Post by cinestertheater on Mar 14, 2010 20:36:22 GMT -5
(video version available here)
I've been looking for chances to create content for our rockin' awesome new website (cinestertheater.com... check it out, because that's what all of the cool kids who smoke by the bleachers after school are doing. I'm pretty sure that hot neighbor of yours signed up for our forum yesterday, too).
And it got me to thinking- what's a movie that I could review without having to watch it immediately? I mean, writing a review can take me awhile, but at least that's time that feels like I'm doing something with it. Watching a movie feels like a bigger investment of time.
Luckily, I've seen "Planet of Dinosaurs" enough times that I can probably perform the whole thing, word-for-word, using my plastic Godzilla as a stand-in for the Tyrannosaurus Rex. So I can review it without having to sit through it again... I understand if you think that's cheating, but when most of your friends are supermodels or Timecops, you're living life in the fast lane... and your car is on fire.
If there's a movie that combines more of my great passions than "Planet of Dinosaurs".... well, it's probably that movie I keep in the back of my sock-drawer, incidentally.
But the point is- "Planet of Dinosaurs" is like somebody took everything I love, dipped it in chocolate, and let me snort cocaine off it's mounding, delicious breasts. It's got it all: spaceships, dinosaurs, laserguns, bellydancing... the only thing that keeps me from putting a stop to the contest and declaring this movie the winner of all future Nobel Prizes is the fact that one out of five people I show it to decide never to hang out with me again.
"Planet of Dinosaurs" is one of those movies that will cut the sheep from the goats when it comes to bad-movie tolerance. No, we're not talking "Manos: The Hands of Fate" bad (that's a movie that separates the goats from the Terminators as far bad movies go), but I like to use it on new friends as a quick way of seeing whether or not our tastes will match. The plot is stupid, but consistent enough to follow. The acting is terrible, but in a way that's strangely engaging. And the special effects, while certainly not "Jurassic Park" quality, actually won an award or two when the movie was first released. In another words, it's a nice trial-by-fire... if they can't sit through "Planet of Dinosaurs", there's no way they'll make it through some of the other movies I've seen.
The story is... you know what? No. All you need to know is right there in the title... it's a planet covered in goddam dinosaurs, good luck making it to the end without winding up as something's lunch. Okay, here's a little more context: the interstellar spaceship "Odyssey" explodes, for reasons that are not sufficiently "planet" or "dinosaur"-related to be worth ever going into, and the brave, hairy crew of 1970's C-list porno actors crash land their escape pod somewhere near the mountains in California... uh, I mean, "on a distant, alien world". Because this is a future where landing a job as a deep-space astronaut apparently involves nothing more than answering an ad in the paper, it takes them less than two minutes to blunder into the jaws of a hungry sea-monster, immediately setting the tone for a movie that works as well as a documentary about the gastro-intestinal systems of some of the Cretaceous Period's largest carnivores as it does as a campy, 1970's sci-fi flick.
The crew manage to save a suitcase full of laserguns, but the future apparently has no concept of "armor", because those high-tech lasers prove to have no effect, other than an excuse to use up the last of their special-effects budget to splice in a laserbeam. Why cool sci-fi lasers do less damage to the dinosaurs thick, armored hides than, say, spears carved out of balsa wood is a plot point that is never suitably explained.
Obviously, the crew runs afoul of more than a few dinosaurs (not to mention an inexplicable giant spider encounter... but like I said, this movie is way to busy blowing your goddam mind to worry about making sense), but the Big Bad is revealed early on to be the King of the Dinosaurs himself, Larry King. I mean, Tyrannosaurus Rex.
I mentioned how often humans get themselves et in this movie, but I joke; actually, a lot of the eating is strictly dino-on-dino. This movie features enough cutaways to stop-motion dinosaurs wrestling to make it a stock-footage goldmine for sitcoms like "Malcolm in the Middle". Which is a good thing, too; otherwise, you'd be stuck looking at the cast.
