Jurassic Prey

Saw 'Jurassic Prey' as part of my low-budget completest quest when it popped up by chance in the recommended for you section. Part of me was oddly intrigued by the premise, despite it being absolutely ridiculous and there are instances of fun dinosaurs on the rampage films (naming them would be unfair).

Was not expecting much from 'Jurassic Prey' to be perfectly honest at the same time. The cover/poster looked cheap, it had a low rating and the reviews were less than promising. So in all honesty was expecting something terrible. Seeing 'Jurassic Prey' with an open mind and fairness intended, it turned out to be irredeemably awful and deserving of every bad thing that has been said about it.

Just for the record, am somebody who hates being critical believe it or not and is more often than not encouraging and aims to be balanced and tries to evaluate rather than completely gushing or bashing, so will always severely object to being called an armchair critic/expert that is thrown around a lot immaturely.

From start to finish, the limited budget shows in particularly the not always very well organised editing and the abysmal look of the dinosaur. The camera work is similarly disorganised and drab. The dinosaur looks awful and has no personality or menace, essentially being unintentionally goofy and lumbering randomly in scenes that are messily executed, tension-free and with no urgency. Nothing memorable about the music.

The human characters are underwritten and have little development or endearing personality with so many silly and less than logical behaviours and decisions (a bugbear of mine and have found myself using it a fair bit recently). None of the actors look comfortable in their roles and don't seem to be having fun at all.

Also found too much of the dialogue on the wrong side of dumb and cheesy, complete with some soapy moments, and that it didn't flow very well. The film had an interesting premise with far too over-familiar execution that has nothing new. The lack of imagination and suspense also hurts the film, too much evokes cringing and the thrills and fun are non-existent.

It's all very contrived, truly ridiculous, paper thin and often not easy to follow. The direction felt like they were not in control of the material and not at ease with the genre.

Overall, awful and with no redeeming features. 1/10 Bethany Cox

Wow, this thing was bad. Bad acting, poor camera work, bad story.

But, the worst was the "special" effects. Now I know this didn't have much of a budget, but I have seen high school kids make some pretty realistic CGI stuff.

This used a big guy in a horribly made suit, worse than old Godzilla movies, and then for full body shots of the dinosaur, it looked like a claymation dinosaur that didn't look anything like the suit version. And the way the dinosaur was spliced into the scenes when it interacted with humans will just make you laugh.

The depth of field was so messed up, they didn't even look like they were near each other. Oh, man....

You should probably just check this out only so you can laugh at the dinosaur scenes. It's pretty entertaining in itself!

Unwatchable. I'm a fan of low budget films and can usually find some redeeming feature in just about any film. Perhaps if I had been able to make it through more than the first 25-30 minutes I would have been able to find it... Following is my best shot at a top 10 list for the film:

10. Cinematography is almost as good as most youtube selfie videos 9. Script writing makes one rethink the quality of the sharknado series 8. Acting, while not up to Sharknado standards, is...well...OK, I got nothing. 7 Plot...didn't include zombies(not sure if this is a plus or a minus) 6. Budget...you get what you pay for 5. Sigh...I give up. At least its over.

Like one of the other reviewers I have always been a fan of low budget B movies. I have always thought and I think many would agree that Plan 9 from outer space was the worst movie ever made, even with the huge cult following it has, at least the burning paper plate used for the crashing flying saucer has some humorous value. This movie has no value at all. the acting is high schoolish at best, the plot could have been written by a 12 year old, and possibly was. Limited to almost nothing that can be considered special affects, and a few shots that look like rubberized sock puppets. The budget for this movie was probably well under $1000, and most of it probably spent on lunch for the cast and crew.

Wait for Mystery science theater 3000 to come back to see this one, it will probably be one of their first picks.

So... Where on earth to start.

The film is on the level of most first year film students... the bad ones...

• Acting: Ugh... imagine you got a bunch of stoners together to act when they were completely baked out of their minds.

• Script: I've read better children's picture books. Half the time the sentences don't even make sense and the other half, due to poor use of intonation, something that SHOULD have made sense... suddenly doesn't.

• Lighting: Non-Existent. Unless it's the flashlight. But i still don't think that counts.

• Camera-work: Hmmm... you know in this day and age it's not THAT expensive to buy a Go-Pro etc. It was clearly filmed on a cam-corder - something you can see in the reflection of windows in almost every shot. This is why the car's windows are wound eternally down in almost every scene.

• Editing: Geez, don't get me started. Effects remaining across cuts, re-using scenes and there's SO MANY bad edits as the film progresses. There is the dreaded "black frame" of a failed edit point on many occasions - Seriously, the news can get it right every day of the year, yet they couldn't get it right for a one off release. This is the sort of most BASIC mistakes you'd be warned about in the first month of media class in high school… clearly the editor dropped out before said lesson.

• Continuity: Forget it. Don't even try. It just doesn't work. In one scene she's trying to open the door to the Jeep but can't. They move the shot inside the car to show her looking at the door which is CLEARLY UNLOCKED. You can see the old school locking bolt standing tall - like a defiant middle finger to the director.

• Music: Score was pretty good... for something that was probably downloaded for free in a highly compressed format. There was simply no consistency to the tracks or on how they were used. It also just wasn't used at the right times, such as a violin track used for about 15 seconds of exposition and then used again for a death scene. Most of the time it seems like someone put the soundtrack on shuffle, went "Yup that'll do" and then proceeded to turn the volume up and down at random intervals.

• Effects: now THIS is the big one. WHY OH WHY do you need THREE DIFFERENT DINOSAUR MODELS??? The first one was rubbish and the next 2 are even WORSE. It's completely pointless! At the end of the film it seems like the actor is fighting off 3 entirely different fake dinosaurs - and all of them are worse quality than what you'd find in a box of cereal. I honestly could have created better visual effects for them with a toy T-Rex and a piece of GREEN CARD... And this was outsourced to a company...

Oh and watch for the bit where they stretch the dinosaur overlay so it's "facing the right way" *Director Hint: It's still not* and then forget to remove it for the next transition so suddenly the dinosaur is staring at it's own tail for a minute.

*Sigh* I honestly can't go on.

FINAL THOUGHTS: All I can say is this film's ONLY PURPOSE TO EXIST, is to make Tommy Wiseau's "The Room" look like an Oscar Contender for Best Picture.

This is a Polonia Brothers film ... number 40-something. How the hell do they keep getting them published with mistakes a high schooler could fix in a matter of an hour?

If you enjoyed this, it might be worth getting your eyes checked... or coming down from whatever you're on. I'd say watch it again sober, but it wouldn't make the pile of excrement any better.

You know what they say - "you can polish a turd, but it's still a turd... and now you're still holding it in your hand."

For more bad acting, poor scripts and silly effects check out "Solid State". It's just as bad but they actually hired an editor and it's in Italy... so I guess that's nice. Oh and that turd has sprinkles.