dir. Ryan Bellgardt
The title alone is a good hint as to the levels of insanity in this film, although it’s far more bizarre than anyone could expect. A lot of it follows typical ’90s family film clichés – a school trip to a museum! A plucky kid! A knowing mentor figure! A pseudo-magical creature running around in the city! An evil scientist! The only thing missing is the actual ’90s, with this film astoungingly being made almost two decades into the twenty-first century. Most of the story is an extended chase sequence, with our hero following a newly hatched baby dinosaur through a museum, a supermarket, and the woods (honestly, a lot of these chases could have been avoided if the boy just learned to zip his backpack up), trying to save him from a camp full of the evil scientist’s minions. There’s no real attempt to explain how or why the dinosaur came to be among us – the knowing mentor figure, who is possibly a ghost, is clearly involved, but it’s fundamentally anyone’s guess. The effects are cheap, the acting is atrocious, and the film generally has no reason whatsoever to exist. No wonder, then that it’s the first of a planned trilogy.
BMDb 