Just the Ticket #145: Prehysteria!

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster

Welcome to Jurassic Joy Ride June, Ticketholders! Last month, I reviewed Shoot 'Em Up for this year's List Lookback event, which was directed by the writer of today's film (and this month's trilogy) up for review: Prehysteria! The Joy Ride part of the month has to do with that trilogy's first entry, which will be the List Lookback selection for June. I have seen the Joy Ride sequels, and have no interest in revisiting them, but I like dinosaurs, so here we are!

Please make Just the Ticket part of your Jurassic Joy Ride by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, post your favorite dinosaur in the comments section at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read to help with my loan repayment, and follow me to the nearest museum exhibit on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest miniature dinosaur eggs of news on my content.

Hatched in 1993, Prehysteria! (not to be confused with the 1998 educational cartoon, Histeria!) was directed by Charles and Albert Band (of Full Moon Entertainment) under their kid-friendly offshoot brand, Moonbeam Entertainment.

Featuring a score that sounds like John Williams covering Huey Lewis & the News (but it was really composed by the directors' brother, Richard Band, Michael Bishop, and "he's worked with so many names that you should just look at his Wikipedia page" music legend Fuzzbee Morse) and songs by "Elvis" and "Madonna" (so, Dollar Store Pod People approximations of rockabilly and early 90s girl-pop), it spends a good chunk of time with the Taylor family as they deal with financial troubles, single fatherhood, and the group of five pygmy dinosaurs their lonely dog brought home because the "good guy and bad guy have identical containers" trope happened while the rock-hounding single father (Lost "Other" Brett Cullen) was making deals and chime-accompanied googly eyes with the local hot wannabe scientist (because Tremors did it three years ago and Tara Reid wouldn't be asked to wear glasses for another twelve years). Her name is Vicki Vandell (like she's going to go around spray-painting graffiti in Gotham City or something), and she's played by K-9's Colleen Morris (I also want to review the K-9 movies this year; probably in September?).

The Taylor kids are Jerry (a rockabilly fan, played by Austin O'Brien, a.k.a. the kid from Last Action Hero) and Monica (the valliest valley girl to ever be a girl who lives nowhere near a valley, listen to pop music, and have hair that's been cryogenically preserved in gallons of hairspray since the 80s, and she's played by Samantha Mills, whose other screen credits include 10 Rules For Sleeping Around, HoneySpider, and Bombshell Bloodbath), and they bicker because brother/sister duo in a 90s movie, hide the pygmy dinosaurs from their father for half of the runtime because "stray animals, Dad! They're so cute! Can we keep 'em?" was contractually obligated to be a theme for variation in every cute animal movie in the 90s, and get chased around by tiny creatures who bite the teenage girl on the ass because this is a Full Moon joint.

Also because this is a Full Moon joint (failing to repress my urge to make an Evil Bong joke...), our "villain" is...a greedy, racist archaeologist? I mean, I can understand an archaeologist being greedy, but what kind of sense does it make for someone whose job it is to understand lost cultures to be racist? Anyway, he's fat and greedy and racist and blurts out what he's really thinking whenever he gets angry (so bipolar and Tourette's are supposed to be funny, too?), and he wants "his" eggs back that he "found" when he desecrated a made-up, unnamed, dinosaur/volcano-worshipping, South American tribe's temple on an island that may or may not be a legally nondescript establishing shot of the island from Jurassic Park and is probably either the island setting of Bong World in the Evil Bong sequels or the woods behind somebody's house...or both? Also, he's played by then-frequent TV guest actor and Roger Corman collaborator, the late Stephen Lee.

After single dad Frank discovers the dinosaurs that his kids are hiding in his basement and Vicki somehow manages to not kill the villain (whose name is Rico Sarno, by the way) by smashing his head in with a lava rock, the story takes a hard pivot into trying to be Home Alone when Rico hires two career criminals to break into the Taylors' farmhouse and steal the dinosaurs for him. But because this is a low-budget, derivative affair, they're a couple of Italian goon stereotypes who make Harry and Marv look like Mensa members. Just take every criminal duo from every 90s kids' movie that was trying to be Home Alone (including the Home Alone sequels after Lost In New York), throw them into a blender with Bulk and Skull, make them dumber, and give them bad Sopranos accents, and there you have Louis (Suburban Commando's Tony Longo) and Ritchie (Teen Wolf Too's Stuart Fratkin).

The plot, such as there was one amidst all of the cute dinosaur shenanigans, family drama, and derivative pivoting, resolves as one would expect in terms of romantic couplings and villain fates.

But as with creature features of any size, the real stars are the pygmy dinos. Brought to life with a mix of green screen, stop-motion, animatronics, and other practical puppeteering techniques (and animal cries provided by VA legend Frank Welker--we're talking everything from Transformers and Scooby-Doo characters to Apu in Aladdin to...LL Cool J's parrot in Deep Bliue Sea?; pretty much any time there was a real or animated animal that needed to make animal noises for the past fifty years and it wouldn't vocalize on its own, that was him), Elvis the T-Rex, Paula (Abdul) the Brachiosaurus, (Mick) Jagger the Stegosaurus, (M.C.) Hammer the Chasmosaurus--that's like a Triceratops with shorter horns and a taller crown--and Madonna the Geosternbergia--which, we now know is a pterosaur, not a dinosaur, and she's based on a model of the male of the species despite the characters (particularly Monica) insisting that she's female--are pretty visually impressive and adorable despite the horrific implications of what could happen if they eventually grow up. There's some pseudo-scientific thing about how their being frozen as eggs for millions of years mutated them into staying pygmy-sized forever, but that doesn't change the fact that Elvis may end up eating his "siblings" one day, if not growing larger and deciding that his doggo-mama looks awfully tasty.

Ticketmaster's Note: I was going to do this as a NPO rant next week, but as I'm trying to bang this review out the night before, I feel like I must explain something here. Blogger has changed how its editing interface on PC reacts to the "Insert or Edit Link button when text is highlighted. Before, it would keep the text highlighted and replace it with a link when the work was done and you hit OK. Now, it dumps the link out as duplicated text after the text you highlighted, meaning you have to go back through your draft and delete all of the non-linked text that's left before your link, like this: Prehysteria!Prehysteria!

And God forbid you have any apostrophes, quotation marks, or other random punctuation in your highlighted text (exclamation points are okay for some reason), because then, it will shove the link into a "null," like this: Austin O'Briennull, leaving you to copy the text you wanted your link to display as, re-edit your link, and then re-apply any formatting options to your link that you had on the text before. So forgive me if I didn't feel like linking to every musician the dinosaurs are named after, or their respective species, at the ass of midnight when I can't save this anyway because the wind is fucking with my internet. Google needs to fix this Blogger quirk right-ass-fucking-now!

Back to our regularly scheduled review ending....

Prehysteria! is pretty much what I remember from watching it as a kid, with the dinosaurs being the most memorable part and the rest being a predictable-to-forgettable non-story framed around Full Moon's desire to put tiny creatures in everything. Despite all the subjective time wasting, it was fun enough, and didn't become unbearable to watch until Act III tried to be a bad Home Alone before those existed. With the Decker Shado caveat of "Two Stars, I Love It!," I'm giving the first Prehysteria! a

D+

Next week, I continue Jurassic Joy Ride June with a review of Prehysteria! 2, so Stay Tuned and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, post your favorite dinosaur in the comments section at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read to help with my loan repayment, and follow me to the nearest museum exhibit on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest miniature dinosaur eggs of news on my content.

Ticketmaster,

Roaring Out.