Jurassic Island (2020)

It's April! Which means it's Dinosaur Month on the blog! Why Dinosaur Month? Well because April is my Birthday month, and I really like dinosaurs, so go figure. Bit of a one off, haven't done this before now, but I've got a handful of dino themed movies to watch and I'm looking forward to it! Starting off this evening with Jurassic Island, a 2020 film from The Asylum that at face value looks to be a sort-of quasi rip-off of Jumanji but with dinosaurs and is so obscure it took me 4 or 5 different Googling variations before I discovered it's also known as "The Final Level: Escaping Rancala"... but that doesn't fit with the Dino Month theme so fuck it, it's Jurassic Island here.

The movie begins 10 years ago as young Jake (Cooper Hagen), determined to beat "The Boss" and his/her high scores in a video arcade, suddenly gets sucked into a video game called "Rancala", as his sister grows more and more impatient waiting for him outside. Fast forward to present day and said sister Sarah (Jessica Chancellor) along with 2 other incredibly attractive ladies; Crissy (Emily Sweet) and Rae (Tiana Tuttle) are busy building a retro games themed bar, because if there's one thing I know about retro gaming; it attracts supermodel level attractive ladies... however it transpires both Crissy and Rae were friends of Jakes when they were kids and on the eve of setting up the bar, when they stumble upon the old Rancala game they are suckered in to playing it, after it flashes up an avatar of Jake as "Player 1", and then literally suckered into it when they hit start! Materialising on the beach in sexy beachwear, because this movie knows it's target demographic (to be fair the characters acknowledge the irony of it in the movie...) the girls start Level 1, The Beach, where it immediately begins to rain sharks. Big sharks. A... Sharknado if you will... Running for cover and catching up with a Fisherman, said Fisherman introduces them to "Rancala" and tells them they must travel to the war camp and defeat the superboss before the timer expires or they will be stuck in Rancala forever. Sounds... familiar... He also explains that they have super powers now but only by working together can they hope to overcome the superboss. But before the girls can question the Fisherman any further they are interrupted by a literal tornado of sharks!! And I was only joking earlier... which Crissy defeats using a high-tech looking grenade from her backpack. Boss defeated, the girls go on to Level 2: The Jungle. Now decked out in slightly more... jungle appropriate outfits, they immediately stumble upon a man being held captive by soldiers with guns, for stealing from the King. But the soldiers are distracted when a spider begins to crawl up Crissy's arm and she cries out, causing a fight to break out and Sarah to get separated from the other 2. Stopped in her tracks by a field full of snakes Sarah searches for a way across whilst Crissy and Rae have an emotional moment when Crissy is too scared to cross a bridge over a river full of bloodthirsty piranha, which ends badly when Rae gets snapped up by something with very big jaws causing her to lose an in-game life. Meanwhile Sarah encounters the jungle boss fight - a solider in a... ski mask... I think? And they have a actually semi-decently choreographed fight, ending with the soldier falling into the field of snakes. As Sarah tries to catch up with Crissy and Rae she stumbles into the third level; The Desert, and enjoys another costume change. Half this films budget must have gone on wardrobe... and it's inside the desert that Sarah encounters the first dinosaur in this movie, when something that resembles a Velociraptor attacks her, killing her and costing her an in-game life. Respawning close by she is distracted by a dust cloud that materialises to reveal Crissy and Rae running towards her, like, really quickly. After a bit of slightly un-necessary exposition about Sarah feeling guilty for giving up on looking for Jake, Rae gets shot and eliminated again by a Safari Ranger looking type dude who is this level's boss and after another fight scene, Crissy eliminates him by using a gun herself, but Rae only has the one life left... Moving on to Level 4: The Dark Woods (and three more costume changes between them, but only subtle changes this time) the girls stumble into some weird voodoo camp place complete with a severed shrunken head that looked like Mark Zuckerberg...  inside they are approached by a strange witch kinda figure dressed in black complete with a huge face concealing hood who tells them there is no hope of Jake escaping Rancala and no hope of them escaping, and when Rae tries to challenge the witch she is almost killed, spared only when Crissy takes her place and loses an in-game life. As the witch lumbers away and Crissy rejoins the group, they then face this levels boss; x3 Grim Reapery looking dudes and they work out that the only way to defeat them is to work together. Making their way to the War Camp, after another costume change which by my count is the... 5th?... 6th?... one by this point, the girls get their first sight of Jake (Brandon Root) who appears to be a captive of the King. Making their way into the camp, Sarah approaches Jake but he is hostile, claiming that in Rancala he has everything he could ever want and he has no memory of them. And when he takes Sarah captive, the other girls try to fight back but with no success, and Sarah is accidentally sedated by Crissy causing her to pass out. Waking up Sarah finds herself and the girls captives of the King (Taylor Behrens) and after Jake displays having no memory of his life before the game and refuses to believe Sarah is his sister, the King orders them to be taken away and held captive until their time expires. Inside captivity the girls opine that maybe the King is more like them, and not controlled by the game, when they are interrupted by an lady (Bai Ling) who has been trapped in the game so long she doesn't remember her name anymore. She explains that the King arrived in Rancala just like them and was able to defeat the superboss, seize control of Rancala and end the countdown for himself. She also explains that both herself and Jake challenged the King before now and lost meaning they are trapped in Rancala forever and that the same will happen to them if they lose. Before she can overact her way through any more scenes though, she is dragged away by soldiers, and the girls make the decision that Sarah will challenge the King. Approaching the King the girls first have to fight their way through all his minions first, as is the standard in any video game... obviously... but once that mild inconvenience is out of the way, the girls face up to the boss and after an impassioned speech by all three, Jake remembers who he is and who they are and joins them. But the heartfelt reunion is short lived as they are interrupted by the King who reminds them, that in order to escape they need to defeat him as the current superboss. And despite protestations from the girls, Jake approaches to challenge the King individually, because he has seemingly learned nothing... however this time around Jake is able to beat the King, but even after doing so, the portal to return home doesn't appear. Whilst the others try to figure out why they can't get home, the King is revived and is outraged that the portal hasn't appeared, seemingly wanting to get home himself, and the girls figure out that they have to fight the King collectively at his full power in order to make the portal appear. Collectively trying their best to fight against the King and defeat a rampaging rhinoceros at the same time, the King eventually gets the upper hand but just as they are on the verge of losing, Sarah uses her power to summon the survivor from earlier (Bai Ling's unnamed character) who joins the fight and working together the 5 are able to overcome the King and win. As the portal appears and they all prepare to escape, the survivor pledges that she will stay behind and rule Rancala justly. Returning to present day, real world, the girls are reunited, but Jake isn't with them. Discovering two young boys just around the corner playing on an arcade machine, Jake, who is now young again, reveals he brought the King with him who's real name is Martin (Austin Skaggs) who apologises for nearly killing them, and as everyone has a nice reunion, Crissy and Rae almost share a kiss for... some reason... until Martin interrupts them. In the closing scenes, Rancala has been powered off and marked as out of order and a post credits scene shows the Survivor dressed in the kings clothes, looking menacing.

