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.
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
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
The seventh of the Jurassic Park/World films, this receives a creative shot in the arm from Gareth Edwards, director of Monsters and The Creator
A unique experimental film from Robert Zemeckis where the camera sits in a single spot in a room and tells is story, covers across history from the dinosaurs to the present day. Based on an acclaimed graphic novel
A follow-up to Godzilla vs Kong, this tries to offer more of the same but suffers another ridiculous script. This ended up being overshadowed by the acclaim that the Japanese-made Godzilla: Minus One received
The third and final part of the adaptation of DC Comics’ classic title Crisis on Infinite Earths featuring an epic battle to prevent the destruction of the multiverse
This tries to go one up on Sharknado and offers a tornado made up of assorted animals and prehistoric life. A completely ridiculous film from prolific British producer Scott Jeffrey
The sequel to the Jason Statham starring killer shark film, bigger and more over the top than before. The surprise is seeing cult director Ben Wheatley turning to making a big, dumb film
Another killer shark survival piece with a family trapped aboard an abandoned oil rig under attack by a megalodon shark that may be the embodiment of an Aztec god
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
This seemed to have a lot of promise in its set-up of Adam Driver crashlanded in Earth’s prehistoric past fighting off dinosaurs
This was the sixth film in the Jurassic Park/World franchise and offers very much a return to the familiar. It at least also shakes several familiar things up
One of fantastic cinema’s great titles bouts is a spectacular effects show. At the same time, it also has one of the single most ridiculous script I have ever come across in the entire time I have been running this site
Film from The Asylum about dinosaurs hunting mercenaries. Essentially Jurassic Park that takes place in a warehouse
This gets you watching with its deliberately ridiculous title but once you do, you soon wish you hadn’t. Winner of this site’s Worst Film of 2021.
A head-scratching oddity from the people behind Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey with people enter in a reality tv show where they are hunted by dinosaurs within the confines of a hotel
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
Timo Vuorensola’s follow-up to Iron Sky. It is hard to believe that a film with a premise that combines Nazis on the Moon with alien lizard people from the hollow core of the Earth could go wrong
Sequel to The Lego Movie. This time the idea of the Lego universe, the crossovers and fourth-wall breaking gags are not as fresh but this still gets good mileage out of them
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
Rather good British-made low-budget take on Jurassic Park, which conducts its variation with an undeniable sense of humour. One of the better films from low-budget director Andrew Jones
Sequel to the hit Korean film Along With the Gods: The Two Worlds about a journey of redemption through the afterlife. This is a much better polished effort than its predecessor
Fifth of the Jurassic Park films. Industrial Light and Magic do their usual excellent job but this time the film is just recycling the same thing as before with minimal change
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.
The sixth of the Sharknado films, this has the usual crew fighting sharknados throughout history. With this comes the recognition there is nowhere more ridiculous and over-the-top for the series to go
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
The Asylum offer up their own mockbuster copy of the Jurassic World films, an amiable children’s film where a young boy hatches a dinosaur egg he finds
I hate the Ice Age films and their tediously extruded adventures. The opening sequence here and its ignorance of even basic science is the most inane thing in the entire series
Despite the disappointment that it is not a Western but set modern-day. This enlivens a formula plot quite well and provides dinosaur effects that range between the surprisingly good and the occasionally ropy
Pixar have never been the same since they slipped into the easy familiarity of sequelitis. This is essentially a boy and his dog story but played out with a dinosaur and a caveboy, but also an alternate history tale
After two ho-hum sequels, this finally delivers a solid follow-up to Jurassic Park. Rather than more scenes with dinosaurs chasing people, this comes with some fascinating ideas about seeing the park in operation
The incomprehensibly manic antics of the Minions have a cuteness appeal that has overspilled the Despicable Me films and seemed like it is in danger of taking over pop culture in the last couple of years; here they get a film all to themselves with amiably lightweight results
