Dinocroc vs. Supergator - review (Killer Croc Season)

Oh boy.  Well, I'm not entirely sure why I'm doing this to myself, but this one is going to be a doozey.  In 2004, famous B-movie maker, Roger Corman produced a movie for the Sci-fi channel called Dinocroc, about a genetically recreated Suchomimus, spliced with a modern crocodile, escaping from a lab and terrorising the locals.  Roger Corman wanted to make a sequel, Dinocroc 2, but the Sci-Fi channel told him that sequels didn't do well for them.  Roger Corman, being awesome, decided to make it anyway, but changed the name, that film became Supergator, this time about a genetically recreated Deinosuchus, escaping from a lab and terrorising locals.  Realising that Roger Corman is a crazy awesome lunatic who cannot be stopped, Sci-Fi eventually caved on the sequels and in 2010, Corman produced Dinocroc vs. Supergator.

Warning, this is a spoiler based review

I've got the feeling that dvd cover is lying to me about the quality of the effects in this movie.

In a lab in Hawaii, a bunch of extras run as alarms sound off.  Supergator has escaped, somehow, from the lab and is on the rampage.  It grabs a scientist to eat on it's way out and actually, the effects aren't bad.  Obviously you can tell it's CG, but it looks relatively realistic at least compared to the likes of Lake Placid 2.

It actually chomps the people instead of vaguely biting in their direction.

Supergator

A blonde woman makes a phone call and holy shit David Carradine is in this movie!  *wikipedia*  So this is one of his last roles before he auto-asphyxiated himself to death in 2009, awkward....  

Carradine is playing Mr Drake, the blonde woman on the phone to him spouts some technobabble and asks if she should call the authorities, but Drake tells her they can't risk anyone finding out what they were up to in the lab and they should just tranq it, but the blonde woman says the reason Supergator escaped is because he's grown immune to the drugs they were using.  Drake tells her to calm down and keep her mouth shut, he'll send a team.

Then he asks about the other specimen, which I think is safe to assume is Dinocroc.  Blonde woman says they are trying to sedate it, but the fleeing scientists clue me that it's probably not working.  Blonde woman says the growth hormone worked too well, cue Dinocroc, stomping it's way through a brick wall, which flattens a scientist called Stuart, farewell, we hardly knew ye.

Dinocroc

Drake asks what's going on, but Blonde woman has dropped her phone and Dinocroc runs off, with some stolen Jurassic Park dinosaur sound effects and eats a few scientists for good measure.  The effects for Dinocroc are much worse than that of Supergator, though it looks like they might have used a similar graphics engine to that of Jurassic park as it has it's T-Rex stomp down.

Cue titles!  We get some stock footage of the Hawaiian islands.

A couple on the beach, the girl wants to go to a waterfall to cool off in the fresh water, the boyfriend points to the see, but the salt water doesn't sound appealing so she runs off through the trees and her boyfriend chases after her.  They strip off at the quite frankly, pitiful, waterfall, and act badly while we wait for one of the genetically enhanced dinosaur crocodiles to turn up and eat them.

The girlfriend goes to get the boyfriend's beer and as soon as her back is turned, Supergator, from literally beneath his feet, raises it's head up and eats him in one bite.  I had to hold my stomach from laughing so hard.  Girlfriend wonders where boyfriend has gone, considering the water only looks about 2 or 3 feet deep at most and Supergator is bloody huge.  She shouts for him fails to notice Dinocroc sneaking up on her.

He's not exactly light footed about it either

Dinocroc looks at her for a few moments before she finally turns around and noticed the gigantic Dinocroc behind her, she screams then Dinocroc eats her.

In what is obviously either the directors or the producers house, Paul Beaumont gets a call from Conrad, they talk without context about folders and committees and recalling and theories and evidence.  It seems Paul has been investigating Drake's lab and he suspects that Dinocroc and/or Supergator are being housed there.  For what purpose, I do not know, but this is not the type of movie to worry about that.  Conrad tells Paul he should go investigate the lab, Paul says he will tomorrow, but for now he's going to enjoy a day off and go fishing.  Oh, movie.

Cut to a boat and another blonde woman, called Cassidy, her dad radios her and tells her to meet him somewhere, he has a shiny sheriffs badge, so I guess he's the sheriff.  She also has a shiny badge so much be a deputy.  They've had a call from a local photographer, reporting finding something strange in the water, the clothes and belongings of the couple from earlier.  They see a couple of helicopters pass over them and we meet a bunch of generic army type dudes.

All of them look vaguely familiar, one looks like Kripke from the Big Bang Theory.

A scientist guy in a lab cost runs through the woods and encounters the army type dudes who have been sent by Drake.  They shoot him.....  why?  The scientists have been working on this for ages presumably and haven't talked before so why would they be disloyal now?  The army type dudes split into two groups and holy shit one group hears the sound of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park.  Oh wait, that's probably Dinocroc.

Two of the guys go look and then, sit down on the floor and let Dinocroc stand on them, I'm not even kidding.  Two other guys encounter Dinocroc and use their limitless machine gun bullets on it for a minute or two, this only pisses Dinocroc off so it eats them.

good, they weren't very nice.