Apparently, another requirement for astronaut training is a face that looks designed by the Jim Henson Creature Shop, lending further credence to my theory that the "Odyssey" was not so much a spaceship as it was some kind of innerstellar leper colony. They feed the most attractive crew member to a dinosaur immediately after landing (probably out of resentment), and then all they're left with is Derna, a Cher-lookalike who's bell-bottoms suggest that she wandered away from a Scooby Doo mystery and onto the set of "Planet of Dinosaurs", and JIM!, a rough, gruff, Grizzly Adams man's man with a beard so powerful that describing it is enough to get you pregnant.
Most people will probably find themselves with a soft-spot for JIM!, probably because 73% of his face is covered with fuzz, invariably calling up memories of whatever stuffed animals they had during childhood. This gives JIM! a natural advantage over the rest of the cast, as they will have to spend months growing into their rockin' awesome Robinson Crusoe beards, whereas Jim practically crashes on the planet covered in dinosaur-blood warpaint while clenching a Rambo-knife in his teeth. It's pretty easy to understand, then, why the crew finds their allegiances torn... torn between bad-ass Dinosaur Dundee survival guru Jim, and the Odyssey's captain: whiny, unsure-of-himself, "couldn't manage his way out of a paper sack" Lee.
Again, I don't know how they run things in the future, but somebody at NASA obviously wants all astronauts to be killed. Lee's approach to leadership is to complain until his subordinates are guilted into following his lead. And since his lead generally puts them directly in the path of the biggest, hungriest animal he can find, most of the crew quickly decides that their survivability can only be improved if they listen to the guy who can kill dinosaurs by grumbling at them.
While Lee advocates the "slow and steady wins the planet" approach, a strategy that basically entails wetting himself anytime somebody even mentions the word "dinosaur", Jim takes a more Arnold Schwarzenneggar "if it bleeds, we can kill it" tack, encouraging the castaways to hunt down the T-Rex and curb-stomp it until it hands over the keys to the food-chain. And when ol' Rexy has finally devoured enough of the cast for Lee to admit that his creepy-rapist mustache doesn't qualify him to explore strange new worlds, the crew gear up and challenge the T-Rex to a final, epic showdown.
Using what I call "The Alien 3" method, the crew's solution is to locate the monster, then get it to chase them, hoping that things just kind of somehow work out. This being a 1970's campy sci-fi, that's exactly what happens: the T-Rex eventually barrels chest first into an enormous wooden spike, impaling himself and, to be frank, kind of tarnishing what was otherwise a solid run as movie monster. And, because it was apparently the one and only T-Rex to be attached to this planet's ecosystem, the survivors celebrate their new position as "Kings of the World" and immediately set to work on construction of the planet's first Wal-Mart.
If the plot, acting, special effects, and absurdly silly climax aren't enough, the movie's soundtrack is more futuristic than your iPod Touch. Apparently written by force-feeding baked beans to a synthesizer, the bleats and fraps and croaks of the incidental music will haunt your dreams for years to come. It may sound awful, but it fits the film perfectly... it's distracting, but vaguely futuristic enough that you're willing to overlook that fact and just groove on its purposeful lack of quality.
I know the phrase gets tossed around a lot, but empirical evidence exists to suggest that I am the world's biggest "Planet of Dinosaurs" fan. At the time of this writing, I am the top contributor to the "Planet of Dinosaurs" IMDB page. I spent my childhood wishing that "Mystery Science Theater 3000" would do a "Planet of Dinosaurs" episode (a dream that would only come full circle after I'd already started on my "Planet of Dinosaurs" riff), and I have permanently sworn off all attempts at growing a beard out of the knowledge that I'll never be capable of producing one as testosterone-fueled-Chuck-Norris-Holy-Diver-kick your ass and make you like it AWESOME as Jim's. I know that "World's Biggest 'Planet of Dinosaurs' fan" sounds like a pretty dubious distinction, but you're probably just jealous because you've never been the best at something.
Should you see "Planet of Dinosaurs"? Let's be honest: just hearing the name "Planet of Dinosaurs" is probably enough for you to make the decision all on your own. If you love bad movies but have somehow never seen this one, I definitely recommend bumping it to the top of your list. Good luck finding it at your local video store, but it's probably available in its entirety on YouTube. Fans of "MST3k" should definitely check out the Rifftrax treatment. And, of course, you could do a lot worse than to check out "Cinester Theater Presents: Planet of Dinosaurs", too.
