100 Million BC (2008)
[caption id=”attachment_1420" align=”alignright” width=”300"]
An adventure 65 minutes in the making…[/caption]
Twitter Plot Summary: A scientist sends a team back 70 million years to rescue the team he originally sent during his experiments in the 1940s.
Genre: Action/Adventure/Fantasy/Sci-Fi
Director: Griff Furst
Key Cast: Michael Gross, Christopher Atkins, Greg Evigan, Phil Burke, Wendy Carter, Marie Westbrook, Dustin Hamish
Five Point Summary:
1. Michael Gross looks like a cheap Sean Connery knock-off.
2. They’ve got themselves a cut price Stargate…
3. That CGI… terrible.
4. Amazing how, despite living in dinosaur times for 6 years, they all look like they use Head and Shoulders.
5. It’s all gone a bit The Lost World on us. But much worse.
The Asylum strike again with another mockbuster that has absolutely nothing at all to do with the mainstream release of 10,000 BC, yet was cunningly released in stores at the same time in a bid to reel in unsuspecting punters. In the 1940s scientist Frank Reno (Gross), a member of the Rainbow Project, aka the Philadelphia Experiment, sends a team of scientists back in time by approximately 70 million years (see, even the title is wrong!), where they are inadvertently stranded. Now, in the present, Reno has figured how to find that original team and so, with a team of incredibly dumb US marines in tow, he travels back in time to rescue the stranded group and bring them back to the future. Unfortunately for all involved, including the audience, everything goes a bit “The Lost World” as they accidentally bring back a T-Rex which runs rampant through modern day Los Angeles. Well, kind of. If you groaned at the T-Rex in that film, you’ll be bashing your face against the TV screen whilst watching this delightful film.
[caption id=”attachment_1421" align=”alignleft” width=”300"]
My, how excellent those effects are![/caption]
Remember that sense of awe you had when you first saw the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park? The possibility that what you were seeing was real and not computer generated? Yeah well, that won’t happen here. The special effects (and they are truly special in ever sense of the word) range between incredibly bad CGI, incredibly bad stop motion, or incredibly bad rubber dinosaurs. Of course, they’re not the only bad things on display, the acting too is truly diabolical. The only one who puts in anything close to a competent performance is Michael Gross, and I think only then because he’s the stalwart of the Tremors franchise. The marines spend the majority of their time shouting and showing no indication that they have ever received any military training — it’s amazing that they actually qualified at all given their blatant lack of discipline and general ability. There is much shouting, many attempts at portraying anguish or indeed any human emotion, and much running away from bad special effects. Suffice to say, their overall level of incompetence ends with most of them being killed and/or eaten by grizzled dinos of the past, and it’s almost a relief when they finish playing a part in the story. This then leads into a ridiculous final act where the T-Rex runs riot and some odd time travel shenanigans are brought into play.
Perhaps the only good thing to mention is that they didn’t shoehorn in a bunch of cavemen in the past, as clearly that would have spat in the face of current scientific understanding, and also been an entirely ridiculous prospect. More than this ended up being, I mean. As it stands we should be grateful that it’s no longer than it needs to be, and we get to see a plant spit venom in the face of one of the marines. Apart from these very, very minor plus points, it’s one to avoid no doubt about it.
Favourite scene: Some poorly animated raptors wipe out a few characters in short succession.
Quote: “CHIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEFFFFFF!!!!!!!”
Silly Moment: The T-Rex leaping into the air and taking down a helicopter.
Score: 1/5