The remaining two army type dudes then run into Dinocroc, the one trying to be a badass says "Stop praying and start shooting", because shooting was so effective for the other guys.  This just pisses off Dinocroc more, so they throw some C4 at it, which singes it a bit and they high tail it out of there.  They call their chopper for extraction, then the scenes cuts to a weird pink building and we hear Supergators roar and a Wilhelm scream. 

A dark haired woman storms up to Drake's house and karate chops a bodyguard.  This is Victoria, she tells Drake that the army type dudes have not been heard from and they think they've been eaten.  She asks if they should get more, Drake starts telling a story about a pizza place, for some reason, then tells her to call 'The Cajun'.  I hope it's Gambit.

In a Bayou in Louisana, we see a guy trying to be a more badass Crocodile Dundee, I assume this is The Cajun.  He...  *sigh* cuts his own arm with Crocodile Dundee's knife, dripping blood into the water.  He gets a call, stating his name to be Logan, Victoria who is calling him, asks if he knows Drake, he says he does and then turns and fires his gun at nothing.  For some reason. This guy is no Reba.

Cut to Paul, fishing, he gets another call from Conrad, he tells Paul that they have new pictures of the lab and it looks destroyed.  The committee called Drake, which I think is shady.

Deputy Cassidy travels through some stock footage, looking for things.  She appears to have boat trouble and sees Paul fishing, managing to get her boat to the dock where he offers to help.  To repay his kindness whilst he is attempting to fix her engine, Deputy Cassidy looks at Paul's laptop and jumps to conclusions.  He can't repair her boat as the blades on the propeller are broken, but offers to give her a lift.  It turns out that Deputy Cassidy is actually working for Fish and Game.

Making her the Bill Pullman of this movie

They drive along the road, but find their way block by dinosaur sound effects and rocks.  At a pool, two bad actresses in bikinis get hit on a creepy dude.  Logan, The Cajun, throws him into a pool.  Bloody hell, he got to Hawaii fast, how far is that?  *Wikipedia*  4000 miles, or an 8 hour flight.  He must be the bloody Flash or something.

Logan gets a message from Drake telling him they're ready for his "hunting" trip.  Jerry the pool attendant gets a phone call from an actor telling him he's arriving soon and wants his villa stocked.  For some reason.

Paul and Cassidy pick the lock on a gate in order to open up a new road.  The two bikini girls from earlier arrive at the pathetic waterfall and are surprised by the photographer who called in the Sheriff.  The bikini girls asks the photographer to take their photo, which he does. 

Supergator has had enough of the bad acting

Their photo shoot doesn't late long and the bikini girls run screaming through the woods.  Then they run into Dinocroc who bites one of them in half and just eats the other one.  The Sheriff arrives at a farm and some guys show him a poorly CGI'ed still photo of a half eaten cow.  One of the guys thinks it's aliens.  The Sheriff tries to radio Cassidy, but she left her radio in her boat.

In the jeep, Cassidy tells Paul to stop and she decides to walk back to her boat, she tells him she saw his laptop and drew her own conclusions, so obviously he's an axe murderer and she's going to shoot him.  He tells her he's investigating Drake and that's why the pictures were on the laptop.  Then he shows her a field of giant mushrooms, which she guesses must be two stories tall. 

Two feet maybe

Paul tells her he thinks mushrooms aren't the only thing they think Drake is growing.  Drake calls Victoria and tells her he needs her to tie up any loose ends if Logan's hunting trip goes wrong.  We get a scene of Logan and Victoria arguing about whether or not she's coming on the boat, which she wins, but both of them lack any charisma to make this scene or their characters interesting.

Paul and Cassidy run into the blonde woman from the beginning of the movie who tells them, "it's coming" and the T-Rex roars in the distance.  They help her to the jeep and they now force me to get somewhat angry with the movie now.

Look familiar?

They reenact the T-Rex chase scene for Jurassic Park.  The only thing they're missing is an injured Jeff Goldblum.  This annoys me, I'm a big Jurassic Park fan, I don't mind homages, the sound effect stealing is quite annoying, but stealing scenes is just going too far.  Also Dinocroc runs far too far for it's body structure.

Logan and Victoria see Dinocroc chasing the boat down as they pass the river they are on, even though the different cuts make it clear that the jeep wasn't really driving by a river.  Logan shoots the Dinocroc with something, but doesn't bother to get off the boat to check if it's alive or dead.  For some reason.

The blonde woman wakes up in hospital, even though she didn't appear to be injured or unconscious thirty seconds ago, surrounded by the Sheriff, Logan and Victoria and Paul and Cassidy.  Her name is Kimberly taft.  She tells them, her and brother Stuart were working on plant growth, then Drake got them to test their magic growth potion on crocodiles.  No one comments that brother and sister, Stuart has an American accent and Kimberly has a vaguely European accent.

She says that they bombarded the creatures in a reactor for six months, then 2 days ago, everything changed and we a two minute flashback of the beginning of the movie, slowed down on a red filter.

