Sunday, February 1, 2015

Age of Dinosaurs (2013)

For my first Asylum movie I think I picked one of their better ones.  It's a story about a genetics company that makes dinosaurs walk again.  They do this to help people be able to walk again, though I must have missed the reason.  There's a big show for the public to let them see how safe the dinosaurs are.  Naturally they escape and things get worse from there.  There is a bit of a nice rampage in LA, and some cool scenes of destruction.  Yes, we've seen the story before, but it's pretty well done, though some of the acting isn't great and the script could use some polishing, overall it kept me reasonably entertained for it's 88 minutes.

There's one carnotaurus puppet, which is really well done.  The CG is passable, until the dinosaur horde is released into LA.  Then it's rather cartoony.  And while the ceratosaurus is nice and colorful, the rest are a rather dull green gray color.  At least there are pteranodons, though they are so small I would wonder how they could pick up a person.  But I love them anyway.

Perhaps it's not good for someone who knows about dinosaurs to watch these movies, one can be a little too critical of how they should look or act.  These dinosaurs are a throwback to the old cinemasaurs, where all they wanted to do was kill and eat people.  Didn't matter if they just ate a person, they'd want to eat the next person they saw.  Or chase them with a single minded intensity, though at least one gets distracted for a bit by the pteranodons.  I sure have missed these terrible lizards!

The acting is pretty decent.  Treat Williams is the hero, and he does a good job.  Ronny Cox heads up Geneti-Sharp (awful name, really) and he's quite good.  The rest of the cast isn't awful, and they do have a couple clunker lines to say.

All in all, it's a decent way to kill an hour and a half.  There's some blood, but you don't actually see any dismemberments on the screen.  Probably safe for kids over 8 or so.

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