The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Dinosaurs refers to any of an extinct species of reptiles. Dinosaurs emerged on the Earth in the prehistoric past some 230-240 billion years ago and were killed off 64 million years ago.
There has been a great fascination with dinosaurs since the days of silent cinema. They are frequently found in Films About Lost Worlds – some undiscovered pocket of the world where prehistoric life still lives. There is also the recurrent popularity of anthropologically absurd prehistoric adventures where cavemen are seen fighting dinosaurs.
The 1950s gave us the atomically revived dinosaurs beginning with The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). The genre underwent a revival during the 1990s with the massive success of Jurassic Park (1993) and its revival of dinosaurs by genetic-engineering and their bringing to life with CGI effects.
There have also been a variety of animated and children’s dinosaur films or else comedy takes such as the various incarnations of The Flintstones. There are even a number of Alternate History Films where the dinosaurs have not died off.
As formula monster movies go, this stands out from the rest – it takes itself seriously, has a better budget than usual, which allows some luxurious location shooting in Belize, and a better standard of effects
Laughable prehistoric drama about cave women searching for mates – too cheap to afford stop-motion animated dinosaurs and filled with ridiculous dialogue howlers
In the aftermath of the success of Jurassic Park, Albert and Charles Band quickly responded with this children’s dinosaur film that contains some of the most pitiful effects in any film of this era
The second and worst of Albert and Charles Band’s dinosaur films made for children, this suffers from the most pitiful and immobile effects of any film of the era
The third and probably the best of the children’s dinosaur films from Charles Band where the pitiful effects are at least compensated for by an eccentric sense of humour
A surprisingly good animated film about the relationship between a caveman and a dinosaur, all without a line of dialogue. From the director of the Hotel Transylvania films
Essentially Platoon meets Jurassic Park. A surprisingly watchable film that places a unit of soldiers in the midst of the Vietnam War up against dinosaurs where things get bloody and ferocious
Reasonable low-budget revived dinosaur film with not bad CGI effects and an often witty, genre savvy script
A spectacularly terrible film. Designed to exploit the 1976 remake, this offers up a sex-reversed parody of King Kong – only the Kong producers didn’t see that way and sued to stop the film being released. Robin Askwith, the star of the softcore Confessions films, engages in a romance with a female Kong amid excruciating puns
A Japanese-made variant on the dream incursion theme of Inception. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is noted for his bafflingly surrealistic horror films but in working in a genre like science-fiction that requires an implied explainability, he makes a far less interesting film
Incredibly shabbily made Danish copy of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms about a dinosaur revived in Copenhagen
John Barrowman fights a giant prehistoric shark in a film that gained a certain reputation as a Bad Movie
A mockbuster take on Sherlock Holmes from The Asylum released the same time as the Guy Ritchie-Robert Downey Jr film. Ben Syder makes for a neurotically subdued Holmes but the film takes a leap off into demented Steampunk territory to emerge as one of The Asylum’s better offerings
This seemed to have a lot of promise in its set-up of Adam Driver crashlanded in Earth’s prehistoric past fighting off dinosaurs
Superlative film that recreates an imagined world of 1930s retro sf filled with flyer heroes, giant robots and stunning Art Deco designs.
