Jurassic Domination (2022) Review
Jurassic Domination starts out like another recent dinosaur flick from The Asylum, Triassic Hunt. A truck delivering bio-engineered dinosaurs intended for military use loses its cargo in the middle of a city. And again it’s a pair of Allosauruses that get loose, although these ones look more like raptors than anything else.
Colonel Ramirez (Jamie Bernadette, Dead by Dawn, I Spit on Your Grave: Deja Vu) has dispatched a team to deal with it. Major Tanner (Jack Pearson, Time Pirates, Shark Season) in turn dispatches Corporal Higgins (Kahlo De Jesus Buffington, Saturday School, Karate Do) to keep an eye on them and report back to him. Meanwhile, General Greer (Eric Roberts, Escape Through Africa, The Rideshare Killer) is reminding Colonel Ramirez how much money they stand to make if she gets the situation under control. However, the dinos are already chowing down on the locals, humans and livestock alike.
Director Brian Nowak (Megalodon Rising, Bullet Train Down) along with writers Geoff Meed (Top Gunner, 4 Horsemen: Apocalypse) and Jason Tozier (Valley Sensation) know what’s expected of them. And that’s what Jurassic Domination delivers, just enough action to keep everyone from tunning out scattered among a lot of walking through dark corridors and budget-friendly dialogue scenes.
So after a cheap bit of rampaging through an all-but deserted RV park, the allosauruses are lured back to the equally deserted base. Major Tanner and his squad, all three of them, are given special energy weapons and told to herd the beasts back to their pen alive. It’s Lazer Tag with dinosaurs, what could possibly go wrong? Quite a bit actually as the creatures turn out to be smart enough to detect tripwires and use a convenient garbage can to set them off.
While the script keeps upping the stakes, a full-grown Allosaurus escapes with eggs that are about to hatch, and Jurassic Domination’s budget isn’t up to dealing with it. We’re frequently told what happens off-screen and even the aftermath of the creatures’ attacks are kept from our sight. At one point we’re told , “They wiped out everyone in the barracks” while all we see is a smear of blood outside the door.
When we do see the creatures they are cut from a better grade of CGI than usual for an Asylum film. And to a large degree, I’m ok with Jurassic Dominion giving us fewer scenes of the creatures but raising the quality of them. But the script needed to find a less frustrating way to inform us about events we don’t see. And having major characters die offscreen gets old fast. It also needs to do better than expecting viewers to accept things like evacuating an entire Army base in an hour or so and keeping it secret. Or a general calling in an air strike on a base on US soil with no oversight. Suspension of disbelief only goes so far.
As expected Eric Roberts is in a handful of scenes and doesn’t interact with the rest of the characters except by phone. And while it’s nice to see Jamie Bernadette back in the genre after a run of Lifetime movies, there are several scenes in Jurassic Dominion where she’s so lifeless she seems to be reading off cue cards, something I would never have expected from her.
Despite my initial enthusiasm for some cheap and bloody dinosaur action, Jurassic Domination is a rather bland example of The Asylum’s work. It’s never awful in the way their worst films can be, but there’s no real spark to it either. It’s just there, watchable but not much else.
Jurassic Domination had a theatrical release in July. The Asylum has released it to Digital platforms with a DVD release scheduled for October 11th. You can check FilmTagger for more dinosaur domination.