The actor from earlier, at his villa with two brunette bikini babes and they talk about the horror movies he makes and practise screaming.  Then they are all eaten by Dinocroc, making their appearances in the movie completely pointless.

Victoria goes into Kimberly's room with a needle and injects her in the arm, killing her, which Paul stumbles across.  Victoria tries to stab Paul with the needle and then zaps him with a heart attack paddle.  She doesn't even shout "clear".   Cassidy and Logan find Paul and Logan goes after Victoria, Paul calls Conrad to fill him in on the plot of the movie so far.

The Sheriff tells Paul and Cassidy Victoria used cyanide and Logan appears, suggesting they deal with the giant crocs, which he keeps calling lizards, which is really annoying.  Whose side is Logan on anyway?  He is a poor Reba.  I miss her, why can't she be in this movie?  Logan says that crocodiles and alligators are mortal enemies and will fight if brought together, he thinks they should get them into a fight and kill the winner.

OK, that's like saying African Elephants and Indian Elephants are mortal enemies.  The only place crocs and gators live together is the Everglades and there's much more interesting things to eat than each other, often zoos will co-habit them anyway.  Stupid movie.

Logan and Paul are buddies now and shake hands as Logan jumps into a helicopter, the plan being to drop explosives on the giant crocs to force them together, why they don't drop explosives on them to kill them, I don't know.  Paul goes to get in the other helicopter and Cassidy kisses him.

No, Sheriff, we don't know why this is happening either.

The Sheriff literally drags Cassidy off Paul, letting him get in the helicopter.  The two copters search the land for the giant crocodiles and take their sweet time about it, one would just suggest they follow the screaming as we get a lot of shots of destruction.  A movie tour bus pulls up to a derelict hotel and the bad actors ask questions about it.  That pointless scene over, we get more helicopters and Paul finds Dinocroc hiding out at the old sugar factory, but the helicopters won't land and they didn't bring the explosives with them....  why?  Why?

They decide to trap them in a tunnel near the sugar factory and we're back to the tour which is about to be eaten by Supergator, who literally throws itself on the tour bus, crushing it, the tourists, touring a building at the time.  Conrad and unnamed female arrive at Drake's mansion, where Victoria arrives to bitch at Drake about Logan.  They shoot Victoria, killing her, and this causes Drake to start having a heart attack.

Tourists at the movie tour are eaten by Supergator, at last and the others run into the grounds of the derelict hotel.  The Sheriff and Cassidy happen upon them and Logan and Paul start filling the tunnel with C4.  Cassidy and the Sheriff shoot at Supergator, but obviously, it doesn't work and the Sheriff, for some reason, decides to let Supergator eat him, for some reason.  It really doesn't make sense.

The second chase

Supergator decides to chase after Cassidy's car, the running is ridiculous. 

Cassidy calls Paul and tells him he better have the tunnel ready because she's on her way with Supergator, which means that Paul and Logan have to get Dinocroc into the tunnel.  Cassidy arrives with Supergator behind her, but they've yet to wrangle Dinocroc, instead Cassidy leads Supergator to Dinocroc and they start butting heads.

1 hour 20 mins into the movie, Dinocroc finds Supergator

The two fight and Paul decides he's going to explode the sugar dust to kill the two animals.  Dinocroc takes a huge bite out of Supergator, apparently killing it and then Paul throws the C4, igniting the sugar dust and killing Dinocroc.

caramelised crocodiles

Cassidy and Paul hug and Logan remarks he's glad it's over with, but a shot inside the sugar factory hears the sounds of baby Dinocrocs.  End of Movie.  So, like, did Drake die?

Summary:

This one is not great.  The beginning of the movie has some promise with some semi plausible effects and some funny kill scenes, but it quickly gets bogged down with tons of characters and a ridiculous plot.

Not that I was expecting better from Roger Corman, but even for him, some of this stuff is just stupid.

There are tons of pointless characters who have no impact on the plot at all, the army dudes, the bikini girls, the actor and his bikini girls, the photographer, the tourists, David Carradine (Yes, David Carradine, he basically does nothing), Logan 'The Cajun' who didn't have a cajun accent and was a terrible hunter, leaving Dinocroc after he shoots it, instead of killing it.

It's all over the place.

For a movie set in Hawaii, there wasn't a single Hawaiian person to be found anywhere in this movie at all.

Supergator looked pretty good (for an obvious CGI crocodile), better than Lake Placid 3, however Dinocroc looked and sounded ridiculous and there was no reason it should sound like a T-Rex.  They had about 2 minutes total time on screen together and the fight was underwhelming and crap, especially considering that Dinocroc won when the best thing it did was the non-sneaky sneak attack on the girl at the beginning of the movie.

The amount of bad acting that was in this movie hurt me, is it that hard to find decent extras these days?  I've seen plenty of low budget movies with extras who can actually act, I don't see this as much of an excuse anymore.

I'll give them props for the creature effects, though all of the other CG in the movie was awful.  I'll also give them points for Paul, the only decent character and a couple of the funny kills from the beginning of the movie.

4 out of 10  *Looks at list of other movies in despair* I thought this one might have been slightly better than it actually was, *sob*