Ugly tyrannosaurs are a cinema tradition. With the exception of the burly stop-motion version in the 1933 King Kong and the hot-blooded monsters of the Jurassic Park franchise, the majority of tyrant dinosaurs to stomp their way across the screen have been ugly, tottering brutes that only bear the most superficial resemblance to the actual animal. The Land Unknown‘s man-in-suit version looked incapable of threatening a rotting carcass, much less live prey, and I lost all respect for the titular villain of The Last Dinosaur when a boulder caved in the puppet’s noggin, only to roll away and leave the theropod unscathed. (And let’s not talk about Tammy and the T-Rex or Theodore Rex.) But, atrocious as they are, these dinosaurs don’t even come close to the worst cinematic Tyrannosaurus of all time.

Oddly enough, the film that assaults viewers with the awful tyrannosaur has nothing at all to do with lost worlds or time travel. Nor does it have the word “dinosaur” in the title. Instead, 1990′s Metamorphosis is bottom-of-the-barrel schlock about mad scientist Dr. Peter Houseman who is trying to understand our prehistoric genetic legacy through weird, uncomfortable-looking eye injections. Because, you know, SCIENCE, I guess. The most outlandish part of this is that the college where the doctor works has not supervised his work or asked for any results in about two years–they left the guy to putter away, doing who knows what with piles of grant money. Science fiction, indeed.

But when the authorities threaten to cease the crazed scientist’s experiments, he–of course–injects himself to prove all those tweed-coated bureaucrats wrong. The experiment doesn’t go as planned, unintended side effects, ripping off The Fly ensues, etc. Ultimately, thanks to a woeful misunderstanding of development and evolution, the doctor reverts into a stiff, ugly Tyrannosaurus apparently made out of rain tarps and duct tape. (As wonderful as it would be to have dinosaurs in our ancestry, our mammalian forebears were on a very different side of the evolutionary tree. Most spent the Mesozoic under the feet of dinosaurs.) Worst of all, the scientist-turned-dinosaur is gunned down immediately upon making his big entrance. Much like the movie itself, the assailants had no respect for the king of the tyrant dinosaurs.

I have to give Tammy and the T-Rex some credit—I can’t say I have ever seen a dinosaur flick with the same premise. Time-travel, genetic experiments and lost worlds are the traditional routes for bringing humans into contact with dinosaurs, but sticking the brain of a lion-savaged teen inside a robotic Tyrannosaurus? That was a new one for me. But as you might guess, just because the setup is novel doesn’t mean that this is anything more than another bit of bargain-bin dinosaur schlock.

Let me back up a little. At it’s heart, 1994′s Tammy and the T-Rex is a teenage romance that makes the relationship shared by the protagonists of the Twilight series look healthy and perfectly mundane. Michael (Paul Walker) and Tammy (Denise Richards) feel all twitterpated around each other, but they are all angsty because the local meathead Billy feels that Tammy should be his alone. The film quickly turns into something of a boy likes girl, girl likes boy, boy is beaten up and thrown to the lions by girl’s bully boyfriend story. (Because, when there’s an exotic animal enclosure nearby, pummeling someone just isn’t enough.) Spoilers ahead.

Unfortunately for him, Michael’s comatose body shows up at the hospital just as the nefarious Dr. Wachenstein—played by Terry Kiser, who seems unable to choose what sort of accent he is supposed to have—is looking for a brain to implant in his animatronic dinosaur. The beast doesn’t look like it can stand up on its own two feet, but that doesn’t stop the confused Michael from stomping around the place so that he can take his brutal dinosaurian revenge on the gang that harmed him. After one attack at a house party, little more than shredded Keds and tattered acid-wash jeans are left of his victims.

