100 Million BC (2008)

I was on holiday last week and kept very busy, so unfortunately we had to skip a week in Dinosaur Month that I was planning on filling with something I read about on Paste Magazine, but that's fine, we can save it for another time, because I honestly might do some more homework first before covering it... watch this space... I did find the time to squeeze in all x3 Lord of the Rings, Shang-Chi, and Black Widow whilst I was away though, which only served to demonstrate just how terrible some of the nonsense I've watched lately truly is, and I also watched The Adam Project, a movie genuinely in danger of finding itself on this blog if it isn't careful, but the less said about that one the better. On the subject of time though, and the travel through thereof, this weeks movie and final conclusion to Dinosaur Month for at least a year is another load of nonsense from The Asylum; 100 Million BC - a movie about time travelling scientists bringing dinosaurs back to modern day I think, and another mockbuster released to coincide with the Roland Emmerich movie 10,000 BC which I err... haven't watched to be honest. For some reason, these dodgy dino movies all seem to be Asylum efforts? They must just really like dinosaurs or something?

The movie opens with Dr Frank Reno (Michael Gross) briefing a team of Navy SEALS about the Philadelphia Experiment, a popular time travelling conspiracy theory that I think was disproven long before this movie was made, before continuing to elaborate on that and revealing that he sent a team of Navy SEALS and scientists 70 million years into the past, sometime around 1949 and that they have been stranded there ever since, which if your keeping score means that they would have arrived slightly after 100 Million BC but let's uh, not nit pick. After revealing that demonstrable evidence has been discovered to suggest the team somehow survived long enough to make pretty cave paintings, the team of SEALS captained by Lt. Robert Peet (Stephen Blackehart) and lead by Dr. Reno use their fancy time machine to travel back to the Cretaceous period. After beginning to make their way to the mountain where the cave paintings will go on to be found, the team are startled when they somehow managed to miss a sauropod the size of an aeroplane creeping up behind them... and suffer their first casualty when they are attacked by... something... in a river. Seriously it's filmed so intentionally chaotically it's genuinely difficult to tell. Continuing to the cave, the team are suddenly attacked by a dinosaur that can seemingly move at the speed of light... who proceeds to pick off a number of the team as they scatter including Lt. Peet, and damn I thought he was going to be one of the main characters?! However when one of the team makes it to the cave mouth despite being savaged by the dinosaur, he is saved by three cave dweller looking types with spears. Similarly on the verge of getting eaten himself, the Dr. is saved by another cave dweller called Ruth (Marie Westbrook), his old squeeze from 50 years ago, who leads him back to the rest of the team who reveal that only 4 of the original team remain. Ruth, Bud (Dean Kreyling), Betty (Wendy Carter) and Erik (Christopher Atkins), Dr. Reno's brother. Making their way back to the entry point, the team are attacked by "Big Red" - a Tyrannosaur looking dinosaur who picks off a couple more of the team before they make it to safety. After spending the night in a cave shelter and exchanging some cringey dialogue, the team, now down to the original 4, Dr. Reno and 3 nameless Marines set out for the entry point in the morning and along the way are attacked again by a Pterosaur, who plucks away one of the SEAL team from the ground and the resulting ruckus seems to wake up "Big Red"... Arriving at the entry point, Dr. Reno activates the portal but after Erik begins to question the science, he realises that his brother has to stay behind to close the wormhole. Despite protestations, Dr. Reno is adamant that he will be the one to stay behind, and once everyone passes through, he is on the verge of closing the portal when "Big Red" storms through and crashes through the wormhole... Arriving back in their own time, the SEALS begin to celebrate, but the celebration is shortlived when "Big Red" crashes through the.. time gate? Thing? Destroying it and proceeding to attack everyone onsite, killing another one of the SEALS, leaving only Officer Stubbs (Phil Burke) as the remaining survivor. Making a swift exit the three original survivors are escorted out the building by Commander Dorn (Greg Evigan) who watches on as "Big Red" bursts out of the building and onto the street. Joining up with Stubbs, the team get chased around the car park a little bit by "Big Red" before making it to the helipad and commandeering a helicopter. After a needlessly protracted and mostly pointless airborne scene, the team somehow manage to lose a 60 foot long dinosaur in a network of Industrial buildings.. and Erik and the other original team ultimately decide to return to ground to search whilst Commander Dorn stays airborne. They then proceed to do the stupidest but most cliché thing in movie history: they "split up" to find him. Him. A 60 foot long fucking T-Rex. Individually. But that doesn't serve to accomplish much beyond Betty nearly getting attacked and the team reconvene, deciding to try and trap "Big Red" in a motorway tunnel.  However "Big Red" outsmarts them, appearing on the other side of the tunnel and almost catching the gang until a jeep literally materialises out of nowhere to attack the dinosaur and provide the team with shelter. The driver, reveals himself to be the younger version of Dr. Reno, Frank (Dustin Harnish) who spins a yarn about old Frank trying to go back to reset the timeline but getting wounded and sending his younger self in his place, equipped with the knowledge of the future. Going off on his own to lure "Big Red" back to them, Erik somehow manages to get sneak attacked by a dinosaur the size of a bus, and who's footsteps can be heard over a mile away... but does enough to catch his attention and lead him back to the tunnel where Frank uses a spear like contraption to send "Big Red" back to the Cretaceous period! After some jubilant celebrations Frank reveals that he also has the technology to send the others home, but this time Erik volunteers to remain behind with Betty so Frank and Ruth can be together back in 1950 and everyone has a needlessly protracted, and slightly cringey goodbye. 

