Tyranno's Claw

Every movie blog on planet Earth has reviewed Jurassic World.  I suppose I should at least attempt to stay topical.  Right, so let's talk about 1994's Tyranno's Claw.  What, you haven't heard of it?  I checked, and this cotton-pickin' picture doesn't even have an IMDb page.  Makes no sense to me.  I know it's on DVD, so if you actually want to own a piece of South Korean cheeseball history, you're in luck.  If.  It's not that Tyranno's Claw is a chastening watch, but honestly, it's pretty fucking depressing.  And it really shouldn't be, not with the cloddish, lubberly cavemen and the herd of tactile dinosaurs scampering all over creation.

A scintilla of background information before I go into why it's so depressing: there is no dialogue, as all of the characters lack - eh, how you say - the English language.  They might as well be primates.  In the film's favor, they do look sufficiently troglodytic.  Grubby hair, splotches of dirt, bullhide garments...I would use the term "realistic," but y'know, dinosaurs.  The Rex dude on the poster munches on Cro-Magnon offerings prepared by Cro-Magnon assholes.  This asshole tribe is led by one guy, the chief executive asshole.  Everyone is afraid of him, so they quail and genuflect to him, even though they could easily overpower him.  It's not like he has a gun.

Anyway, a couple escapes during a sacrificial ritual and Tyranno's Claw becomes a chase sequence.  But Dominic Jay Coccaro, why is it depressing?  First of all, don't interrupt me.  Secondly, don't use my full name proper.  You're really pissing me off.  While it's never true animal cruelty (or at least I hope it isn't), there are several scenes in which regular beasties who have NO IDEA what is happening are either pursued by idiots or gobbled up by a mechanical carnivore.  You don't see a goat being shredded (as metal as that would have been), so I'm assuming it was okay.  This stuff is hard to watch for me, especially the Triceratops death.  That poor Triceratops!

Enough bitching.  The effects are genuinely impressive.  If you dig creature suits, by God, Tyranno's Claw is the cult entrée for you.  We even get a biped rodent monster.  Bipedal?  Anthropoid?  Hominid?  Humina, humina?  Hubba, hubba?  Hubba Bubba?  Nevermind.  Technically, this counts as kaiju, though it's not Japanese.  It's well-executed for a low-budget foreign film.  The pacing is locomotive and the action is relatively imaginative.  Character-wise, there isn't much to sink your incisors into.  In fact, the humans suck.  I made reference to an asshole tribe earlier, but in candor, they're all assholes.  At one point, the main boor slings arrows through baby Pterodactyls!  What a dick, right?

Tyranno's Claw toyed with my emotions.  It's entertaining, but it's also a bummer.  An entertaining bummer.  Use your own judgment.