Eventually Tammy realizes that her admirer is in the body of the robot. She seems to take it pretty well. No screaming, no denial, no running away in shock, and apparently no recognition that Michael just killed a bunch of his classmates—she has about as much reaction to the realization as if someone said, “It’s sunny out today.” Nevertheless, dating a robotic dinosaur doesn’t sound all that appealing and so Tammy tries to recover Michael’s body at the funeral. The trouble is that the funeral home apparently just shoved his body in the casket and called it a day when his body arrived, so Michael’s corporeal form just ain’t what it used to be. (“Suddenly, I’m half the man I used to be…“) Further grave-robbing shenanigans ensue without a suitable candidate to be found, and the search is cut short when Wachenstein shows up to reclaim his creation. In a final showdown, Michael kills the mad doctor, but bites the bullet himself under a spray of police gunfire. Or at least his mechanical body does. His brain, still intact, is dusted off by Tammy and hooked up to a computer/camcorder combo in her room. I find it’s best not to ask about how they figured out the human-to-computer interface in their relationship.

The poster for the 2001 b-movie Raptor.

You know a movie is going to be bad when the first scene is lifted directly from another b-movie.

When I flipped on Raptor (2001), I thought I had somehow made a mistake and rented the gory dinosaur flick Carnosaur (1993). The opening scene—in which a trio of airhead teens is ripped to shreds by the cutest little raptor puppet you have ever seen—was straight out of schlock legend Roger Corman’s earlier film. As I soon found out, this wasn’t the only thing the wannabe dinosaur horror lifted from other movies. In it’s own weird way, Raptor is the matryoshka doll of awful dinosaur cinema—there are at least three crummy films nested within the larger one.

There isn’t really much to say about the plot of Raptor. The movie relies almost entirely on recycled footage from Carnosaur, Carnosaur 2 and Carnosaur 3 for its dinosaur special effects shots. Raptor condenses those three movies into one pile of cinema mush so that all the dinosaur shots will have the right set up. (For sharp-eyed audiences, this explains why there are life preservers on the walls of the landlocked facility, because scenes reused from Carnosaur 3 originally took place on a boat. Whoops.)  A grumpy small town sheriff (Eric Roberts) and a plastic-surgery-enhanced animal control officer (Melissa Brasselle) take their sweet time scratching their heads at the dinosaur-bitten remains of multiple citizens, while the local mad scientist (Corbin Bernsen) pushes forward with his project to resurrect dinosaurs and adds a bit of humor by looking ridiculous in his nerd-glasses/beret combo.

Raptor really doesn’t need any of the principal characters, though. The same movie could have been created by simply re-editing all three Carnosaur films, especially since Roberts, Brasselle, Bernsen and the other actors don’t even seem to be in the same movie half the time. In the poorly-matched duel between a Tyrannosaurus and the sheriff in a skid loader—come on, how could the tyrannosaur possibly lose?—Roberts is shown bouncing around in a Bobcat while shots of the dinosaur from Carnosaur and Carnosaur 2 are edited in. The two may as well be in entirely different dimensions, the match up between the new footage and the old stock is so bad. But it gets even worse. The film’s director, Jay Andrews, brought in two supporting characters from the original Carnosaur to film some new shots that would set up the recycled clips of their deaths. (For a full list of all the silly mash-up moments between the new shots and the old death scenes, see the page for Raptor on WikiSciFi.) Not that Roger Corman minded. After all, he produced this bit of cinema trash. Never underestimate the eagerness of schlock horror filmmakers to go for the easy direct-to-video cash grab.

The most telling moment in SyFy’s latest installment of Saturday night schlock – Triassic Attack – comes fairly early on in the film. Dismayed and angered by the expansion of a nearby college, a Native American protester named Dakota (played by Raoul Trujillo) breaks into the local museum and trashes the gift shop filled with kitschy representations of his people’s culture. The museum had made a mockery of Native Americans just to make a few bucks.

But smashing the store only upsets Dakota further. Enraged, he goes about performing a ritual in the museum’s fossil hall that brings the skeletons of a Tyrannosaurus, a Pteranodon and a “raptor” to life so that they can take revenge on the university president who ordered the expansion. The ritual is so stereotypical and poorly executed that it is offensive, turning Dakota into a representation of everything he just destroyed.