Bloody hell this was crap. I mean, I've seen worse, but uh yeah, this was a not very good one. Meandering plot, terrible special effects, amateur production there was very little in the way of redeeming factors with this one, but they at least managed to include some dinosaurs in it, unlike the deceptively titled "Jurassic Island". But by comparison Jurassic Island was at least a competently average movie compared to this ridiculous state of affairs. I honestly just wanted it to be over by about the one hour mark. I had taken enough.

Might as well start with a positive. There was at least: dinosaurs. They looked like shit, moved at the speed of lightning, made weird animal noises, and were suspiciously ill fitting with the Cretaceous Period theming that was going on, but you know what? I'll overlook that to a degree because at least they were here. They promised dinosaurs going in, and with this one, they delivered. Even if they were so obviously computer generated it was a bit grim. Dino score: 2 out of 5.

That is... pretty much where the positives end really. I mean, nobody is coming out of this unscathed. Christopher Atkins was... the least worse? I think? But the acting across the board was pretty sub-par. Nobody was really bad so as to be genuinely terrible. Actually now that I think about it, half the nameless SEALS were quite bad. Very corny, over-the-top, dripping in stereotypical characters. The Lieutenant was calling them all "ladies" and shit like that. Hated it. But everybody was so bland and vanilla that I genuinely had a hard time defining who was who. And there was a good helping of some serious cringe served up in this movie with some of the acting. Serious over performing of any emotional moments.

And on a similar tangent, the dialogue / script writing took the night off with this one because tandem with some cringeworthy acting was some cringeworthy dialogue. Especially the cave scene at the end of the first "act", where the new team and the old team spend the night together. There was also a very heavy degree of filler writing going on. So you know those scenes in other movies, that they usually cut out for continuity purposes? Well this entire movie was stitched together with them. More on that shortly, but it served up some completely un-necessary moments that did nothing to develop the plot, or the characters really. Dialogue for dialogues sake.

Which segways us nicely into the production and cinematography as when this movie wasn't wasting our time with un-necessary scenes, it was filling the gap with some b-roll footage. In the first 45 minutes it was wide-pan shots of the "Cretaceous" wilderness and in the last 45 minutes it was widepan shots of the city skyline from the helicopter vantage point. The whole helicopter stuff was a complete dead end actually, a literally just a plot device, I'm convinced, to sandwich in some airborne city footage, because Commander Dorn and the helicopter serve no purpose to the development of the story whatsoever?! That aside, any scenes featuring a dinosaur attack were either played out at 300% speed, or so confusing constructed that it was impossible to decipher what was going on until it had happened. A familiar trope of low budget movies, I know, but it can be done better than this with more attention to detail.

Those mortal, death blows covered, regrettably any scenes that were constructed competently and professionally mostly served no purpose to the movie whatsoever and existed mostly just to boost the run time. The special effects were mostly terrible. The dinosaurs looked incredibly unrealistic, like they were some kind of weird jelly like substance formed into recognizable creatures. And other parts as well; when guns were being fired, the time travel stuff, e.t.c. all just looked very cheap and nasty. I actually recognized some of the sound effects from other low budget movies I've watched. They must all come from the same soundbank... The cinematography was mostly ok really but nothing that I particularly found impressive, and I swear the same song played on loop in the background the entire way through the movie, so much so that I think I just sort of tuned out to it. It's that vanilla "dramatic" orchestral kinda music, you know the type I mean. Everything about this whole thing felt like it was hamfistedly thrown together as cheap and as quick as possible to get it on the shelf in time.

This was roundly bollocks if I'm being honest with you and there is very little you can get from this movie, but just by virtue of the fact that it wasn't as bad as Almighty Thor makes it better than the worst Asylum movie I've ever watched. And in fact in comparison with some of the other rancid, festering turds that I've covered on this blog, it was by a country mile not the worst thing I've ever subjected myself to. But it just didn't really have anything. The dinosaurs looked crap. The acting was crap. The story was crap. But it was just crap. Not so terrible as to be genuinely insulting. But bad enough that it left an empty, rewardless feeling with me as the end credits mercifully started to roll. It's a zero but, y'know not the worse zero, I've genuinely seen much much worse, but regrettably I can't think of anything from this movie that even registers half a point on the board, let alone a whole point really so uh yeah, Zero out of Five I'm afraid.