King Dinosaur

Poster tagline: TERRIFYING! FANTASTIC! STARTLING! SEE... A PREHISTORIC WORLD OF FANTASTIC ADVENTURE COME TO LIFE!!! There are few certainties in life, like the fact that one day you’ll die, that the smug douchebag Václav Klaus will continue to poison the local political climate, and that Bert I. Gordon does not change! His entire oeuvre, all his films, have a common symptom: overgrown, especially radioactively tuned-up fauna vs. man, hideous rear and front projections, sloppy effects; and this film is no exception. It’s an ultra low-budget piece shot in three days, and one of his worst, in fact. The story of four astronauts exploring the planet Nova (sic!!!), which suddenly appeared in our solar system, looks like this: during 45 minutes of the hour-long runtime, 4 actors sit in a spruce forest, with randomly cut shots of a fawn, a bear cub, an alligator (!), and a sloth (!), they are attacked by a hideous front projection of a giant ant, and one of the actors rolls in the ground fighting with a stuffed crocodile. The highlights are the violently cut shots of an iguana (that's supposed to be the dinosaur) breaking into some kind of opening that represents the cave where the main characters are hiding. All of this is achieved with hideous back projections. During the escape, the actors shoot a giant armadillo, there are brief shots of mammoths and prehistoric goats from the 1940 film One Million B.C., which do not match the visuals of the film at all, and everything ends with a shot of a massive atomic mushroom with one of the actors cheering. Forget the Ed Wood’s films, forget the legendary Robot Monster, this is an absolute cinematic low point that will have you laughing in disbelief. (27.02.2013)