REVIEW: THE DINOSAUR EXPERIMENT

As the opening credits roll on the film you're about to watch and review, and you find yourself saying, "Well, at least Lorenzo Lamas is in this," you know you're in trouble. If, from the earliest onset, you get a gut feeling that you're about to spend 90 minutes undergoing cinematic mediocrity, and you consider the presence of the guy from "Renegade" to be a positive, well, Jesus.

Jesus Christ.

A group of strangers find themselves all stranded at a road-side diner/gas station (conveniently all within minutes of each other) when the old weird hick guy/scientist who lives in town shits the bed and allows his experimental velociraptors to escape. The strangers must band together to fight off the dinosaurs all whilst trying to stay awake in their own film.

Hold onto your butts.

A horror/comedy hybrid that contains neither horror nor comedy, The Dinosaur Experiment attempts to be a strange assemblage of Jurassic Park, Tremors, The Hangover, and something Roger Corman might have produced in between Ensures. The film features a collection of flat, bored performances meshed with over-the-top, scenery-chewing, kitchen sink performances, all making for a wildly uneven experience. Every line of dialogue designed to elicit a laugh instead induces a groan, and every character archetype is not only present and accounted for, but the subtle approach to their archetypal construction is turned down to negative 11. 

"If you're gonna have a horny frat-boy character, he should be, like, at least twice as horny," this film screamed in my face.

What you've got here, ultimately, are a random hodgepodge of characters, half of them pretty girls clad in the skimpiest costumes possible (but don't worry it makes sense in the context of the film LOL) wandering from one set-piece to the other so their arms/heads/hair can get ripped off. There's even a funny black pimp character, whose every line is automatically funny because he's got a purple suit on and is wearing an obviously fake wig. (He dies on the toilet just like that dude from that other, better movie about dinosaurs made by that guy who produced Real Steal.)

(Oh, and: Spoiler.)

hu·mor ˈ(h)yo͞omər/ - (noun)
1. the quality of being amusing or comic, esp. as expressed in literature or speech.
"his tales are full of humor"

The visual effects are pretty decent, considering the budget on this project was obviously quite low, and I'm actually quite pleased to see an attempt at keeping the under-explored dinosaur horror sub-genre at the very least active. The problem is that's not nearly enough to even so much as recommend this as a one-night rental.

Experience filmmaking 15 minutes in the making: The Dinosaur Experiment.  

But from here it looks like a six-foot turkey.

 

CLOSE CALL

DEMONS

BEAUTIFUL AND RADIANT

My mom had many interesting stories involving paranormal activity, but this one was always the most fascinating.

Her and a girlfriend would always walk to and from school together when they were in high school and they had befriended an old lady who lived on their route. They would help do small chores and the lady would always offer coffee, tea, cookies, crackers etc. Well this one day, they saw her dressed immaculately. She was hanging clothes on one of those clothes line trees (whatever they're called) and my mother decided to help while her friend continued home. My mom would say that she looked beautiful and youthful and would comment but the lady never spoke of the occasion. Finally the women asked my mother to go inside to get something (I don't remember) and when she returned, she was gone. She went back in and saw her son whom she had met from previous visits.

She asked if he had seen how beautiful his mother had looked but the man seemed upset and almost agitated, ignoring my mother and frantically going through the house. My mother, confused, followed the man and asked where the woman was. He had told her that she wasn't there. She said that was impossible because they were just out back helping with the clothes on the line. She described how beautiful and radiant she had looked. Then she described the dress she was wearing. The son's face dropped and then took my mom upstairs.

On the women's bed was the very dress my mom saw her wearing. My mom told the man as such and he explained that she had passed away over night. This is the dress he picked out for the old lady to be buried in.

Story source.

ONLY SLIGHTLY HAUNTED

SMASH

THE MAN IN THE BLACK SUIT

Even before he reached me, I recognized the aroma baking up from the skin under the suit—the smell of burned matches. The smell of sulfur. The man in the black suit was the Devil. He had walked out of the deep woods between Motton and Kashwakamak, and now he was standing here beside me. From the corner of one eye I could see a hand as pale as the hand of a store window dummy. The fingers were hideously long.

He hunkered beside me on his hams, his knees popping just as the knees of any normal man might, but when he moved his hands so they dangled between his knees, I saw that each of those long fingers ended in what was not a fingernail but a long yellow claw.

"You didn’t answer my question, fisherboy," he said in his mellow voice. It was, now that I think of it, like the voice of one of those radio announcers on the big-band shows years later, the ones that would sell Geritol and Serutan and Ovaltine and Dr. Grabow pipes. "Are we well-met?"

"Please don’t hurt me," I whispered, in a voice so low I could barely hear it. I was more afraid than I could ever write down, more afraid than I want to remember... but I do. I do. It never even crossed my mind to hope I was having a dream, although I might have, I suppose, if I had been older. But I wasn’t older; I was nine, and I knew the truth when it squatted down on its hunkers beside me. I knew a hawk from a handsaw, as my father would have said. The man who had come out of the woods on that Saturday afternoon in midsummer was the Devil, and inside the empty holes of his eyes, his brains were burning.