This lack of self-awareness is the most prominent feature of Triassic Attack. Our heroes – police officer Jake (Steven Brand) and archaeologist Emma (Kirsty Mitchell) – don’t realize that they are two-dimensional characters; the token comic relief character isn’t aware that he isn’t funny; and the film’s prehistoric monsters forgot to put on their muscles and skin before leaving the museum. True, a B-movie about rampaging dinosaur skeletons could be fun, but it does seem a bit inconsistent when the skeletons can sniff, roar and otherwise do just about anything a real dinosaur could. The only thing they can’t do is swallow properly – it takes a little while for the film’s Tyrannosaurus to realize that frat boys just fall to the ground when it tries to eat them (“I swear, these things go right through me”).

Granted, I was not expecting very much from a movie that seems like it was concocted entirely for the reason of having archosaur skeletons stomp around a college campus. (“Hey, where’s the rec center?”) As described by the film’s director, Colin Ferguson, the premise of Triassic Attack could be summed up as “What happens when a flying Tyrannosaurus rex attacks Oregon?” He wasn’t referring to the film’s Pteranodon. Fairly late in the film the college’s R.O.T.C. squad jumps into action with rocket launchers they just happened to have lying around (?!) and blow the attacking Tyrannosaurus and Pteranodon into bits. Being that these were magic dinosaur bones, they obviously had to recombine into a flying monstrosity that looked about as aerodynamic as a brick. As I sat there watching the scattered bones begin to roll towards each other I said aloud “Are they really… ? They are, aren’t they? *facepalm*”

I would say a bit more about the plot, but there isn’t much of one to speak of. Triassic Attack mostly coalesced from residues of other action films. Monsters run amok, the daughter of our heroes just happens to pick the one place where she will be in the most danger (but survives while nearly everyone around her is killed), our leads are torn between stopping the monsters and saving their daughter, and ultimately the monsters must be destroyed in the manner in which they were created. This last bit places the film more in the realm of supernatural fantasy then reality. Through a cheap backstory meant to convey depth, Triassic Attack makes it a point to say that stereotypical spirituality is superior to logic, science and modern medicine.

And among the worst parts of it all? There was nary a Triassic creature to be seen in the entire film! All three monster skeletons were from the Cretaceous. Yes, yes, I know it is a SyFy movie and if I want anything approximating accuracy I should look elsewhere, but I still feel like this was a missed opportunity. Imagine what fun could be had with some real Triassic predators like Prestosuchus on land or the immense ichthyosaur Shonisaurus in the sea. I guess we may never know, but, given the quality of your average SyFy original movie, that may be for the best.

Regular readers know that I can’t resist cheesy dinosaur movies, and a new SyFy feature set to debut late next month will be the latest stinker to be heaped on the pile of bad dino cinema.

Called Triassic Attack, this direct-to-video schlock features the reanimated skeletons of a pterosaur and a Tyrannosaurus that set about chomping up the boneheaded attendees of a local college. It just figures, doesn’t it? The film is called Triassic Attack, but both of its monstrous stars were Cretaceous creatures. With a title like that, I was hoping that one of the crocodile-like rauisuchians—such as the toothy predator Prestosuchus—or the early predatory dinosaur Herrerasaurus might make an appearance. No such luck, apparently.  

If paleontologists have said it once, they have said it a hundred times: non-avian dinosaurs and humans never coexisted. Most people who insist otherwise are creationist cranks who believe that evidence of a living dinosaur would somehow undermine evolutionary theory, but I understand that Hollywood has to play by different rules. Dinosaurs are just not as exciting without people to menace, and so it has been traditional to use time travel, the existence of prehistoric “lost worlds,” fertilized eggs preserved for over 65 million years and genetic engineering experiments gone awry to bring dinosaurs and people together. But none of these options worked for the creators of the 1970 Hammer film When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. They wanted dinosaurs and other prehistoric monsters to attack scantily-clad cavepeople, and so they made a film that a biblical fundamentalist could take as a documentary rather than fiction.

