Drat1964

Originally made in 1931 with a couple of updates in 1937 and again in 1940, using historical recreations in the first part and switching more to a documentary style for the later parts. The recreations are a bit hit and miss most seem to give historical French, Italian and German characters broad English accents but Laurence Olivier gives his character an attempt at a genuine accent. A young Michael Rennie also makes a brief appearance. Ends on a rather odd note talking of the future use of peaceful flight showing gliders, but the footage used is from Germany and was in fact the method Germany used to train pilots to get around WWI restrictions on it's airforce. But overall, considering it's 1931 origin not a bad film.

Play's to a now tired formula our hero's, dinosaurs and annoying kids (or kid in this case). By this point you know what you are going to get. Large dinosaurs who continue to be able to avoid weapons fire (if only elephants and Rhinos could learn this trick).

About all you can say is the effects have improved a bit from the original, but the story is pretty weak, the mother and father are very annoying, particularly the mother, played by Tea Leoni, who several times seems to be trying to get everyone killed. JP movies have a solid history off killing cast members and about half way through you are really hoping this will be the fate of the Ms Leon's character. Sadly not.

Of the 3 films in the first series the 1st was fresh and new, the 2nd not quite as good but still watchable and 3 should just not have been made.

Quite a few reviews call this a B move, that's an insult to B movies. B movies of the 50's are things like Forbidden Planet, The Thing, War of the Worlds or most of the films of Ray Harryhausen 70+ years later these are now regarded as classic movies. This is more of a Z movie a ranking developed for movie's so bad they could not be considered as B movies.

Frog Town is just awful and it doesn't even seem to try and hide how awful it is, it's even a theme in its own preview clip.

A looking at the trivia for the film, shows why it was so bad, script written in just 6 days, filmed in just 19 days, Tim Thomerson (king of 80's B movies passed on this). Had an original budget of 3 million slashed to just 1 million, this is half the budget of Forbidden Planet, made in the 50's.

Set in a post apocalyptic world where it seems nobody can act, but strangely based on the hairdo's of Roddy Piper and most of the girls many hairdressers seem to have survived and in spite of having an acting coach Piper just seems to have no idea of how to act.