Well Dinosaur Month has fallen at the first hurdle because despite advertising itself as "Jurassic Island" this film featured a grand total of 2 dinosaurs. 2. And to be fair that could have been the same one twice. So it's a fail there. And to be honest, this wasn't a great movie. I mean, it was ok, I was at least kept mostly entertained throughout the whole film but there was some really cringey, corny moments, and some pretty embarrassing performances that it got kinda difficult to not shake the nagging feeling in the back of your mind that you were watching a really awful movie. 

But to it's credit, the x3 girls were decent, if not a little out of their depth in some of the scenes, although it was difficult to cast off the notion that a good majority of the reason they were cast was for how attractive they were, and I was distracted by Jessica Chancellor for most of the movie to be honest... but that's not to say they were just eye candy and nothing else, cos they weren't. They were decent here. Called upon to act tough and fight, called upon to get deep and meaningful, called upon to respond to genuine peril and apart from some ropey moments, they were mostly alright. Not helped by some seriously cringeworthy dialogue and some serious cringeworthy direction.

Aside from that the standard of acting elsewhere was a little thin on the ground, Brandon Root as older Jake was mostly alright, although he didn't quite convince me as the loyal henchmen, everybody else sorta felt like they were trying far too hard and overacting far too much that it really exposed the movie for it's low budget B-movie status, although I say low budget, these recent Asylum flicks have budgets rivalling some Hollywood studios nowadays! So they're hardly low budget! But the level of acting here was pretty much sub-par not including the x3 main leading ladies and Bai Ling in particular was bordering on painful and embarrassing to watch.

A disappointing lack of dinosaurs though. I touched on it earlier I know, but the whole point of this, for me, going in was that it was supposed to be a dinosaur flick and there was... 1, maybe 2? Jurassic Island is misleading with the best intentions. And the dinosaur that did feature you didn't really ever get a good look at. By about 45 minutes in it suddenly dawned on me that that was it, there wasn't going to be any dinosaurs and that made me sad. If you're going to promise me dinosaurs and then not deliver me dinosaurs you aren't going to score highly here. Dino score: 0 out of 5.

Yes that screenshot was the best I could do... That crippling disappointment explored, cinematography wise the movie had it's fair share of nice, interesting shots, they particularly made sure to get a nice handful of cleavage shots in the movie, well done lads, but that accounted for, it was shot professionally. The fight scenes in particular were decent enough when I've seen them cheapened out before and they actually looked like fight scenes. Special effects wise too, the movie was mostly fine. There was something just not quite perfect about the CGI sharks, the CGI dinosaur, the CGI rhino, that meant you could tell they were computer graphics, but they looked mostly good enough so fair enough. The problem here however was that they weren't low budget and lo-fi enough to be charming but not professional and high budget enough to compete with studio movies so it was kinda none of the benefits of either really.

Storyline-wise though, I was mostly impressed. They had a story: Sarah wanted to find Jake, Jake is trapped in the video game, let's explore the game and rescue him, and they played it out. And it was entertaining. It did feel a bit rushed, like the characters were not really developed and by about 50 minutes in we were already approaching the natural conclusion of the movie with half hour to spare, but there was a structure here and the movie worked it's way through that structure and it was entertaining as a result. Some of the emotional scenes I could have done without as I felt they didn't really develop the story and just hammed up the B-movie nature of the whole thing. If they had dialled that in or made them less emotionally over-the-top I think it would have helped.

Ultimately though, I was disappointed here, even despite discovering that Jessica Chancellor is ridiculously attractive, but you promised me dinosaurs with your title, movie; Jurassic Island, and you didn't deliver me dinosaurs. No, that one Velociraptor moment doesn't count. And this movie had far too much in common with Jumanji to set itself apart as a stand alone flick. Even if the plot and the story was engaging enough. It was decent, it was ok, the girls were fine, but there was a real pungent stench of this being nothing more than a mockbuster and a bad movie that hung around throughout the entire thing and was difficult to shake. I don't feel like this was unenjoyable as such, but it's certainly not a movie I could see myself ever wanting to watch again. Even just for Jessica Chancellor to be honest (sorry Jessica). 1 out of 5.