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth doesn’t begin with a shot of a steaming, primeval forest, but of a gaggle of tanned and oiled cavepeople who have crawled out of their cliffside dwellings to engage in their regular “let’s pick which blond woman we want to sacrifice” ritual. Naturally, the prospective victims are not very happy about this—one throws herself off a cliff—but when they try to escape they are hindered by the fact that they are wearing prehistoric underwear so skimpy that it actually makes it more difficult for them to run away. It would have made more sense for them to lose the push-up bras and just bolt for it, though I imagine going streaking during prehistory would have presented its own unique risks.

In any event, one of the Cenozoic supermodels—named Sanna—does manage to escape by jumping into the sea and is promptly rescued by a conveniently placed group of fishermen whose unfortunate garments remind us why it’s never wise to wear thongs in a windstorm (I wish I were talking about sandals here—yikes). It is among this group of unfortunately attired men that we meet Tara, our film’s scruffy male lead. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the musclebound leader of the cavepeople is clearly upset that the sacrifice did not go as planned; he shouts incomprehensible phrases and gestures widely to get people to go do whatever it is they do. Maybe this was intended as a bit of fun for the audience—make up your own dialogue as you go along—especially since words like “akita” appear to mean: “Over there”; “Stop”; “Give me that”; “Come over here” and “Let’s have pancakes for dinner tonight.”

For me, though, the film’s real stars are the prehistoric creatures that help to thin out the cast, and the audience’s first look at one of the film’s exquisite stop-motion monsters comes when the fishermen return with the woman to their camp. While the dudes were out fishing, someone brought a plesiosaur (which is, of course, not a dinosaur) to the big clam bake, but damned if they knew what to do with the thing. It was too angry to just stick an apple in its mouth and start slow-roasting it, and when half the village runs over to examine their new visitor their dinner tries to make a break for it. Unfortunately, though, the plesiosaur wanders right into a mess of fluid the tribe uses for lighting fires, and soon the only question on anyone’s mind is: “White meat or dark?”

Things don’t look so rosy the next day. The cliffdwellers are still miffed that their sacrifice just up and left, and Tara’s wife isn’t too happy that he came back with a new, blond girlfriend. When Sanna’s captors show up, she makes a break for it, and thanks to an assist from an angry Chasmosaurus she gets a little extra time to get away. That does little to help the fisherman and his friends, though—when they set out after her the same dinosaur causes them a spot of trouble before throwing itself into what sounds like a bottomless pit (lots of roaring, but no crash). Sanna also encounters some of the dangerous local fauna when she finds herself being enveloped by a carnivorous plant, although I would not recommend her escape technique of reaching outside to stab inwards at the plant’s tough outer hide (pointsy towardsies = bad).

The remainder of the film is little more than an excuse to watch Victoria Vetri run around in an embarrassingly small bikini. Thankfully, there are a few more prehistoric critters to help break the movie’s naked tedium. A newly-hatched baby something-o-saurus and its mother (which look like cousins of the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms) provide a brief bit of comic relief as they try to figure out whether Sanna is friend or food; an attack by an oversized Rhamphorhynchus livens things up a bit, and when Tara returns home to find that his tribe doesn’t think it’s cool that he ran off with someone else’s sacrifice, they try to serve him up on a raft to the local Tylosaurus. (The marine reptile responds by tossing him off the raft. “Yecch! Human? No thanks – I’m trying to cut back on junk food.”) Given how good these stop-motion creatures look, though, it is sad that the film also resorts to gluing plates and spikes on alligators and monitor lizards and making them fight, a practice that is despicable as it is lazy.

In the end, a giant tidal wave wipes away the coastal village but delivers our heroes to a mountaintop to observe a lunar eclipse. Dumb, but attractive, they would go on to found a settlement along the southern coast of California which would eventually be named Los Angeles. What happened to all the prehistoric monsters is unclear, though. Perhaps they got so tired of the cavepeople’s shenanigans that they eventually died of boredom—a risk I certainly felt while watching this vintage 1970s schlock.

