Friday Night Drive-In: 100 Million B.C.

For lovers of really bad movies, there's nothing better than gathering a few of your snarkiest friends, obscene piles of artery clogging snacks, some friendly beverages, and watching two or three low-budget (or really misguided high budget) movies on DVD that are just ripe for MST3K-style mockery. 

Tonight I've got a goldmine for you. Instant first-ballot bad-movie HOF'er.

100 Million B.C. is not to be confused with the theatrical release 10,000 B.C. from last spring. Because as all you math whizzes know, 100 million is like 10,000 times BETTER than 10,000!

You see, during WWII the Navy conducted the Philadelphia Experiment. Maybe you've heard of it. It involved sending Micheal Pare forward in time to the '80s where he was then free to make Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives! Well, it turns out the Philadelphia Experiment also sent a bunch of WWII sailors back in time. Way back. All the way back to the Cretaceous Period, which was a lot like the Jurassic Period, only with better music and crappier-looking CGI dinosaurs.

Well, it took 60-some years, but finally Micheal "Family Ties" Gross has gotten Greg "B.J." Evigan to help him send a squad of Navy SEALS (aka "fresh meat") back in time to rescue Gross' brother, who was lost in the original experiment. Little brother is played Christopher Atkins from The Blue Lagoon of Giant Killer Dinosaurs. Many of you have been wondering when would Gross, Evigan, and Atkins finally make a movie together. Well, your wait is over.

Folks, I'm not gonna kid ya--this one has it all. It has Navy SEALS wearing low-budget uniforms that came from the Army-Navy surplus store, while firing rifles that we never actually see fire. It's true--every time they shoot them, the camera is framed to cut off the muzzle. That's right: The producers couldn't even afford blanks. And you know all those annoying puff pieces about how some pretty-boy actors in a war film spent a week or two in boot camp training to learn to look and act like real soldiers? Well don't worry! No one in this movie went through anything like that.

We have a couple women who were sent back in time with the sailors because apparently during WWII the Navy was using strippers in top-secret ops. (They're doing the whole Raquel Welch look from One Million B.C.--which was only a hundredth as awesome as this movie.)

We have indoor sets that are at least as good as most high school prom decorations and outdoor sets that suggest that Earth during the Cretaceous Period contained a large number of national parks.

And best of all we have blood-thirsty dinosaurs that make the original Land of the Lost TV show look like Jurassic Park. You know how in Jurassic Park II, the T-rex ended up wreaking havoc in mainland America? Well, in this case a giant killer dino follows the rescued time travelers back to the future. Where our hearty WWII crew--including the strippers--are the only ones who can stop it. In fact, no one else seems to even notice the giant red iguana running around eating people and cars.

Washed-up '80s B-list stars and their WWII stripper sidekicks using stock helicopter footage to fight giant car-eating dinosaurs? I know! You're thinking, "Why is this DVD not already in my player?! Where is my pizza!? Why am I still sober?!"

Oh, and as if you need more encouragement, the trailers at the start of the feature are for War of the Worlds 2 (not to be confused with the Spielberg-Cruise War of the Worlds), Monster (a shaky-cam monster-eats-Tokyo thriller that is in no way a rip-off of Cloverfield), Alien Vs. Hunter (any resemblance to Aliens Vs. Predator is purely exploitive), and I Am Omega (totally not a knock off of I Am Legend or its earlier version, The Omega Man).

Brothers and sisters, we are living in glorious times.

Comments

[greg king]

I can't believe that I actually sat and watched this movie. Dubbed in sound and speech that doesn't always match the actors mouths. If I had to hear the Navy seal team leader yell "OK ladies, move out!" one more time, I was gonna throw something at the TV. Thankfully he got eaten by a dinosaur. Surprise, surprise. This movie looked like someones high school film project.