This Prehistoric Copycat Should Remain Undiscovered…
At Influx Magazine, we’ll go to great lengths to get you the skinny on the latest hot movies, or in this case, not so hot. That even includes Asylum films, which have a reputation for throwing smallish sums of money at horrendous scripts, then stepping back to see what happens. Their last two movies were extremely bad, and of course, this also sucks ass, but just not as much. To helm this debacle they settled on Joseph J. Lawson, who I’m sure we all remember from his directorial debut Nazis at the Center of the Earth. This unfortunate piece of nastiness isn’t much better, however, it did have a larger budget. The director has an impressive amount of film titles, for visual effects, which is a huge surprise after seeing the piss-poor effects, that have gone into bringing the dinosaurs to life, because every single one of them, were pretty bad. It looked as if no one cared because realism wasn’t the point, a fast buck was, and the entire project suffered because of it.
Spielberg would be spinning in his director’s chair if he saw this shameful rip-off of Jurassic Park, as scene after scene was a clear ‘Copy/Paste’ effort, without it ever coming close to working in any way. At times, it felt like a parody of the $400 million grossing blockbuster it was trying to emulate ,but it was never going to work, but it was clearly never Asylum’s intention.
To give some star-power to Age of Dinosaurs, they signed on Treat Williams, and TV Movie king, Ronny Cox, and both sailed through with ease, and another stinker to add to the old, resume, but to add a feminine touch, we had the talented Jillian Rose Reed, who is still young enough to actually consider even taking on these kind of roles, without it killing her career stone dead. The acting was pretty much solid with the only exceptions being a couple of bit-players, but it’s to be expected in a low-budget movie. The rest of the film was just plain bad, with CGI and Editing being the worst offenders, but continuity was an extremely close second. The dinos were garbage looking, the movement was laughable, and had the look of a high school project, I mean, it’s been twenty years since Jurassic Park but this looked like effects from ‘thirty’ years ago.
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If you’ve seen Jurassic Park then you don’t really need to watch a watered-down parody of it, but if you still decide to see it, then you’ll no doubt have a laugh at the silliness of it all. The biggest fans of Asylum movies, are the people who have tiny parts in them, and their family members, but I also think there might be a small subculture who enjoy ‘B’ movies of this, persuasion, and if so, more power to you. Sadly, I’m not a fan of Asylum and found it tedious sitting through the film in its entirety, but occasionally at Influx Magazine, we have to take one for the team.
Review by Ed Blackadder, Lead Entertainment Writer
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