Dedicated to the boys of the Satellite of Love. I may come to regret it.
One week ago the pioneers of professional riffing comedy returned to the air via Netflix in the form of the season 11 premiere of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Without them, the pop cultural placement of B-movies would probably be in a much different place and a great many series, both famous and obscure alike, would probably not have risen to such prominence in the internet age.
With that in mind, I decided to dedicate this rather slow release weekend to the Satellite of Love crew by kicking back on the couch and spending an evening with a film that reminds me of exactly why I had to pull Fromage Fridays from regular rotation.
The nicest thing that I can truly say about “Cowboys
vs. Dinosaurs” is that what you see is truly what you get. For all of the film’s
massively gaping faults, it doesn’t take more than 10 minutes before a
velociraptor rears its scaly face to dig into the human buffet laid out before
it and that sense of momentum is probably the movie’s ultimate saving grace,
It’s obsession with following disgraced rodeo cowboy
Val Walker sulking back into his hometown after leaving in shame following a
failed performance and a spiral into domestically abusing his girlfriend would
have been an unsalvageable failure had those elements actually lingered long
enough to land an impact.
Fortunately, every moment you begin to wonder whether
or not the director of this cinematic compost heap actually realizes that
directors are supposed to use more than one take for quality control, a CGI
raptor bursts in like the Kool-Aid man to mercifully spare you from
performances so bad they become more life draining than out right hilarious.
The only real worthwhile talent of the cast ironically
comes from the characters that the film wants us to actually hate, resulting in
the opposite impact.
Vernon Wells plays the sleazy corporate mineral
mining executive that orders the iridium excavation that uncovered the film’s
dinosaurs and his experience helps him to act circles around his cast members
so brilliantly that when he actually pins the blame for this incident on his
shrewish and horrendously wooden project manager, you actually buy it despite
knowing that 20 minutes ago, he was a maniacal laugh away from becoming a “Power
Rangers” villain once more.
He and Eric Roberts exist in the movie to
essentially denigrate the cast of non-acting sentient cardboard the film calls
characters and god bless them for it because it takes a special kind of bad to
utterly fail at simply selling getting mauled by dinosaurs.
They don’t even look alive during the action
sequences. There’s a good several shots of the women of this film firing fully
automatic weaponry Rambo style with all the excitement of man dragged to a
Katherine Heigel rom-com by his clingy casual hook up of 3 weeks. I’m not
convinced for a second that any of this movies extras actually wanted to be
there. The only guy that manages to have a stand out performance is Kelcey
Watson as Quaid, whose intensity is the exact brand of outright comical that
this film should have been chasing.
Although “Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs” moves fast enough
to prevent any developing sense of regret, what really grinds in my craw about
it is that it is more or less indicative of what the direct to video B-movie
market has become in the modern age; a rising trend that is slowly sucking the
fun and enjoyment out of ironic viewing that has left me so drained with
watching these types of films that I often contemplate throwing in the towel.
“Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs” is littered here and there
with moments that are memorably bizarre in concept, such as the most awkward “skinny
dipping” get together ever put to film and Val reaction to the murder of a good
friend and mentor by essentially shaking his head and staring at the floor for
a few seconds while looking mildly disturbed.
At the heart of the movie’s problems however, is
something that is becoming more and more prevalent in schlock cinema, which is
a sort of baked in laziness born from the thought that the absurdity of the
premise should be enough to carry a film rather than actual craftsman ship or
effort.
I applaud that director Ari Novak at least
understood to make the dinosaurs of the title a central part of the show but
the usage of the cheap CGI rendered dinosaurs to essentially murder their
victims with a tap of the snout and a millisecond cut to a screaming reaction of
somebody in the vicinity is just unforgivably dull.
Low production values is no excuse for a flat out
lack of imagination and when the majority of a film is about dinosaur attacks,
it would help if more than 20% of the actual kills and confrontations were
cleverly thought out or visually interesting.
And that summarizes too many of these movies in a
nut shell; over reliance on conceptual absurdity and under delivering on where
it actually matters.
1½ out of 4 Shatners
Bottom Line: I appreciate “Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs”
not being painful. I would’ve appreciated it being entertaining even more.
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