Like the last Dinosaur Drive-In film featured here, Crater Lake Monster contains no actual dinosaurs (no matter how many times the scientists in the film call it one). Instead our monstrous star is a big, hungry plesiosaur hatched out of an egg kept in “suspended animation” at the bottom of a lake until a meteorite strike turns the lake bottom into an incubator. It’s not the most original premise, but not a terrible place to start, either, and the stop-motion special effects of David Allen are pretty good for their time. Too bad the filmmakers had no idea what to do with their story.

The film opens with a trio of scientists who have discovered a cave painting—said to be thousands of years old but looking like it was made with a Sharpie just yesterday—depicting Native Americans attacking a plesiosaur. The scientists have to scramble out of the cave as the meteorite strikes the lake, and they soon forget their first discovery to investigate the impact. Pretty standard monster movie stuff, but the movie jumps the track when we meet our unexpected protagonists, a pair of local ne’er do-wells named Arnie and Mitch.

Arnie and Mitch are meant to be the film’s comic relief. They are not the least bit funny. They haggle, squabble and complain for an inordinate amount of time without moving the plot forward, outside perhaps of giving people an opportunity to fall prey to the lake’s plesiosaur by renting them boats. After finding one of their rented boats full of blood and a snooty couple in shock after a run-in with the monster, Arnie and Mitch begin to suspect something might be up, though they never see the monster themselves despite working around the lake, scuffling in the lake and otherwise acting like oblivious potential prey items. Perhaps the odd day-night cycle is responsible for their weird behavior. Throughout the movie characters keep saying things like, “look at all the stars,” in the middle of the day; the director apparently tries to convince his audience that it’s dark out by having characters repeatedly comment on it being nighttime, all evidence to the contrary.

In any case, the monster continues to select morsels from the lakeside buffet—from cattle to fugitive liquor store robbers—before running into the town’s sheriff. Everything comes together, but when the local law enforcement brings up the problem to the scientists we met at the beginning of the film he receives little sympathy. The researchers basically yell “SCIENCE!” at the sheriff and decide that it would be wiser to trap the monster in a nearby bay for study rather than destroy it outright. A town meeting—filled with people apparently given $5 by the director to be in the movie and giving him his money’s worth—is called to resolve the issue, but it doesn’t get very far before the monster starts tossing around hay bales in a nearby work yard. It’s the last straw for the sheriff, who powers up a flimsy bulldozer that looks capable of giving the monster a very dull shave. Before he can dispatch the monster, though, the plesiosaur kills Arnie, leaving a sullen Mitch alone as the end credits begin to roll. As the yellow list began to flash over the screen, my wife said it best when she said, “wow. Nothing happened in that movie.”

When you get right down to it, most dinosaur movies are missing something. “Good special effects” might be one answer, and “a plot” is an even better one, but if “a trippy jazz-disco musical score” was your reply, then 1977′s Japanese monster flick Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds may be just what you have been looking for.

Our story picks up, as so many schlock films do, with an eye, apparently belonging to a young woman wandering around the woods of Mt. Fuji. It sounds as if she is being stalked by the British prog-rock band Jethro Tull, but as she tries to flee Ian Anderson and Co. she ends up falling into a cavern in which several giant eggs are kept on ice. Awakened by the disturbance, what I can only assume is one of Baby Huey’s siblings begins cracking out of its shell, providing us with another close-up eye shot (the amount of close-up shots of characters looking offscreen so early in the film makes me wonder if the director was a Spielberg admirer).

The young woman survives the ordeal, although she receives little help from the mining crew that finds her—contrary to what this film shows, vigorously jostling a fall victim down the side of a hill is not a good way to see if she has any serious spinal injuries. She soon dies at a hospital, but not before her story pops up on the evening news and catches the attention of the ambitious young geologist Ashizawa. This, ladies and gentlemen, is our hero—a smug, arrogant scientist who abuses women and becomes so preoccupied with his father’s idea that dinosaurs could have survived into the present day that he spends the majority of his screen time doing little more than saying “I know my father was right!” I’m sure he and Maston Thrust would get along famously.