I've been looking for chances to create content for our rockin' awesome new website (cinestertheater.com... check it out, because that's what all of the cool kids who smoke by the bleachers after school are doing. I'm pretty sure that hot neighbor of yours signed up for our forum yesterday, too).
And it got me to thinking- what's a movie that I could review without having to watch it immediately? I mean, writing a review can take me awhile, but at least that's time that feels like I'm doing something with it. Watching a movie feels like a bigger investment of time.
Luckily, I've seen "Planet of Dinosaurs" enough times that I can probably perform the whole thing, word-for-word, using my plastic Godzilla as a stand-in for the Tyrannosaurus Rex. So I can review it without having to sit through it again... I understand if you think that's cheating, but when most of your friends are supermodels or Timecops, you're living life in the fast lane... and your car is on fire.
If there's a movie that combines more of my great passions than "Planet of Dinosaurs".... well, it's probably that movie I keep in the back of my sock-drawer, incidentally.
But the point is- "Planet of Dinosaurs" is like somebody took everything I love, dipped it in chocolate, and let me snort cocaine off it's mounding, delicious breasts. It's got it all: spaceships, dinosaurs, laserguns, bellydancing... the only thing that keeps me from putting a stop to the contest and declaring this movie the winner of all future Nobel Prizes is the fact that one out of five people I show it to decide never to hang out with me again.
"Planet of Dinosaurs" is one of those movies that will cut the sheep from the goats when it comes to bad-movie tolerance. No, we're not talking "Manos: The Hands of Fate" bad (that's a movie that separates the goats from the Terminators as far bad movies go), but I like to use it on new friends as a quick way of seeing whether or not our tastes will match. The plot is stupid, but consistent enough to follow. The acting is terrible, but in a way that's strangely engaging. And the special effects, while certainly not "Jurassic Park" quality, actually won an award or two when the movie was first released. In another words, it's a nice trial-by-fire... if they can't sit through "Planet of Dinosaurs", there's no way they'll make it through some of the other movies I've seen.
The story is... you know what? No. All you need to know is right there in the title... it's a planet covered in goddam dinosaurs, good luck making it to the end without winding up as something's lunch. Okay, here's a little more context: the interstellar spaceship "Odyssey" explodes, for reasons that are not sufficiently "planet" or "dinosaur"-related to be worth ever going into, and the brave, hairy crew of 1970's C-list porno actors crash land their escape pod somewhere near the mountains in California... uh, I mean, "on a distant, alien world". Because this is a future where landing a job as a deep-space astronaut apparently involves nothing more than answering an ad in the paper, it takes them less than two minutes to blunder into the jaws of a hungry sea-monster, immediately setting the tone for a movie that works as well as a documentary about the gastro-intestinal systems of some of the Cretaceous Period's largest carnivores as it does as a campy, 1970's sci-fi flick.
The crew manage to save a suitcase full of laserguns, but the future apparently has no concept of "armor", because those high-tech lasers prove to have no effect, other than an excuse to use up the last of their special-effects budget to splice in a laserbeam. Why cool sci-fi lasers do less damage to the dinosaurs thick, armored hides than, say, spears carved out of balsa wood is a plot point that is never suitably explained.
Obviously, the crew runs afoul of more than a few dinosaurs (not to mention an inexplicable giant spider encounter... but like I said, this movie is way to busy blowing your goddam mind to worry about making sense), but the Big Bad is revealed early on to be the King of the Dinosaurs himself, Larry King. I mean, Tyrannosaurus Rex.
I mentioned how often humans get themselves et in this movie, but I joke; actually, a lot of the eating is strictly dino-on-dino. This movie features enough cutaways to stop-motion dinosaurs wrestling to make it a stock-footage goldmine for sitcoms like "Malcolm in the Middle". Which is a good thing, too; otherwise, you'd be stuck looking at the cast.
