Thursday, June 08, 2017

Movie review - "Dinosaur Island" (1994) **1/2

Great fun from Jim Wynorski and Fred Olen Ray, two very much kindred spirits whose careers have so many similarities. They directed this enjoyable pastiche of 50s American-men-crash-on-all-female-island movies - with the additional twist of the island containing dinosaurs.

I wish there had been more dinosaur action because the stuff of the soldiers blasting machine guns at them is entertaining - I assume this was budget. There are however plenty of cave girls, who are sometimes topless... the thing that brings this into the 90s. The style of acting and dialogue and stories are all very 1950s.

This starts off well with the very overweight soldiers crashing on the island and battling stop motion and puppet creatures, and meeting the cave girls. Some of the wisecracking of the soldiers may put viewers off; personally I preferred the straight acting of Ross Hagen, as the senior soldier.

The two main flaws of this film I felt were the fact that, after a flying start, the story got bogged down. It was a lot of hanging around the girls, and repetitive romance/sex stories, instead of building momentum. Secondly, the humans were quite mean to the dinosaurs, taking their eggs and being a nuisance - I felt sympathetic to them.

But I totally got where Wynorski and Ray were coming from and it's a high spirited fun movie. Roger Corman helped finance it.

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