The 1933 King Kong is a landmark classic Yhis sequel was quickly produced soon after its success,. While the original created a monster movie fairytale, this plays everything for maximum cuteness – it is essentially King Kong mounted as a children’s film
Adaptation of the classic Ray Bradbury time travel story is overblown as a ridiculous big-budget film filled with bad science where the original point of the story disappears in a script that makes no sense
The animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse proved an unexpected success. This sequel builds on that ups the artistic quality of the original to something quite extraordinary
Modestly effective Soviet SF film about an expedition to Venus where the cosmonauts encounter a wild and colourful planet of plants and prehistoric wildlife
The first film to be adapted from a videogame and inauspiciously one of the worst. This is a film made on a decent budget that seems to have set out to be as stupid and brainless as possible
Sequel to the animated The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which was the second highest grossing film of 2023. From the people behind the Despicable Me films, this exists as little more than eye candy for five-year-olds
One of the films that came out in the aftermath of Jurassic Park, notable only for the absurdity of its premise wherein teen Paul Walker’s brain is transplanted into an animatronic dinosaur body and he struggles to reconnect with girlfriend Denise Richards
Roger Corman film that sets out to exploit the teenage themed fad of the late 1950s, offering up a caveman drama that comes with a surprise SF twist
The fifteenth Godzilla film, the last of the classic series, featuring a return of Mechagodzilla from the previous film. Original director Ishiro Honda returns to the series and reclaims it from the juvenile focus it had taken over the last few films to make the best entry of the 1970s
Disastrous flop that tries to do a Lethal Weapon buddy cop film by way of Jurassic Park and gives us a film about a cop with a dinosaur partner!
Are there any new creative directions that Michael Bay feels he he has to explore for a fourth Transformers film? All the Transformers beating the crap out of each other and copious mass destruction has become hard to tell one of the films from each other
The fifth of Michael Bay’s Transformers films. This comes with more of an outright comedy focus than any of the other films where Bay seems to be second-guessing his critics and spoofing his own peccadilloes in quote marks, only to produce the silliest entry in the series yet
Terrence Malick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, maybe the best work yet about the great Lost American Childhood yet – a film that doesn’t seem to be about anything but has far more to say than almost all other multiplex films
Film from The Asylum about dinosaurs hunting mercenaries. Essentially Jurassic Park that takes place in a warehouse
A mockbuster from The Asylum that was designed to capitalise on the release of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, this is a low-budget CGI dinosaur film that is slightly better than most
Animated adaption of the comic-book about a Native American warrior stranded in a prehistoric lost world
This comes with an intriguingly original concept – that Spanish Conquistador Hernan Cortes during his conquest of Mexico came up against dinosaurs
Routine B-budget lost world fantasy with a group of explorers stranded on an island filled with dinosaurs
Ray Harryhausen film featuring cowboys roping dinosaurs. The plot rehashes King Kong but with a dinosaur instead of an ape however it is Harryhausen’s amazing stop-motion animation effects that make the film watchable
Among the 1950s/60s spate of Jules Verne films, this was an adaptation of one of Vernr’s lesser-known works Hector Servadac/Off on a Comet. That said, all the but the notion of people swept up on a comet is thrown out and the rest played as a prehistoric lost world adventure
Inspired by an autoccorrect error, this is deliberately ridiculous film about a priest who transforms into a dinosaur to fight evil, A film made with a full awareness of its own absurdities where the ineptitude of the shoestring effects adds to the charm.
Another Roger Corman film made up out of footage recycled from Russian SF films and pseudnonymously directed by a young Peter Bogdanovich in a rather silly plot about astronauts encountering dinosaur-worshipping women on Venus
Roger Corman had a good deal of success in the 1960s by buying up footage from Soviet SF films, shooting English language inserts and reissuing them. Bar a handful of scenes with some Hollywood actors, this is almost the whole of the Russian film Storm Planet
Walking With Dinosaurs was an amazing documentary series that recreated prehistoric life with CGI animation. By contrast. the film spinoff is a cutsie animated film with talking dinosaurs. It is a film that is killed by the decision to let the dinosaurs talk with smartass one-liners and contemporary in-jokes
Juvenile animated film from Amblin Entertainment concerning dinosaurs whose intelligence is raised to human level and they are let loose in the present-day
After the success of their earlier caveman vs stop-motion animated dinosaurs epic One Million Years B.C., Hammer made several other prehistoric films, including this effort that purportedly had a script by an uncredited J.G. Ballard
Likeable puppet animated film about a time-travelling boy and his monkey companion
Italian cheapie that has become regarded as a bad movie classic. This starts out as a Conan the Barbarian ripoff before, in a twist lifted from Teenage Caveman, we learn we are in a post-apocalyptic future