100 Million Years BC (DVD)

...and Marines to the year 100 Million B. C. as part of an experiment in time travel. Unfortunately, things go badly wrong and the ones that survive the trip are trapped with little hope of return. Despite the team finding a clever way of telling him they don't blame him for this, Doctor Reno still tortures himself, especially as one of the team who has been trapped was his brother, Erik. This is only natural, I suppose; I don't know what their family ...
...lead a team back to 100 Million B. C. to rescue his brother and whoever of his colleagues has survived. As is common in films of this type, they run into a lot of strange animals and situations that they didn't expect or plan for and they also forget that the wormhole they've come through could let the residents of 100 Million B. C. back in the other direction. Equally predictably, it's the biggest and fiercest of them all that makes it through, ... more

"100 Million B. C." is from Asylum films; a company who in recent years have specialised in making and releasing films deliberately titled and written to cash in on the hype surrounding major label releases. Generally, however, the films they make are far worse than the originals and rarely worth watching. Given that "100 Million B. C." is based on "10,000 B. C.", which wasn't really all that good a film to start with, you can maybe guess that this one isn't going to be worth watching, either.

Perhaps what makes it more of a disappointment is that it's actually not a bad idea to start with. Back in the 1940s, Doctor Frank Reno sends a group of scientists and Marines to the year 100 Million B. C. as part of an experiment in time travel. Unfortunately, things go badly wrong and the ones that survive the trip are trapped with little hope of return. Despite the team finding a clever way of telling him they don't blame him for this, Doctor Reno still tortures himself, especially as one of the team who has been trapped was his brother, Erik. This is only natural, I suppose; I don't know what their family are like, but I certainly wouldn't want to explain something like that to my mother!

Sixty years later, however, there is some hope. Technology has moved on far enough to give Doctor Reno the opportunity to lead a team back to 100 Million B. C. to rescue his brother and whoever of his colleagues has survived. As is common in films of this type, they run into a lot of strange animals and situations that they didn't expect or plan for and they also forget that the wormhole they've come through could let the residents of 100 Million B. C. back in the other direction. Equally predictably, it's the biggest and fiercest of them all that makes it through, something akin to a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Even knowing how bad the film is, the thought of this story still fills me with excitement. It's a great basic idea, filled with excitement and endless possibilities, if it's done right. Admittedly, it's not the most original of ideas, as pretty much every single element has been done before; people dropping into pre-historic periods was a staple of 1950s film making, travelling to strange places through wormholes is very much like "Stargate" and large dinosaurs causing havoc reminds me of "Jurassic Park" or "Godzilla". But that doesn't mean the combination was destined to failure if everything was up to scratch. Sadly, it wasn't in any way.

Whilst the basic idea was sound, the plot has enough holes that suspension of belief wasn't enough; you need to take disbelief and rip it up and throw it away completely. This is especially so when the rescue team are preparing to go back to pre-historic times the second time around. Suddenly, they are concerned by things that hadn't bothered them the first time around; things like creating a paradox despite the people who were sent back having written things in English. Also, they seem to be concerned about air quality affecting them, but the fact that the people they are going to rescue have been breathing that same air doesn't seem to have occurred to them; it's either harmless, or it's killed them, but no-one thinks of this.

The script is fairly predictable most of the time as well. The second half of the film is the same as every other "dinosaur in a city" film you can think of. Instead of trying to destroy it, they try to trap it, involving lots of running away and people being eaten. Again, in true predictable fashion, the next person to be eaten is usually the last one to have said something of the lines of "I can't see it", only to discover that it was behind him all along. The suspense was never killing me, but the sheer boredom of it nearly did, as it did get rather repetitive towards the end.

Watching the film, it didn't seem as if I was the only one to have felt this way about it. The entire cast seem to have realised that this film was doomed from the start and put in a level of effort to match. Admittedly, most of the Marines were largely unknown and probably grateful to get a role, but the performances here don't suggest that an acting career is in the making for any of them. Most of them acted like they had received very little in the way of direction and weren't entirely sure what they should be doing. However, they can maybe be forgiven as the performances by the lead actors weren't really a great deal better. In the case of Greg Evigan as Ellis Dorn, it wasn't entirely his fault as he wasn't given a huge amount to do, but I would have expected more from Michael Gross and Christopher Atkins as the Reno brothers, but they didn't seem to want to waste their time with emotions.

As bad as the humans were, they were completely outshone by the special effects which were so bad, they certainly came across as being "special". The T-Rex was obviously computer generated, but didn't seem to have a great deal of depth to it, as if they ran out of budget before they'd put in the third dimension. The way it kept appearing from nowhere suggested that they were trying to minimise the on screen time, although whether this was to keep the budget down or because they realised it looked awful, I don't know. Some of the other dinosaur type creatures looked a bit rubbery, in a way that hasn't been so obvious in a film since "Snakes on a Plane", or some of the old "Doctor Who" monsters.

It ended up making the film look like one of those 1950s or 1960s dinosaur films, which would have been acceptable if they were trying to spoof one of those, but this didn't seem to be the case. It makes it even worse when you think that "Jurassic Park" had much better effects, despite now being fifteen years old, although I will concede that a major difference in budget could have been more responsible for this, despite the progression of computer generated effects in the decade and a half since then. Watch out for one particularly bad moment where a car drives past the actors backwards in a scene that must have used blue screen technology, but did so incredibly badly. It would have been funny if it wasn't so pathetic.

Not content with being a disappointment to the eye, the film is also an assault on the ears. It's perhaps just as well that films don't come in scratch and sniff, as I'm sure that would have been a let down as well. But here, the sound effects are not up to scratch, with the dinosaurs not sounding terribly scary and with their sounds not always matching up to their movements. The gun noises were also badly dubbed, with some sounding like they were just firing compressed air; almost as if they'd been missed and not been dubbed over in the mix later on. Even the gun sounds that do seem to have been dubbed don't always sound the same, despite them supposedly being the same weapons. The actual music was done in much the same way as the computer effects; the general idea was there, but the execution was obviously done on the cheap and the film makers clearly got what they paid for.

It seems kind of churlish to kick a film while it's down, but it could be argued that even the rating the film was given is wrong. Whilst there are some characters being killed by dinosaurs in not terribly pleasant ways, this doesn't seem to being enough to account for the 18 rating. Given what some films get away with, I suspect a 15 rating would suffice, although the one advantage to the 18 rating is that it reduces the number of people who have the option to see this most awful of films.

If there is one good thing to be said about the film, it's the running time. At around 85 minutes long, I can only be thankful that there isn't more of it. Given the lack of quality in other areas, I suspect that the lack of a decent budget was the reason the film was deliberately kept short, but this is the only area where the lack of money seems to have had a positive outcome.

This isn't a film that seems to be easy to come across offline, as none of the major DVD sellers in my area seem to stock it. Still, if it was easy to find, people might be tempted by it, so maybe this can be seen as a positive thing. The Amazon price of £15.99 nearly made me choke on my coffee, as that seems to be to be more than the budget for the film itself as opposed to a reasonable purchase price. Even the cheapest prices I could find, for £5.99 on Play Trade and £6.99 on the Amazon Marketplace, would be more than the film is worth and I suspect the same could be said for even rental costs. This is a film to be avoided wherever possible, even if it gets shown on TV for nothing, as it's not a film that's so bad it's good, it's so bad it's simply awful. 

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