A Prehistoric Mockbuster

Film rental service Netflix offers dinosaur lovers a plethora of choices from animated to animatronic, from classic to laughable. I keep my Netflix queue loaded with random dinosaur films. I try to watch the movies that are important to the cannon of dinosaur films – from early contributions such as The Lost World and King Dinosaur to films that altered the genre like The Jurassic Park series. I also add kid’s films like Land Before Time or We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story. Some of these films are amazing, and some are not – but that’s why I like to see them all.  I’m interested in how these films reflect culture, science and other films.

In my mailbox last week I found a movie called 100 Million BC and did not instantly recognize what it was.  The envelope revealed that the 2008 film was made by The Asylum, a production company known for their “mockbusters” – low-budget action films with poor acting and dialogue, often named similarly to recently released films, ostensibly to capitalize on their popularity. Whether I Netflixed it with that knowledge or not didn’t matter. I was excited to check it out.

The movie actually has a couple redeeming factors – it’s fast moving and fun, with a premise based on time travel (it’s a little vague about how the time travel works, as most films trying to tackle this topic are).  The acting is certainly terrible, as are the special effects, but it’s a nice surprise to see Steven Keaton, er, Michael Gross playing our aging super-genius out to make good on the errors of his past.

This film also has a few fun plot elements. It opens with modern day hikers stumbling upon some prehistoric cave paintings. Its unbelievable enough that the paintings include images of dinosaurs (unless you believe that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, and then its totally plausible), but also with the hand scrawled phrase “Rita Hayworth as Gilda.” We find out that the messengers most certainly were 1950s scientists sent back in time 100 million years via some early time travel experiments. The paintings prove for the first time that the time travelers survived the trip.

100 Million BC also falls back on (or pays homage to, depending on how you look at it) some classic dino-film movie tropes. You probably won’t be surprised to find out that some way, some how, there’s a glitch in the portal and a terrifying T-Rex is transported to the urban center of an American city. Calling to mind 100 Million other movies.  Like I said, we can give them a little credit and say that the decision was a purposeful hat-tip to films that came before them, but its just as likely that the attempt to make a quicky direct-to-DVD dinosaur action movie lead to a little laziness in screen writing.

It's not a life-changing film, and Spielberg would likely not have his attention held, but it is a fun 85 minutes. It also reminds us that even today dinosaur special effects are an art, and can be pretty painful if left in the hands of folks just trying to capitalize on the love we all have for dinosaurs.