Apparently, another requirement for astronaut training is a face that looks designed by the Jim Henson Creature Shop, lending further credence to my theory that the "Odyssey" was not so much a spaceship as it was some kind of innerstellar leper colony. They feed the most attractive crew member to a dinosaur immediately after landing (probably out of resentment), and then all they're left with is Derna, a Cher-lookalike who's bell-bottoms suggest that she wandered away from a Scooby Doo mystery and onto the set of "Planet of Dinosaurs", and JIM!, a rough, gruff, Grizzly Adams man's man with a beard so powerful that describing it is enough to get you pregnant.
Most people will probably find themselves with a soft-spot for JIM!, probably because 73% of his face is covered with fuzz, invariably calling up memories of whatever stuffed animals they had during childhood. This gives JIM! a natural advantage over the rest of the cast, as they will have to spend months growing into their rockin' awesome Robinson Crusoe beards, whereas Jim practically crashes on the planet covered in dinosaur-blood warpaint while clenching a Rambo-knife in his teeth. It's pretty easy to understand, then, why the crew finds their allegiances torn... torn between bad-ass Dinosaur Dundee survival guru Jim, and the Odyssey's captain: whiny, unsure-of-himself, "couldn't manage his way out of a paper sack" Lee.
Again, I don't know how they run things in the future, but somebody at NASA obviously wants all astronauts to be killed. Lee's approach to leadership is to complain until his subordinates are guilted into following his lead. And since his lead generally puts them directly in the path of the biggest, hungriest animal he can find, most of the crew quickly decides that their survivability can only be improved if they listen to the guy who can kill dinosaurs by grumbling at them.
While Lee advocates the "slow and steady wins the planet" approach, a strategy that basically entails wetting himself anytime somebody even mentions the word "dinosaur", Jim takes a more Arnold Schwarzenneggar "if it bleeds, we can kill it" tack, encouraging the castaways to hunt down the T-Rex and curb-stomp it until it hands over the keys to the food-chain. And when ol' Rexy has finally devoured enough of the cast for Lee to admit that his creepy-rapist mustache doesn't qualify him to explore strange new worlds, the crew gear up and challenge the T-Rex to a final, epic showdown.
Using what I call "The Alien 3" method, the crew's solution is to locate the monster, then get it to chase them, hoping that things just kind of somehow work out. This being a 1970's campy sci-fi, that's exactly what happens: the T-Rex eventually barrels chest first into an enormous wooden spike, impaling himself and, to be frank, kind of tarnishing what was otherwise a solid run as movie monster. And, because it was apparently the one and only T-Rex to be attached to this planet's ecosystem, the survivors celebrate their new position as "Kings of the World" and immediately set to work on construction of the planet's first Wal-Mart.
If the plot, acting, special effects, and absurdly silly climax aren't enough, the movie's soundtrack is more futuristic than your iPod Touch. Apparently written by force-feeding baked beans to a synthesizer, the bleats and fraps and croaks of the incidental music will haunt your dreams for years to come. It may sound awful, but it fits the film perfectly... it's distracting, but vaguely futuristic enough that you're willing to overlook that fact and just groove on its purposeful lack of quality.
I know the phrase gets tossed around a lot, but empirical evidence exists to suggest that I am the world's biggest "Planet of Dinosaurs" fan. At the time of this writing, I am the top contributor to the "Planet of Dinosaurs" IMDB page. I spent my childhood wishing that "Mystery Science Theater 3000" would do a "Planet of Dinosaurs" episode (a dream that would only come full circle after I'd already started on my "Planet of Dinosaurs" riff), and I have permanently sworn off all attempts at growing a beard out of the knowledge that I'll never be capable of producing one as testosterone-fueled-Chuck-Norris-Holy-Diver-kick your ass and make you like it AWESOME as Jim's. I know that "World's Biggest 'Planet of Dinosaurs' fan" sounds like a pretty dubious distinction, but you're probably just jealous because you've never been the best at something.
Should you see "Planet of Dinosaurs"? Let's be honest: just hearing the name "Planet of Dinosaurs" is probably enough for you to make the decision all on your own. If you love bad movies but have somehow never seen this one, I definitely recommend bumping it to the top of your list. Good luck finding it at your local video store, but it's probably available in its entirety on YouTube. Fans of "MST3k" should definitely check out the Rifftrax treatment. And, of course, you could do a lot worse than to check out "Cinester Theater Presents: Planet of Dinosaurs", too.