You see a title like The Jurassic Dead and several emotions take you over. Deep down, you want it to be awesome, to kick Spielberg’s a*s and send the Jurassic Park series screaming into the jungle like a scared little kid. Reality, of course, takes hold and you hope that this independent feature will have something great to offer despite its limited budget. If it’s bad, you want it to be really bad, like The Room bad, so you can get your friends to come over and have a party. The last thing you want is for it to be so bad it’s just boring, but unfortunately, that’s what you get.
The script is a mess. First, we get not one, but two, prologs, and the second seems to take place before the first. Here, we see the backstory of Dr. Wojick Borge (Cooper Hoag), who created his creatures to take revenge on those who misunderstood and ostracized him. Then there’s some introductory narration that would have fit better at the very beginning but it’s here for some reason and now the main story starts. A group of bland, generic action movie mercenaries runs into a group of stereotypical kids in the desert and they all find themselves stuck in a secret compound where Dr. Borge, who now looks like a cross between Darth Vader and The Emperor from Return of the Jedi, has been creating his zombie dinosaurs. Predictably, people die and there’s some sort of a showdown, but at this point, you’ve lost interest and instead you’re looking up everyone involved in the movie because you’re seriously wondering who the hell thought this was a good idea.
“…a cross between Darth Vader and The Emperor has been creating his zombie dinosaurs.”
One-dimensional characters can be forgiven, but when combined with sub-porn-level acting and a script with the depth of a 16-bit video game, they become annoying, unlikeable nuisances, e.g., everybody in this film. There isn’t a single character you can get behind, which begs the question, “Why bother?”
It took two people to direct this schlock, by the way. Apparently, the main director Milko Davis sees himself as an auteur of badass SyFy Channel-inspired hybrids with titles like Tsunambee and Merwitches under his belt. Unfortunately, he’s left out everything that makes the Sharknado series appealing. Co-director Thomas Martwick has credits on a few of Davis’ efforts.
All this film has going for it is the special effects. Despite the limited budget, the dinosaurs look pretty damn good. Unfortunately, everything that happens around them is unwatchable.
It takes a special kind of ineptitude to make zombie dinosaurs uninteresting. Sadly, great concepts do not make a good film. You won’t miss anything if you skip this one. Really.
The Jurassic Dead. Directed by Milko Davis and Thomas Martwick. Written by Michele Pacitto and Milko Davis. Starring Cooper Hoag, Ben Johnson, Mia Klosterman, Adam Singer, Ruselis Aumeen Perry, Andy Haman, Raquel “Rocky” Pennington, Shale Le Page and Nicole Goeke.
3 out of 10 stars
Jurassic dead was one dumb movie if there was a minus rating I would have to rate it – 20
This movie has been removed from digital platforms due to copyright issues from the authors.
What is the song at the end