You really have to love dinosaurs to appreciate this cheap and ludicrous film. The best dinosaur flicks are the ones where the dinosaur isn't the star, but the purpose of the plot (as in Jurassic Park, which is more of a cerebral survival flick). This movie appears created by the same people who created the vastly more superior "Bemuda Depths" movie with Connie Selleca. The plot takes an idea from the Doug McClure movie, "The Land That Time Forgot," that dinosaurs still exist in a jungle under the polar icecap; how this is all possible, I don't know, I think Jules Verne wrote the novel. Interested in the oil reserves down there, an oil company sends Thrust, a big game hunter played by Richard Boone, in one of his last roles I think, to kill the last living tyrannosaurus Rex guarding it. Two archaeologists, Steven Keats and Joan Van Ark (the inspiration for Spielberg's archaeologists in "Jurassic Park ?") go along to study the thing before he can kill it, but Boone gets all "Ahab after the whale" on them. Neither Keats or Van Ark have much chemistry with each other as Thrust tales a Three Stooges approach to killing/capturing the thing, failing each time and getting even more irrational as the movie goes. One of the craziest scenes is when the T-Rex steals the Arctic borer like a big dumb dog stealing a bone. The special effects are cheap, man in a T-Rex outfit filmed at extreme angles, ala the old "Godzilla" movies, which looks ridiculous and takes away from the obvious anatomical form of the T-Rex and the credibility of the picture. A triceratops with styracosaurus features is uncovered buried in the countryside (how it would survive buried alive is a mystery) which is played by two men in a suit, again off disproportionately in size, anatomy and scale to the T-Rex, and duels off in an even more ridiculous travesty. Even more ridiculous is the T-Rex never eats anyone. He's this large apex predator who stomps one guy and stands in place as a big rock literally rolls across his head, making a shape in the top of the costume! He's nothing more than a lumbering, stocky, hump-backed dumb animal, and the few pterosaurs you see glide so slow, you have to wonder just how they're staying aloft! The man-apes in this picture are also a rip-off from "Land of the Lost." With all this going against it, you can't call this a great picture, but if you want to see a dinosaur movie, the high camp won't bother you.
Review of The Last Dinosaur
