Crew
Director – Andrew Jones, Screenplay – Christian Sellers, Story – Andrew Jones & Christian Sellers, Producers – Lee Bane, Andrew Jones, Rebecca Graham, Robert Graham, Harry Willis & Jonathan Willis, Photography – Jonathan McLaughlin, Music – The Mescalito Vampires, Dinosaur Effects – David Oakman & Chris Roberts, Makeup Effects – Amanda Williams, Production Design – Felicity Boylett. Production Company – North Bank Entertainment.
Cast
Lee Bane (Frank Hawkins), Lee Mark Jones (Matthew Rankin), Derek Nelson (Mickey Stahl), Darren Swain (Lloyd Whittaker), Jason Homewood (Vincent Redgrave), David Lyndon (Exley), Harry Russell (Professor Massey), Richard Dee Roberts (Major Harris), Claire Carreno (Professor Myers), Patrick O’Donnell (The Robber), Megan Lockhurst (Bonnie), James Noir (Coffee Shop Employer), Andy Evason (The Landlord)
Plot
Frank Hawkins, a tough but non-conformist soldier, is released from custody and charges against him dropped on the orders of Exley, a representative from a government agency. Exley’s people want Hawkins to help locate a genetically-engineered tyrannosaurs rex that has escaped from a laboratory in Devil’s Creek. Hawkins agrees so long as he can form his own team of individualistic non-conformists. They set out into the wilds to track the dinosaur, but it proves tougher and more fierce than anticipated.
Andrew Jones is a Welsh director/producer who has had a more than reasonable output through the 2010s up until his death in 2023. He started out with two troubled teen films Teenage Wasteland (2006) and The Feral Generation (2007) and subsequently joined the horror genre making the likes of The Amityville Asylum (2013), The Midnight Horror Show (2014), Valley of the Witch (2014), A Haunting at the Rectory (2015), The Last House on Cemetery Lane (2015), Poltergeist Activity (2015), The Curse of Robert the Doll (2015), Robert the Doll (2015), The Exorcism of Anna Ecklund (2016), Cabin 28 (2017), The Toymaker (2017), Werewolves of the Third Reich (2017), The Legend of Halloween Jack (2018), The Legend of Robert the Doll (2018), The Curse of Halloween Jack (2019), Robert Reborn (2019), The Haunting of Margam Castle (2020), A Killer Next Door (2020) and Alien: Battlefield Earth (2021). He has also produced and written Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection (2012) and Silent Night: The Homecoming (2013).
Jurassic Predator is a low-budget Jurassic Park (1993) copy. There have been a mountain of these produced since Jurassic Park came out and still are being three decades on with no end in sight. See the likes of Carnosaur (1993), Pterodactyl (2005), 100 Million B.C. (2008), Triassic Attack (2010), Age of Dinosaurs (2013), Jurassic Attack (2013), Poseidon Rex (2013), Cowboys and Dinosaurs (2015), Jurassic Prey (2015), Triassic World (2018), Dinosaur World (2020), Cowgirls vs. Pterodactyls (2021), Dinosaur Hotel (2021), Triassic Hunt (2021), Jurassic Domination (2022), Jurassic Island (2022), Kingdom of the Dinosaurs (2022), Pterodactyl (2022), Dinosaur Prison (2023) and Jurassic Triangle (2024), among many others. (For a more detailed listing see Dinosaur Films).
Lee Bane is a regular in Andrew Jones’ films. Here he has the most entertaining role he had in any of them. (Bane also produces the film and acts as second unit director). He gets a great introduction, wandering into a coffee shop to make an order and pouring scorn on the affectation of a typical Starbucks-type barista with his bolshie manner, all before a pullback to reveal a man hiding beneath the counter with a gun to the head of the co-worker. Things continue as Bane gets out onto the street and finds a plea for help from the barista written on his paper cup whereupon he returns and faces down against the gunman (Patrick O’Donnell) and verbally dominates him into surrendering while going on about his anger management class.
Jurassic Predator borrows the basics from The Dirty Dozen (1967), which has become an action movie staple – that of the leader who gathers a group of miscreants and/or the old individualistic gang back together to do a dirty job. Jones and Bane, as well as the rest of the supporting cast, do rather well when it comes to the tough guy posturing. They even borrow the scene from Armageddon (1998) where the gang demand from the government agent that they never have to pay taxes again and then add a host of other demands on top of it about no telemarketers, insurance payments, and the amount of trash bags that one can put out at the curb.
There is also a rather funny scene where a guy and a girl are making out in a car before the WTF moment where an alien with tentacles bangs up against the window. All before this is a revealed to be a low-budget SF film shoot and the actress starts going on about wanting to do Shakespearean drama, before the dinosaur turns up and the director regards her screams as perfect and is impressed by the production values of the dinosaur. Later in the show, Lee Bane gets a great piece of writing where he talks about a wounded Iraq War veteran who wanted to return home to his family.
The film shows Andrew Jones with a sense of humour he has not displayed before and it suits him rather well. In fact, I would have to say that Jurassic Predator is the best of Jones’s films that I have seen to date. The only real letdown of the film is the very rubbery looking dinosaur effects, which are limited to head and shoulders shots, not a full body T-Rex.
Trailer here