dinosaur menace once and for all.

Original idea for the film goes to Jack H. Harris and the film is written by Dan E. Weisburd and Jean Yeaworth who create a very kid friendly dinosaur adventure.  The film was definitely designed to appeal to the younger crowd but has enough adventure for the older crowd as well (at the time).  Although very dated, the film has a charm of innocence like that of the television show Land of the Lost and is something you’d now find on Saturday mornings for young children.  It’s more of a time piece for children from a by-gone era when dinosaurs were exciting and not as terrifying as they are in the more recent Jurassic Park films.

Film Review: JURASSIC WORLD (2015)

I will definitely be in the minority when I say I did not enjoy the film Jurassic World (2015).  The forth film in a franchise thought dead, this new film is a means to expand and reboot the franchise for a new audience.  The only problem is that it recycles the plot from the previous films without adding anything new. 

In the new film they actually (finally) got the park open to the public and people visit it like they do Walt Disney World.  Every dinosaur is a major attraction but even though it is highly successful, the shareholders want more and now the scientists who brought the dinosaurs back from extinction have genetically something new that no one has ever seen before.  This new dinosaur is bigger, stronger, and smarter than anything anyone has ever seen and once it gets lose in the part it is up to rogue velociraptor trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and his boss Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) to save the day (and her two nephews who have managed to get themselves lost in the park).

The film’s biggest problem is that it borrows entire plot and themes from the original film but does it less effectively.  Whereas the original film had the pleasure of being the first and inspiring awe and wonder in audiences this film has none of that and has a feeling and tone of “having been there and done it before.”  Two kids get trapped behind enemy lines and have to be saved only these two brothers (who are Claire’s nephews) are not nearly as interesting as the kids in the original film and come off as very cliché for the most part.  Howard as Claire seems miscast from the very beginning as she has little chemistry with Pratt and really doesn’t come into her own until half way into the film when the dinosaurs are more interesting than she is.  Speaking of Pratt, he’s not given as much freedom as he had in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) so his performance seems as if he’s holding something back.  There is a welcomed return for character actor B.D. Wong as Dr. Henry Wu from the original film who created the technology to clone dinosaurs.  He’s given more screen time in this film as this is the beginning of a new franchise that hints at more things to come.  Irrfan Khan (so memorable in The Namesake and Life of Pi) is underused as Simon Masrani, this film’s version of John Hammond, who runs the park, and Vincent D’Onofrio is slumming it as Hoskins, the N-Gen representative looking to militarize the velociraptors.

This film has more short-comings than all the other films combined and they manage to masque most of them with flashier SFX and more dinosaurs but the heart of the original film is long gone and replacement with an extended fight sequence between man and many dinosaurs for the finale.  I thought I was watching one of Michael Bay’s insipid Transformer films by the way in which what could have been a good film is turned into a franchise starting entertainment mess.  Unfortunately, that’s what audiences crave in this time of summer (as indicative of the huge Box Office opening of the film) so instead of a film that will stand the test of time Jurassic World is another (in a long line) highly forgettable SFX extravaganza with nothing new to say.