100 Million BC (2008)

Wonderful Movie

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Like a prehistoric crocodile inside some shaky cam experience that looks as bad as it looks fake, I fell for the name luring bait once more. I saw the name in the tv guide and thought it was 10000 bc. But that added 0 is exactly the rating this one deserves. It's asylum, the first 2-3 seconds tends to make you realize the mistake. It's a fun movie to poke at...and boy are there many things to poke at. Worrying about time travel paradoxes while the clue where the lost expedition is could have already caused the paradox. Hell, one guy is drawing ufo cave drawings for fun... Bringing a grandpa as the sole person with a clue how to get back while the process of arriving has a random chance of fusing you in a tree or such. He's huffing and puffing from exhauston most fo the movie and would make ideal prey for the very very very fake dino's. Not that the navy seal team bothered to do any research or get a proper prep, cause they are all useless too. I think the only reason some of them survive is cause the dino's realized letting such bad actors continue with their struggling career would be more cruel than eating them. There's really nothing in this movie done well. The story sucks. The acting is abysmal, some of the situational response just made me shake my head. The effects are laughable too; the eye shot, the raptors...or when it jumps to bite a helicopter...just LOL. The sound design is all over the place. At one point I reset my sound bar cause I thought it had desynced with the picture...but yeah, it was not the sound bar's fault.And yet, I watched the whole thing. WIth a beer and a chuckle/groan.

Dr Frank Reno (Michael Gross) once worked on the Philadelphia Experiment and his early work left some people including his brother stranded far back in time.Now in 1998 Dr Reno has got the time travel technology working properly and he along with some soldiers travel back millions of years to the early Cretaceous period so he can rescue the team from the 1949 expedition.Dr Reno's team arrives a few years after the time when the 1949 team arrived and they manage to find a few survivors. The soldiers themselves are attacked and some of the are killed by prehistoric creatures.What is left of the two groups of survivors return to the present day but they also manage to bring a T-Rex who follows and causes havoc in present day America.Meanwhile Dr Reno who stayed behind on the pre-historic period somehow time hopped to 1950 and meets up with his younger self and tells him how to use the time technology properly before dying.Young Dr Reno assembles a crack squad of soldiers and leads them through the portal to 1998 where they take on the rampaging dinosaur and send him back through time.Well at the least the film has a plot, some of it rips of Jurassic Park 2 with the dinosaur on the loose. The special effects are poor and so is the acting. Despite the efforts put into the story the script is bad.Another Asylum stinker.

...and the unintentional comedy.I watched 100 Million BC because I had nothing better to do so I thought I could give this dinosaur film a try, and the story seemed fairly intriguing, although unoriginal. Since it's a TV movie, my expectations were pretty low to begin with. Turns out the film was even worse than expected.The CGI was appalling but that's fairly understandable for a low budget production. What really got me was the poor acting, and the terrible, terrible editing and sound. The directing was so bad that I think even I could have done a better job although I have no training in movie making. Also, my advice to the actors is to find another profession. How can they possibly be that bad? If the cast was random people picked up in the street, statistically they couldn't have been this poor. 100 Million BC was probably filmed in a few days and grossly sold off to cable channels that needed fillers.I'm still giving it a 2/10 because the beginning of the film was mildly intriguing, and because Marie Westbrook (yes, I actually looked her up) is a treat for the eyes, the only one in the entire movie by the way.

For low-rent studio The Asylum, this is probably one of their bigger-budgeted efforts. I don't know what was spent on this movie, but I'm guessing a minimum of $1 million, probably closer to $5 million. Those CGI effects, as fake looking as they are, still cost several hundred K to produce.Also, this has actors in it (on the downward slide of their careers though they may be) that you have actually heard of. Usual fare from The Asylum gets actors you've never heard of, like minor soap opera players and refugees from other direct-to-video studios. Also, they did some actual location shooting in Belize. I think it was just second unit footage with no actors in it, but, that still cost them some money. I would bet that the parts with the actors trudging through the supposed prehistoric jungle were shot in some remote part of California mountains.Which is to say that I am willing to grade on a curve here. The producers and director are working with a really low budget. Still, you have to have a good story. The idea for the film was a good hook I thought, but the story is a little confusing. I'm willing to give some slack for "plot holes" since all time traveling movies have them.The acting was really not too bad. These are all experienced working actors trying to do a good job. About the worst moments were some of the death scenes where they get eaten by dinosaurs. However, I've seen much worse, namely in any Ed Wood film, or anything by Coleman Francis or Al Adamson. The music was canned, but it didn't sound too bad, it did sound somewhat similar to a big budget studio movie soundtrack. And helicopter shots of Los Angeles at night (the whole last 30 minutes of the movie) always add a higher budget sheen to the proceedings.If you like monster movies, there are worse ones out there. Maybe if you aren't paying too much attention, they will fool you into thinking that you watched a big budget movie. I recognize that this is not a ringing endorsement. Unless you are a monster movie fanatic, or fan of schlock, I would stay away.