Last Night I endured
"Actium Maximus: War Of The Alien Dinosaurs"Although not obvious from the synopsis, this is a
Troma film, or at least it's distributed by Troma...and I thought I saw Lloyd Kaufman in the opening credits in a producer role (which means I think he worked a couple of extra shifts deliverying pizzas for the tip money needed to finance this one).
The general plot, as such, is that on some planet somewhere, the leader (Grand-Automaton Polpox...played by a couple of carboard boxes with some lights and tubes stuck to them) has created a sporting event called the "Actium Maximus Karnivale", which is basically a bunch of...er...well..'Alien Dinosaurs' that fight it out in a big coluseum. I use the term 'alien dinosaur' loosely because I think they came up with the name after they had made all the props and then sat around thinking "well, what in the world are they?". They mostly seemed tp be sock puppets with extra pieces of foam stuck to them and then dipped in some sort of goo...one of them I dubbed the "lasagnesaurus" given that it looked like...well...lasagne with a mouth.
To spice up the action in the ring, Polpox sends Omni-Turor Axezun (one of our few human actors in the film...played by someone's cousin I guess, with a tendancy to mumble his lines for dramatic effect) across space to find some new giant beasties for the fights. He's accompanied by an assistant..also no doubt played by someone's cousin but she has the distinction of being the *only* character in the film whose lines can actually be heard. The land on a planet, troop around for a bit, and fine somehuge giant dead-god-spaceship thingy with A Purpose or A Message or Something Important fot the characters to learn or discover but I'll be darned if I could figure it out between the mumbled dialogue and heavy sound track. Then the wander away and get stuck in the spit pools of some monster that...um...growls at them for awhile.
In the meantime... back on the homeworld, there is a revolution brewing against our friend Polpox. Apparently someone doesn't like the Karnivale, our Polpox, or the whole freakin' thing. So we get scene after scene of Polpox complaining to his underlings that the revolution is getting out of hand and how it must be crushed *now*. It resembles the scene from Becket where Henry II says "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?"..in the sense that both were put to film...other than that no real resemblance...but it did cross my mind just now as I was trying to think of something better than this movie...which is like trying to think of flowers when the smell of a baby diaper is in your nose; not too hard to think of something that smells better, but pretty hard to get that stench out of your mind.
So that's the plot...scene after sene of Polpox whining, interspersed with scene after scene of Axezun and friends wandering around doing nothing, finding little and mumbling importantly about it all.
and folks...it's *much* worse than it sounds.
First off, sound is a *big* problem. Most of the movie has an underyling heavy-metal sountrack, which makes any dialog difficult to understand, and it doesn't help that Axezun can't figure out how to open his mouth when he talks. Polpox and his minions all speak with an incomprehensble electronic voice...so bad that most of the more incomprehensible parts are sub-titled. As if the editors sat in the room and realized "you can't hear a single thing!! So they added the subs to try to make sense of it. The important plot points were further enhanced by a narrator to try to keep the viewers attention...although I would've been happy with just five minutes of the narrator saying "this is the story we were going to tell..." and be done with it. Most of the challenge of this movie is in actually trying to figure out what is going on because you can't understand anything anyone is saying. "What the heck..what are they saying? Oh...here's a subtitle...hmmm...well *that* makes no sense..."
Despite the title, the Alienn Dinosaurs only make two appearances. Early in the movie to get your attention, and half way through to try to wake you back up (in doesn't work...either time). The problem is that the dinosaurs never interact with anything...either each other or the settings or other people. They are shot two ways: close up of their head roaring, or far away just kinda walking. They are all video-composited over sets that look like miniture models of a coluseum put together by grade school students and covered in red sand. So it's a very disconnected "what's happening here...is this part of the movie?" feeling whenever they are on the screen (which is usually about three times longer than neccessary to make whatever point they are there for)
Which brings up the video. *Most* of this video, whith the exception of our swamp-wandering dino-hunters, seems to be blue-screened and video composited together. This is true of the monsters andespecially Polpox, along with his minions of "junk in the studio we'll stick together, wiggle around a bit on comera, give an incomprehensible electronic voice-over too..and call a character" It's Jim Henson's worst nightmare after a bad night of cheap tacos and even cheaper tequila
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and the worst part of this whole film is that after an hour and fifteen minutes of it...it simply stops with a 'cliff hanger' that says "to be continued..." I guess Lloyd needs to go work a few more shifts. and at an hour and fifeteen minutes it really felt twice as long.
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Normally I try to find *something* entertaining about a movie but this one is only for Troma completists and insomniacs. It's really hard to sum up just how *badly* done this movie is on so many levels. Take the average budget of any Troma release and try to use it to make a sci-fi film with aliens, monsters, and robots ...leaving even *less* money than usual for acting talent or a script. If you want sci-i and dinosaurs together, watch
Future War for something much more professionally done
