Terrordactyl
aka Jurassic Wars
2016
3rd Films : MarVista Entertainment / Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
2 / 10
I had some hopes for this film, not high ones, after all, it is a budget B-Movie Monster flick. Though MarVista has been distributing these type of movies for years now, I thought they would be "Cherry Picking" the better ones. However, the budget must have been spent on the CGI and Model-FX as the rest of the movie was pitiful in the extreme.
So, the good first: There were times when the CGI Terrordactyls were pretty decent and quite believable. Unfortunately, viewers only remember the badly rendered scenes. When the Terrordactyls are swarming and flying through the city and around the apartment block, these are the best CGI scenes. The worst being the whenever a human gets snatched by one, these scenes made me smile in their badness.
Then there's the puppetry when you get the one-to-one fight scenes with the humans V the Terrordactyls. The major drawback is the budget, once again. But to be fair the 'Dactyls aren't too bad, that being said there are times when the movement of these puppets are awkward and I even felt embarrassed for the team working on them. Especially the part in the apartment where the 'Dactyls keep lining up for the heroes to shoot them down - just like all the fairground games... it would've been funnier had the director decided to play calliope music over the scene.
This is another area where the film failed, the writer and director, Don Bitters III and Geoff Reisner, try to install humour throughout the film, though most of this falls flat. Sometimes, due to the writer, but most of all due to the actors.
The best I can say about the actors is that they were below par and, at times, annoying. The worst was Jonas' maniacal laugh, which wasn't even called for. To be fair, they didn't have too much to work with, thanks to the writer, Don Bitters, whose characters were stereotypical. Even though characters in these genre films are usually stereotyped, in this movie there also boring to the N'th degree and two-dimensional. Then you have the inane backstory of the Terrordacytls having been blown into space when the dinosaur-killing meteor hit the earth... What else from Earth's past is waiting in space to fall upon us?
Hopefully, NOTHING by this film crew!
Except for the CGI artists.
I really don't understand why you want to make a movie (or do anything, for that matter) and not give it your best effort. If this is their best effort than they should start working in call centers and stop inflicting your audiences with half-baked ideas and movies, Give us something decent - and yes even Bad films can be entertaining "SHARKNADO!!!"
Don't waste your time on this badly written, badly acted, nonsense. Go give blood - at least you get a cup of tea and biscuit after.
