Tuesday, September 22, 2015

JURASSIC PREY

See that really cool cover art for Jurassic Prey [2015]? Then you have just seen the best thing about this movie. In fact, it might be the only good thing about this movie. How bad is it? It’s so bad that there will be no spoiler warnings in today’s bloggy thing on account of not telling you about this movie completely would make me an accessory to cinematic crime.

Jurassic Prey was directed by Mark Polonia, who has been involved in many low-budget movies like this one. It was written by John Oak Dalton, who has fewer prior offenses on his record. The movie runs 87 minutes. Some of those minutes will make you laugh. You will not be laughing with this movie. You will be laughing at it.

Here’s a quick plot outline from the back of the DVD:

After a botched robbery, a group of thieves clash with police and others while trying to hideout at a remote lake cabin, but unknown to them all, a recent mining explosion has unearthed a prehistoric T-Rex beast, who is the perfect hunter, and is very hungry.  Now, they must all band together and fight to stay alive as the Jurassic predator hunts them down one by one, piece by piece.

That’s reasonably close to the plot of the movie, but some details are exaggerated or omitted. Besides the group of thieves, we have a young woman who stole a bag of money from her criminal boyfriend. We have the various people chasing the bank robbers and the woman. We have a few people unlucky enough to wander into the dino’s kill zone and appear in this movie.

Missed bet. One of the robbers is the former child star of a dawn-of-television science fiction show who has turned to crime because he can’t make enough money doing conventions. You could have done a lot with that in a real movie.

Second missed bet. It should have been fracking that unleashed the T-Rex. Then you could made this both a dinosaur on the loose film and a political satire.

Enough with the missed bets.

The T-Rex in this movie is not a perfect hunter. It’s some guy in a suit or possibly just parts of a suit. The suit isn’t convincing, but apparently the dinosaur it represents has mutant stealth powers because nobody ever sees it until its rubber head and stubby rubber arms are right on top of them. Blood spatter and rubber human parts indicate the hungry T-Tex has dined and that it is a sloppy eater.

The people in this movie do not actually band together. They just go off on their own to make it easier for Rubber Rex to tear them into little rubber body parts.

The movie could not afford CGI for the dinosaur. However, for the final battle between man and T-Rex, they switch to really amateur stop-motion animation. The stop-motion dinosaur doesn’t look at all like the rubber suit dinosaur.

Jurassic Prey is not a keeper. It’s garage sale merchandise.  Who am I kidding? It’s mystery box merchandise which some unfortunate garage sale customer will get stuck with until he or she can pass the curse on to someone else.

But how ‘bout that cover art?

I’ll be back tomorrow with a short bloggy thing on the meaning of life or some part of life. That will be followed by a review of a movie that doesn’t feature dinosaurs or any other monsters, but is a wonderful film nonetheless. That will be followed by at least two more monster movie reviews.

Have a great day.

© 2015 Tony Isabella

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