Not long after we meet Ashizawa, the film introduces us to our other main protagonist—Akiko. The film’s score tells us that Akiko is Ashizawa’s love interest, but that is a bit hard to swallow, especially given the scientist’s reprehensible treatment of Akiko later in the film. Like Ashizawa, though, Akiko spends much of the film doing the same thing over and over again—in her case, screaming at the top of her lungs whenever the film’s titular monsters (which, as we will see, are not actually dinosaurs or birds at all) come into view.

The majority of the film takes place in and around Lake Saiko, which is bordered by the creepy Aokigahara Forest—a place filled with rocky caverns that is, as the film correctly notes, a popular place to commit suicide. There could hardly be a more perfect setting for a scary monster movie, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, Legend of Dinosaurs doesn’t really deliver. As the stilted story kicks into gear, people start disappearing around the lake and, in an unfortunate cameo, Black Beauty loses his head and gets stashed in a tree. Ashizawa uses these events to jump to his favored conclusions. Maybe he is meant to be portrayed as a bad scientist, or maybe, since the actor read the script, he knew what was up and felt fine skipping ahead a bit. “Oh look! A plesiosaur track… I mean, a mysterious track made by some unknown critter. I wonder what it could be….”

I have to say this for the film’s monsters, though—they have impeccable timing. The first, an immense plesiosaur, shows up just on time to cause trouble at the annual Dragon Festival. My hypothesis is that it was angered by the pop stylings of a Japanese band dressed up in country-western outfits playing on a floating stage—if that was the first thing I heard upon waking up after slumbering peacefully for hundreds of millions of years, I would be pretty mad, too. Apparently the marine reptile was more a fan of lively disco fusion, and it spares little time in dispatching a group of would-be hoaxers to the nauseatingly chaotic soundtrack.

Not content with slinking around the forest and stashing horses in trees anymore, the plesiosaur shifts gears and starts going after people hanging out in and around the lake. Among its victims is Akiko’s diving buddy, who practically serves herself up as a plesiosaur hors d’œuvre on a raft. (To tell you the truth, the plesiosaur-about-to-eat-Akiko’s-friend-scene—with its own creepy music—goes on for a bit too long, underscoring the hypothesis that many horror film directors have some pretty deep issues with women, issues that need addressing.) When news of the sightings and attacks reach the ears of a visiting American reporter, the whole town goes nuts over Nessie’s vacation to Lake Saiko, and a full-scale “scientific” investigation is launched. Frustratingly, the search doesn’t lead anywhere, and most everyone gives up out of boredom. A few hold out hope that the monster is still out there, though, and in my favorite line of the entire film, a reporter explains to a local official “if [the creature in the lake] is a dinosaur, it wouldn’t be very strange if there was also a pterodactyl here.” No, not strange at all….

Ashizawa, of course, is among those who believe that there really is a plesiosaur in the lake, but he goes diving at a very inopportune time—depth charges and divers don’t mix well. It’s up to Akiko—who is apparently immune to underwater pressure waves caused by the exploding canisters—to save Ashizawa, and the two eventually find their way out to the side of Mt. Fuji through a conveniently-placed cave. Meanwhile, a pair of hikers wandering around the Aokigahara Forest stumble upon—surprise!—an enormous pterosaur, and when the falsely-named “monster bird” drops by the town everyone is thrown into such a tizzy that they literally blow themselves up. Another lesson from the film—when hiding behind the big pile of depth charges, it’s best to make sure your gun’s safety is on.

With the lakeshore burnt to a crisp, the film returns to the plight of Akiko and Ashizawa on Mt. Fuji. As if the plesiosaur and pterosaur were not bad enough, it turns out that they were just signs that the massive volcano was about to erupt again, trapping the duo between some very hot rocks and the hungry puppets monsters. As the plesioaur and pterosaur squabble in the forest, Ashizawa reminds us of the dictum “Take a picture, it will last longer.” His delay on the rumbling volcano means almost certain death for him and Akiko, and with the roll of the end credits nearly every character introduced in the film—reptile and human alike—has died. The movie isn’t just bad, but it makes you feel bad, too.