Director: Gregory William Randolph Jr.
Year: 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Dinosaurs
Plot:
Arriving at her family’s house, a woman joins her siblings at the remote family house to go over an inheritance from their father, but when the get-together is interrupted by the genetically-engineered dinosaurs their father created for his research, it forces them to get away alive.
Review:
For the most part, this wasn’t too bad of a genre effort. Among the more likable factors here is the generally fun setup that manages to bring the group into the house where they can get stalked. The initial idea of the family get-together, predicated on a change in their father’s condition and them all coming together to figure out what to do with him, sets this up incredibly well as a means of getting to know the layout of the house and their own issues due to the catch-up required of them when they meet back up once again. The tension and animosity they experience are quite relatable, not just because of the passing time since they’ve last met but also due to the stripped-down state of the property where they’re staying, so that everything has a solid enough starting point.
When everything starts to go wrong and they find themselves stuck at the house with man-eating dinosaurs, the action picks up and the film is progressively more entertaining. The initial attacks, focusing on the various guards and other stragglers that are shown taking place in the surrounding woods, get this off to a solid start as the mix of dinosaur point-of-view stalking ambushes or full-scale attacks makes for some fun times. The main section here is the series of encounters that take place around the house as the secret nature of everything is revealed, and the dinosaurs use their vastly underestimated intelligence to strike the family throughout the house, creating some immensely solid, cheesy encounters as they try to use the few bits of technology at their disposal to get away alive. Overall, these are what make this one rather fun.
There are some issues here that keep it down. The biggest drawback in the film is the wholly bizarre family dynamics at play that make the plot difficult to understand. The initial gathering here seems to involve them arriving for the purposes of looking into the new inheritance, which is hardly ever brought up when they begin squabbling over their personal issues from when they were kids or mentioning the lack of internet in the area. When they finally learn the truth about what the father’s company is all about, this is much more about the corporate takeover and the fury over what his actions mean, which makes the family seem all the more unlikable and irritating than they should if we’re supposed to want them to survive.
The other drawback with this one is the series of unnecessary and useless cutaway scenes to other similar films in the style that this one offers up as a way to enhance the running time. There’s several instances where it introduces a few random dinosaurs simply for the purpose of reusing footage from other films, namely a series of pterodactyl attacks out in the woods with other random hikers who we’ve never been introduced to before and don’t have much context for why the footage is being reused, especially when one character is shown killed but then reappears later on when more stock footage is used. With the cheesy CGI being used that highlights a series of usual flaws in this particular style, these all lower this one.
Overview: **.5/5
A watchable if problematic cheesy creature feature, there’s enough to like here that it’s not a complete waste, while the series of issues here keep this one down overall from what it could’ve been. Those with an appreciation for this style or approach will have a lot to like here, while most others out there should heed caution.
Comments
Post a Comment