Prehisteria 3

I always remembered this movie from my childhood because my sister and I would always pick this movie at blockbuster. I also have never seen any of the other movies in this franchise.

Right out of the gate you get these amazing mini dinosaurs riding a train set before they are whisked away on a putt-putt adventure the likes of which you've never seen. I am definitely giving a lot of points for nostalgia, but this is worth a watch because of the dinosaurs alone.

The human characters interact with each other in a strange almost alien fashion. And upon the initial reaction to seeing the dinosaurs people seem to accept them alarmingly fast. The dinosaurs are even employees at our heroines makeshift minigolf course.

And who is the heroine of this movie? She is a 10-12-year-old girl who's obsessed with Scotland and golf to an extremely unhealthy degree. She will often do her faux Scottish accent and talk about Sean Connery and Haggis.

Also of note is the incredible use of stock cartoon sound effects for comedic value. Roughly every single scene assaults you with classic effects such as "*boing* which I personally loved.

While i understand this movie is probably a 3-5 for most folks, I find it charming and loved the premise. I will now go back and watch the others to give my retroactive review.

19th opus in queer director's David Decoteau's career. Cheap infra-production with stock footage, stock characters and stock sequences already presented and seen in the last two movies. Filled with reiterative narrative excuses to simply reset what was built in the last movie and create a similar story about the mini-dinos solving family conflicts but with less of a presence and not nearly as personal this time around.

Decoteau doesn't have much to grab onto this time, the script provides the characters with cartoon-like behaviors and adds a mocking tone of cynical children schlock, leaning on the over the top performances and decidedly absurd/cleverless jokes that giveaway it's careless and utterly self-conscious condition.

Having said that, David's touch is unquestionable, with the expected immersion-breaking kitchyness (perhaps not as potent as the one in his more radical searches for modern camp like A Talking Cat), the gender transgressions and unexpected stereotype-free female characters, but perhaps the biggest staple it's the unabashed quirkiness and the earnestly eccentric spirit.

Besides that, there's nothing here other than the shoddy children fiction tropes one can point out since it shares a screenwriter with Foodfight! (2012). Five writers got their hands on the project and it shows in its eclectic structure and messy concatenation of jokes.

The flaws turn into virtues for the warned spectator, enjoyable for those who like weird cinema, they will find what they seek for in this negligible little piece of infantile camp without remorse or reservations.

The summary above is roughly about all we could do in our college dorm when this came on. We literally couldn't move, this movie just drained the life out of us. Now granted, I'm writing this review a few years after having viewed it (I refuse to watch it again) but I must say this is, or is at least near, the worst movie ever made. Not for any particular reason, but that it was like a bad car wreck. Not funny even in an Army of Darkness intentional cheese or even a Plan 9 unintentional cheesy way. All of us in the dorm lounge could not move while the movie was on. I would call this movie a vomitous mass, but I probably couldn't have even up-chucked while the movie was on...just stare in hypnotic horror.

As for a more than one line summary: ingredients for a cutesy movie...

-cute little (poorly made) miniature dinosaurs check

-cute little girl and her family check

-cute miniature golf course that said family owns check

-not so cute villain plotting to take miniature golf course check

I don't know what went wrong, but something surely did. Perhaps it was the over-done cartoonish plot of the family business being taken over by an evil villain (but a miniature golf course?) <shudder>. Perhaps it was the fact that the miniature dinosaurs did nothing but look cute...literally nothing beyond cute posing for these things <shudder>. Maybe it was just the fact that this movie sucked.

Ah well, avoid at all costs (if you don't have a very young child that is amused by Teletubbies...this <may> be on his/her level. 1/10