Director – Gerald Rascionato, Screenplay – Ward Anderson & Marc Morgenstern, Producer – David Michael Latt, Photography – Marcus Friedlander, Music – Mikel Shane Prather, Visual Effects Supervisor – Glenn Campbell, Production Design – Larae Wilson. Production Company – The Asylum.
Cast
Linnea Quigley (Simone), Ramiro Leal (Luis), Kristie Krueger (Elaine Kelso), Sienna Farall (Joy Harland), Michael Paré (Jordan Friedman), William Jeon (Nick Gibson), Kevin Keeling (Gordon Berkely), Todd Karner (Karl Manovich), Sam Schweikert (Deacon Forrester), Mike Ferguson (Harrison Paul)
Plot
A shipment containing two dinosaurs is being moved while guarded by a team of mercenaries, only for the dinosaurs to make an escape in mid journey. Luis, the head of the mercenary team, guides the two accompanying scientists to safety at a nearby warehouse. The head scientist Simone explains how the dinosaurs were genetically engineered and are the most valuable creatures on the planet. The mercenaries are not allowed to kill the dinosaurs but are given tranquiliser darts to subdue them. As the mercenaries hunt the dinosaurs through the warehouse, they realise the dinosaurs are intelligent and are in fact hunting them. What they do not realise is that Jordan Friedman, head of the Triassic Corporation that created the dinosaurs, is using them in order to demonstrate the dinosaurs’ capabilities so that he can sell the dinosaurs as super-soldiers in an online auction.
Since the early 2000s, the low-budget US production company The Asylum has been known for their output of Mockbusters – films that come out with titles intended to mimic those of big-budget releases in the hope that people will mistake them or not look too closely. In between these, they essentially created the Gonzo Killer Shark film, as popularised by their bad movie hit Sharknado (2013), and have made an assortment of monster movies.
The Asylum have not ventured into the Dinosaur Film as much as they have say the gonzo killer shark film, nevertheless have made a number of entries including 100 Million BC (2008), The Land That Time Forgot (2009), Age of Dinosaurs (2013), Jurassic School (2017) and Jurassic Domination (2022). This is a sequel to the earlier Triassic World (2018).
Triassic Hunt is essentially Jurassic Park (1993), Jurassic World (2015) or any of the sequels made on an economy budget – one where there are a total of two dinosaurs and all of the action is confined to a warehouse. You could stretch comparisons and say that the plot of mercenaries being stalked by dinosaurs has occasional similarities to The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997).
William Jeon vs a dinosaur
Certainly, by this point among The Asylum’s low-budget films, the digital effects of the dinosaurs have improved to the point they look semi-professional. The minus side is that the set-up of mercenaries hunting/being hunted by dinosaurs in a warehouse with occasional cuts away to corporate double-dealing is all that the film has and the show soon runs out of plot due to sheer repetition.
The film’s headline name is Linnea Quigley who was one of the original Scream Queens in the 1980s and enjoyed a reasonable B movie career. Now aged 63, she looks like she is paying the price of having spent far too much time in the sun and simply fails to seem convincing in the role of a scientist. The main problem, especially in casting her as a scientist, is that all of Quigley’s Scream Queen roles were ones that involved her in a state of undress and little that involved any acting. Michael Paré (listed as Michael Pare without the acute on the credits) appears in a handful of scenes as the corporate bad guy conducting an auction via his laptop, while on the receiving end of an improbably contrived just desserts end comeuppance.
Director Gerald Rascionato had previously made Open Water 3: Cage Dive (2017) and the dinosaur film Claw (2019).
