Originally titled Triassic Hunt (seriously, how did anyone think that was a good idea?), Triassic Squad isn’t just scraping the bottom of the barrel as a dinosaur film, it’s also digging deep into the very crust of the Earth as a feature film. Inexcusably, shamefully rotten, Triassic Squad is another project from the increasingly-lamentable Asylum Studios, purveyors of grotesque genre rip-offs for the Syfy Channel – who really should know better by now.
Dreadful by any reasonable critical measure, Triassic Squad asks us to give a flying pterodactyl about a bunch of mercenaries stuck in a containment facility where a couple of rogue allosaurs are on the loose. We’re initially led to believe that they’ve broken free but our luckless heroes are actually inadvertent pawns in a demonstration of the raw power of these poorly-realised prehistoric parodies by a boo-hiss business magnate who plans to sell them to foreign powers to use as instruments of warfare. Oh, the inhumanity!
If you’re in the mood for some state-of-the-art visual effects, a subtle, nuanced script populated by believable, fully-rounded and believably-motivated characters and off-the-scale performances by a stellar cast at the top of its game then… you need to look almost anywhere else because Triassic Squad is a shocking disaster from start to finish. This stuff looks hideously cheap even by Asylum standards, a horrible knock-off presumably knocked out over a weekend in an abandoned warehouse somewhere and with laughable special effects and ‘actors’ presumably dragged in off the street and forced into ill-fitting costumes. The dinosaurs look terrible; not for an instant do they look as if they are actually interacting with what we might call the ‘human cast’ and for a film that predicates itself on the ruthless carnivorous natures of Earth’s most formidable killing machines, the film is quite coy in showing any actual monster munching save a few risible splatterings of CGI blood when someone falls headfirst into the mouth of a dinosaur.
Irredeemably ghastly, Triassic Squad is film to avoid at any and all costs. Even the most undiscerning monster maniac will find nothing of any interest in this howler that’s about as welcome as a delivery of a ton of 65 million year old dinosaur guano.
