Terrordactyl (2016)

Touches You

The Worst Film Ever

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

I had some hopes for this film, not high ones, after all, it is a budget B-Movie Monster flick. Though MarVista has been distributing these type of movies for years now, I thought they would be "Cherry Picking" the better ones. However, the budget must have been spent on the CGI and Model-FX as the rest of the movie was pitiful in the extreme.So, the good first: There were times when the CGI Terrordactyls were pretty decent and quite believable. Unfortunately, viewers only remember the badly rendered scenes. When the Terrordactyls are swarming and flying through the city and around the apartment block, these are the best CGI scenes. The worst being the whenever a human gets snatched by one, these scenes made me smile in their badness.Then there's the puppetry when you get the one-to-one fight scenes with the humans V the Terrordactyls. The major drawback is the budget, once again. But to be fair the 'Dactyls aren't too bad, that being said there are times when the movement of these puppets are awkward and I even felt embarrassed for the team working on them. Especially the part in the apartment where the 'Dactyls keep lining up for the heroes to shoot them down - just like all the fairground games... it would've been funnier had the director decided to play calliope music over the scene.This is another area where the film failed, the writer and director, Don Bitters III and Geoff Reisner, try to install humour throughout the film, though most of this falls flat. Sometimes, due to the writer, but most of all due to the actors.The best I can say about the actors is that they were below par and, at times, annoying. The worst was Jonas' maniacal laugh, which wasn't even called for. To be fair, they didn't have too much to work with, thanks to the writer, Don Bitters, whose characters were stereotypical. Even though characters in these genre films are usually stereotyped, in this movie there also boring to the N'th degree and two-dimensional. Then you have the inane backstory of the Terrordacytls having been blown into space when the dinosaur-killing meteor hit the earth... What else from Earth's past is waiting in space to fall upon us?Hopefully, NOTHING by this film crew!Except for the CGI artists.I really don't understand why you want to make a movie (or do anything, for that matter) and not give it your best effort. If this is their best effort than they should start working in call centers and stop inflicting your audiences with half-baked ideas and movies, Give us something decent - and yes even Bad films can be entertaining "SHARKNADO!!!"Don't waste your time on this badly written, badly acted, nonsense. Go give blood - at least you get a cup of tea and biscuit after.

TERRORDACTYL is a dreadful comedy/horror/fantasy/science fiction film about people fighting a giant CGI Pterodactyl. There's no more to the story than that, and it says something that this is so poor that it makes equivalent Asylum films look good by comparison. It wasn't even picked up by the SyFy Channel, instead escaping to DVD under the re-titling of JURASSIC WARS.The story opens with a meteorite landing on Earth and spawning the aforementioned beastie. It destroys some stuff and carries a few people away to their deaths, but if you're expecting anything like a kaiju film then you'll be sorely disappointed. The acting is terrible and the attempts at comedy cringe-worthy. As for the special effects, they're absolutely awful and among the worst examples of CGI I've seen lately. Despite the short running time this is a film which drags interminably and is a real chore to sit through.

They fell from the sky! Two buddies, albeit one being a moron, get the chance to save Los Angeles. Lars (Christopher Jennings) and his rubber-jaw slacker friend Jonas (Jason Tobias) hit the bar right after work; while outside the night sky is aglow with a meteor shower. Bartender Candice (Candice Nunes) impresses the dimwit Jonas by talking about how space rocks are worth a lot of money. The two buddies manage to find an odd looking rock and hopes it is worth a fortune. Things turn very sour when the meteor show turns out to be an attack of ancient pterodactyls and Jonas and Lars don't possess a space rock, but a flying reptile egg.You would expect some sleazy CGI, but alas, the special effects are visually pretty solid. Action at times drags, but worst of all is the humor that easily flat lines. You beg for Jonas to be the first to go. His stammering and ignorance brings more groans than laughs. But you know what, I will take this over "Sharknados" anytime.Candice's room mate Valerie (Bianca Haase) is stunning! Also in the cast: Jack E. Curenton, Leo Oliva, Aubrey Wakeling and Victoria Summer.

Today many filmmakers use unashamedly the ideas of others without even include a "based on" or "inspired" in the credits. Ishirō Honda, the father of "Daikaiju", brought us already a flying monster coming from space in "Rodan" (1956) that appeared in another nine movies to date. Then we had in 1957 the unaccredited American version of "Rodan", the low-budget Sam Katzman production titled "The Giant Claw". But from what I have no doubt is that the story line for the sequences with the nest and eggs in "Terrordactyl" obviously follow (again, unaccredited) the story line on Larry Cohen's masterpiece from 1982 "Q - The Winged Serpent (1982)".