The publicity image for this catastrophically bad film boasts a striking illustration of a giant, roaring Tyrannosaurus rex under attack from fearsome gun-blazing soldiers. Forget about it. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the sequence to appear in the film should you be foolhardy enough to spend your hard earned currency on it. The best you’ll get is a couple of hopelessly feeble scenes of a ridiculous quarter-sized Tyrannosaur costume (nothing as lavish as CGI in this buttons budgeted effort) lurching about in a badly-lit room roaring and flailing its little limbs around like a toddler in fancy dress. Welcome to The Jurassic Dead; watch it at your peril and you’ll wish you’d never been born.
Dr Wojik Borge (Elliott) is a man with a grudge. Fired from his job as a college science professor (at the sort of college which would employ a Grant Mitchell look-a-like as a science professor) he’s somewhat cheesed off because no-one will take his reanimation theories seriously. At one point he reanimates a dead cat. Unfortunately, it looks a little bit like Stouffer from TV’s Harry Hill Show, but undeterred, he presses on and discovers that he has the ability to reanimate a dinosaur! Even better, as the creature is, strictly speaking, undead, its victims also reanimate as the living dead! It’s what we’ve all been crying out for – a zombie/dinosaur mash-up! Meanwhile, an asteroid hits the Earth, creating a debilitating electromagnetic pulse that forces a gang of irritating whiny teens travelling across the desert to abandon their stricken vehicle and make their way to a nearby mysterious silo which is also being infiltrated by a Duke Nuke ‘Em doppelganger (to be fair, the film acknowledges the resemblance) and his gang of mercenaries for reasons far too pointless to worth recalling here. Barmy Borge plans to toxify the entire world and the kids and the mercenaries find themselves reluctantly working together to stay alive and stop the baldy baddy wreaking his terrible carnage across the planet.
The Jurassic Dead is far more woeful than we could ever reasonably manage to describe. It’s thunderingly inept in every possible department; the script is pretty atrocious (although the snippy interaction amongst the teens has a certain grating believability to it), the acting often painful and the visual effects rarely better than eye-wateringly laughable. It’s an awful, pitiful film and yet it’s marginally more accomplished than Tsunambee, the director’s previous wretched effort. Even lovers of truly terrible cinema will find their patience exasperated by this dreadful, largely clueless abomination. For the love of God, give this one the swerviest of swerves if you even begin to value your sanity.
THE JURASSIC DEAD / CERT: TBC / DIRECTORS: MILKO DAVIS, THOMAS MARTWICK / SCREENPLAY: MICHELE PACITTO, MILKO DAVIS / STARRING: COOPER ELLIOTT, BEN JOHNSON, MIA KLOSTERMAN, ADAM SINGER, RAQUEL PENNINGTON / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
