Engineer Bart and his team are triggering underwater explosions along the coast of a Caribbean island to clear the seafloor to build a harbor. Accidentally, they stumble upon a frozen Brontosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus Rex in the sea and pull them out on the shore. Bad idea: a lightning bolt hits and awakens said dinosaurs, and they now roam the island. A Neanderthal is also awakened and becomes friends with kid Julio. The local 'island master' Hacker wants to kidnap the caveman and sell him to an exhibition. The Brontosaurus sinks in quicksand; the caveman dies by holding up the beam of a collapsing mine while Julio and Betty, Bart's girlfriend, escape. Bart uses an excavator to push the T. Rex into the sea.
"Dinosaurus!" once again proves that there are so few dinosaur movies, and even fewer of them that are good. A silly oddity, Irvin Yeaworth's film is a harmless 'guilty pleasure' that indulges the human fascination with giant monsters, but it aligns with one unwritten rule: in these kind of movies, human characters are often bland and boring, while only the scarcely shown dinosaurs are interesting. Indeed, already in the opening, the viewers sense that the main (human) protagonists are not only one-dimensional, but also wooden and stiff: engineer Bart and his team are launching underwater explosions off the coast, while Betty for some reason is heading with her boat right towards them, even though they are waving a red flag to not go near them. Didn't she hear all those explosions just a minute ago? Why didn't they close the coastline around them while they are blowing up the seafloor? When Bart arrives with his boat towards her, she suddenly starts taking her clothes off, revealing a swimsuit, saying: "I'm going down to Davy Jones' locker for my mother's portable icebox, in which I had stashed all sorts of goodies for you guys to eat, and which I intend to eat whether you're hungry or not." Whoever wrote this dialogue needs to have it read back to him. Would a woman really dive deep into the sea to get food from a sunk refrigerator on the seafloor? Is she that hungry? How about going to a supermarket? The rest of the movie is equally as strained and illogical, but the dinosaur sequences, created thanks to stop-motion animation, are a bit better. At 28 minutes into the film, there is an elegant camera pan from the head of a lying Brontosaurus up to his tale, which moves. The battle between the T. Rex and Bart operating the excavator is solid, a forerunner to Cameron's battle between the Alien Queen and an exoskeleton in "Aliens", whereas the comical moments involving the caveman are at least partially amusing: for instance, the caveman sees food on a table through the window, but is surprised that he cannot touch it because of glass, and when a woman with a wacky facial mask sees him, they are both scared from each other and run away.
Grade:+
No comments:
Post a Comment