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 third entry in a franchise that seems to be stretching to find anything to do with its premise beyond the first film. Everyone involved seems to have only turned up to collect a paycheque and be going through the motions in a show that entirely coasts by solely on your familiarity with the characters
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
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
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
A modestly effective Jurassic Park copy from The Asylum with genetically-revived dinosaurs loose in L.A. and featuring better than usual effects
A killer shark film concerning a prehistoric megalodon prowling the waters of a lake. This once had the distinction of being the lowest rated film on the IMDB
Found Footage film as survivors from a commercial airliner that has crashed on a top secret government test site find themselves hunted by mysterious creatures
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
The first sequel to The Asylum’s Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus and marginally a better film. This is less sparing with the cheap effects, while in every other regard it plants tongue-in-cheek and tries to make a virtue out of the sheer ridiculousness of the action
Luc Besson adapts a French comic-book – sort of a female version of Tintin – with uneven but generally amiable regard. The result is somewhere between an Indiana Jones adventure and the quirkness of an Amelie
From prolific B-budget director Fred Olen Ray, this is a softcore parody of the Indiana Jones films
A compilation of shorts from anime directors set in the Halo videogame universe. The first two episodes have a breathtaking scale but the others are bitsy stories but nothing standout
The Asylum’s first venture into the gonzo shark movie that would spin off a series of sequels and culminate in the Sharknado phenomenon. Despite one of the great attention grabbing titles of all time, this is an unmemorable affair
Sequel to the Ben Stiller hit offers more of the same with a bigger museum and more exhibits come to life but little else
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
A low-budget modernised version of the Edgar Rice Burroughs book about a group ending up on a lost island where dinosaurs still roam. Slightly better than usual for The Asylum
Big screen revival of the children’s lost world tv series that is now a loud and excruciating Will Ferrell vehicle that reduces the original into lowbrow farce. A majorly unfunny bomb on every level
Another of Blue Sky Studios’ interminable animated sequels to its likeable original about prehistoric talking animals. This has little substance beyond a kinetic rush from one gag to the next
This offers the novelty of a Loch Ness monster film that takes place in Canada! This is otherwise a routine monster of the era made for the Syfy Channel
An Asylum mockbuster released at the same time as Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 B.C., this involves time travel mission into the prehistoric past that accidentally brings a dinosaur back to the present
Animated Justice League film, which adapts a comic-book storyline that reconceived the various DC superheroes as they were back in the era of their original creation
Animated adaption of the comic-book about a Native American warrior stranded in a prehistoric lost world
A mockbusters from The Asylum made to coincide with the big-budget Brendan Fraser film. Resemblance to the Jules Verne book fairly much ends at the title
This family friendly adaptation of the classic Jules Verne novel was made to highlight the 3D process and throws most of the book out to essentially become Jules Verne the theme park ride
One of the more enjoyable efforts from the mid-2000s dead zone where Disney animation with filled with ideas that left-you scratching your head, this quickly gets demented and emerges like The Jetsons colliding with The Royal Tenenbaums
This comes with an intriguingly original concept – that Spanish Conquistador Hernan Cortes during his conquest of Mexico came up against dinosaurs
Popular family hit with Ben Stiller as a night watchman at New York’s Museum of Natural History who discovers that the exhibits come to life at night. More a cute idea than a full film, there is some fun to the characters and effects
Peter Jackson’s dream project, a remake of the 1933 film, and his finest work as a filmmaker. Jackson builds the original out considerably and his command of the effects gives us something quite dazzling
Reasonable low-budget revived dinosaur film with not bad CGI effects and an often witty, genre savvy script
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
Adaptation of a classic British children’s book made by Jim Henson Productions where children discover a sand fairy that grants wishes. The film is largely centered around creating slapstick chaos
Superlative film that recreates an imagined world of 1930s retro sf filled with flyer heroes, giant robots and stunning Art Deco designs.
