100 Million BC (2008)

Excellent but underrated film

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Yes, another awful B movie from The Asylum on Netflix...Right at the beginning of this film a group of Navy Seals are debriefed on time travel experiment that took place in the 1950's by Dr. Frank Reno. They sent a team back 75 Million Years to prevent any kind of time paradox. So now roughly 60 years later they are ready to send the rescue team.Most people into time travel movies and half a brain -at this point- are asking, Excuse me, what?! The further back you send anything in time, the more likely and traumatic the changes are on future events (aka the butterfly effect). Also why did you call this 100 Million BC? I guess it just sounded cool and a simple rewrite of the script was out of the question.For the remainder of the film, the viewer is shown crappy computer generated dinosaurs, tribal scientists from the 1950's, and extremely poor dialog. Once they get back to the future with one hitchhiker, a dinosaur named "Big Red", the team who was stranded for 6 years in the past now appear to have super human abilities. They can leap from helicopters 50 feet in the air and run very fast.Then during the climax a younger version of Dr. Frank Reno shows up from the 1950's... paradox? No of course not, he sends the dinosaur back to where it belongs and takes half the team back to the 1950's with plenty of future knowledge from the year 2008... I am sure that will make everything just fine.This movie blatantly steals from, The Philadelphia Experiment, Jurassic Park, Stargate, and abuses time travel worse than any movie I have ever seen. The special effects are low budget, because they must have spent the money on Michael Gross. His salary alone had to cost something right?

But in all honesty, is it really saying that much? I watched this out of curiosity as I make it a habit of watching these Syfy movies(most of which are really bad) when there is nothing else on. I have seen worse movies than 100 Million BC and there have been worse from SyFy, however this aside that doesn't stop it from being terrible. The production values are cheap and shot so darkly sometimes you can hardly make out what was going on and the effects look phony and the sound is both murky and lacking in authenticity. The music is canned, which can mean tacky and annoying, the case here, the story is badly paced often being dull and there are no thrills, suspense or tense build ups to savour and the dialogue is toe-curlingly bad. The acting not helped by some stock and clichéd characters is awful, Michael Gross tries but Chris Atkins is wooden and painful to watch. All in all, I've seen worse, but this was not a good movie at all. 2/10 Bethany Cox

I, too, got sucked into buying this at Wal-Mart because of the cover art - the misleading cover art.I watched the other flick, "Journey To the Center Of the Earth" first and thought it was putrid. Well, it was, but "100 Million BC" was even (new word) putrider. I can only conclude that everyone involved during the couple of days it took to put this s--t together were drunk.As for Michael Gross, well, oh how the mighty have fallen. As for everyone else, may they fall off the face of the earth. The jokers who were advertised as "an elite military team" were scary. In spite of the pseudo-intellectual ranting they were thoroughly unconvincing as their characters and as actors.Well, maybe, it was played for laughs, but it was neither humorous or even mildly interesting. Being a sadist I sat through the whole thing with the feeling that it had to get better.It got worse. CRAP with a capital K. If you spot this in the Wal-Mart bin take it out and, as a public service, stomp on the damn thing so no one else will be taken in.One hundred million zeroes for "100 Million BC."

For low-rent studio The Asylum, this is probably one of their bigger-budgeted efforts. I don't know what was spent on this movie, but I'm guessing a minimum of $1 million, probably closer to $5 million. Those CGI effects, as fake looking as they are, still cost several hundred K to produce.Also, this has actors in it (on the downward slide of their careers though they may be) that you have actually heard of. Usual fare from The Asylum gets actors you've never heard of, like minor soap opera players and refugees from other direct-to-video studios. Also, they did some actual location shooting in Belize. I think it was just second unit footage with no actors in it, but, that still cost them some money. I would bet that the parts with the actors trudging through the supposed prehistoric jungle were shot in some remote part of California mountains.Which is to say that I am willing to grade on a curve here. The producers and director are working with a really low budget. Still, you have to have a good story. The idea for the film was a good hook I thought, but the story is a little confusing. I'm willing to give some slack for "plot holes" since all time traveling movies have them.The acting was really not too bad. These are all experienced working actors trying to do a good job. About the worst moments were some of the death scenes where they get eaten by dinosaurs. However, I've seen much worse, namely in any Ed Wood film, or anything by Coleman Francis or Al Adamson. The music was canned, but it didn't sound too bad, it did sound somewhat similar to a big budget studio movie soundtrack. And helicopter shots of Los Angeles at night (the whole last 30 minutes of the movie) always add a higher budget sheen to the proceedings.If you like monster movies, there are worse ones out there. Maybe if you aren't paying too much attention, they will fool you into thinking that you watched a big budget movie. I recognize that this is not a ringing endorsement. Unless you are a monster movie fanatic, or fan of schlock, I would stay away.