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38%
Overall Rating
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Ranked #7,495
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A space-ship gets lost and is forced to make an emergency landing on an unknown planet. The planet looks much like Earth, only with no trace of civilization. Soon the crew discovers that there are dinosaurs on the planet, and blood-thirsty buggers at that. The crew hopes to be found and rescued, but they have to struggle to survive until then.
--IMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: March 29, 2010
Reviewing Planet of Dinosaurs is going to be a bit tricky, as there are two ways that I could go about this. On the one hand, it's really a horrible little movie: it has some special effects that were great for the time, but otherwise, there's nothing about it that warrants a recommendation. The acting is laughable, the storyline is practically non-existent, and some of the dialogue... well, let's just say that there was a good reason that the RiffTrax boys decided to feature this movie on their program. On the other hand, I have fond memories of repeatedly watching this movie as a kid. I can certainly see the flaws in the movie some twenty years later, but I'll readily admit that some of that nostalgia factor may override the cold hard facts in this review. So, should I trash the movie or give it a good fanboy gushing regardless of the problems? Well... let's get started.
As mentioned, there's really nothing here in terms of storyline. We begin with a group of scientists flying through space in their spaceship, something goes horribly wrong, and they crash land on a planet thousands of light years away from earth. This new planet is much like the earth that we all know and love, but with one minor difference: the planet is younger than the one we grew up on, and as such, evolution hasn't passed the dinosaur era. Needless to say, nine humans versus a planet full of dinosaurs isn't a fair fight, but our heroes attempt to make the best of their situation. Aside from a minor subplot involving two characters with radically different outlooks on how to handle their situation, that's about it for the story: spaceship crashes, humans encounter and battle dinosaurs, repeat until the credits roll.
As I also mentioned, the acting found within these eighty minutes is about as stiff as it gets. I can't point to a single actor or actress and say that they did at least a somewhat decent job, but I could certainly run through the credits and point out who was downright horrible. When you stop to consider that there is a lot of awkwardly-written dialogue and a minimal amount of actual dinosaur action, you'll probably realize that this was a recipe for disaster.
Truthfully, the film was downright boring in spots. There is a staggering amount of padding on display, with a number of scenes showing us nothing more than our group of merry misfits wandering aimlessly through the barren wasteland that is now their home. We'll watch as all seven or eight survivors enter one side of the shot and exit through the other, and then we'll switch to another angle to repeat the process. I get that it couldn't be dinosaur action from frame one until the grand finale, but something - anything - other than this would have worked better to pad out the running time.
On the positive side of things, the effects used to bring the dinosaurs to life and bring them together with the humans were surprisingly well done. Now, this is judging the movie by 1979 standards, so don't pick this one up expecting something that will rival Jurassic Park. It's readily apparent that the filmmakers took some inspiration from the work of Harryhausen, and though the effects found here do not rival those of the master, they still get the job done and then some. I have seen a lot of movies do a lot worse with their effects, and I'm not narrowing that list down to movies released during the late seventies: the dinosaurs here look a lot better than some of the low budget stuff that I have seen released in the past five years. The fact that there were some great locations used that actually looked otherworldly only sweetened the deal.
One other thing that I'd like to point out is the score. Now, I'm usually not one to acknowledge a musical score unless it's exceptionally good or horrifically bad, so it really surprised me when I found that I was paying more attention to the music than the action in some scenes. It borrows heavily from the scores produced by Goblin, but in a good way: there's no conceivable way that I could label this as a ripoff, but it certainly shares some similarities. This score was downright excellent, and I'll be looking for it on CD shortly after posting this review.
Overall, there are some really good dinosaur effects on display and there's a brilliant score to tie everything together, but there's a lot of padding in a story that is already short on actual meat and the acting is atrocious. With that said, I did enjoy the film, but I'll admit that some of my enjoyment may have been due to the nostalgia factor of rediscovering a film from my childhood. Still, I think that I can objectively give the film a 5/10, even though my personal enjoyment may have been a bit higher.
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