John Barrowman fights a giant prehistoric shark in a film that gained a certain reputation as a Bad Movie
A TV mini-series based on the popular illustrated books by James Gurney about the discovery of a lost land where dinosaurs have evolved into their own civilisation
Steven Spielberg handed the directorial reins of the series over to Joe Johnston and this emerges as a better film than The Lost World was, even if it is only ever arranged around a series of effects set-pieces
A TV mini-series adaptation of the Arthur Conan Doyle lost world story, this has been produced by the BBC as a glorious period adventure with CGI dinosaurs
Sequel to the live-action The Flintstones film. Whether we asked for it or not, this offers up a Flintstones origin story where we see familiar elements of the series fall into place
The first full computer animated film from Disney. It feels like someone decided to give the Jurassic Park dinosaurs their own film, mixed up with the plot of The Land Before Time
Hallmark TV mini-series version of the Jules Verne novel that keeps faith to the book for the most part before heading off on some colourfully exotic adventures
The fifth of The Land Before Time animated films about talking dinosaurs, all having been made for very young children
The first sequel to the massive success of Jurassic Park where Steven Spielberg returns to direct with a script that seems a mishmash of loose ends that only weakly rehashes the original
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!
This was the second and weakest of the Josh Kirby juvenile time travel adventures that takes the young hero and companions to a future where they are enslaved by giants
This was the first and one of the weaker of the generally quite likeable films from Charles Band about the time-travelling adventures of a juvenile hero
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
The fourth of The Land Before Time animated films about talking dinosaurs, having been made for very young children
Third of The Land Before Time animated films about talking dinosaurs, made for very young children
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
A collaboration between B-budget hacks Fred Olen Ray and Jim Wynorski. Made not long after Jurassic Park, the two have simply made one of their usual softcore T&A films and slapped the word dinosaur on it
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 first in what later became a fad for replicating cartoon tv series as big-budget live-action films, this does an exacting live-action version of the Hanna-Barbera series
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
An enormous hit for Steven Spielberg who took new emergent CGI technologies and wowed audiences with dinosaurs brought to life in dazzlingly realistic detail. It doesn’t hurt that he delivers a relentlessly suspenseful film too
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
A Roger Corman produced cheapie about genetically engineered dinosaurs that was quickly rushed out to exploit the success of Jurassic Park. Corman went on to make two sequels
Juvenile animated film from Amblin Entertainment concerning dinosaurs whose intelligence is raised to human level and they are let loose in the present-day
One of the better films from Charles Band – an uncredited homage to Marvel’s Dr Strange. The film captures a wonderful atmosphere of esotericism and Jeffrey Combs is perfect as the sorcerer superhero
Feeble and shabbily made kid’s film in which children are transported inside the world of their favourite dinosaur tv show. Featuring some terrible dinosaur effects
The eighteenth Godzilla film and one of the best of the modern era. This has the most conceptually audacious plot of any Godzilla film and overflows with wild ideas involving time travel and changing the timeline
Despite one of the great exploitation titles of all time, this bikini clad babes vs dinosaurs after the apocalypse effort lacks the cheerful cynicism of other Troma films and is just cheap, dull and unwatchable on almost every level
Likeable but lightweight talking dinosaur film. This aims to be a prehistoric Bambi but never quite finds the depth. A large number of video-released sequels followed
The first sequel to House, this is largely unrelated to its predecessor and plays itself with a sense of humour to emerge as the superior film. Now a skull opens doorways in the house into different eras
Disney film about a group of teens who find that heart of a UFO that opens up a time warp at their high school
Disney family film about an expedition to Africa to find a dinosaur. This was made before Jurassic Park and so the effects are physical and variable but the film has an undeniable tenderness
A bizarre Italian film that recounts the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and then follows on from their banishment from Eden and into the wilderness where they encounter dinosaurs, cavemen and wild beasts
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
A comedy spoof of One Million Years B.C. and the whole sub-genre of caveman vs dinosaurs films This proves amiably goofy where Ringo Starr seems perfectly cast as the lead caveman