Just the Ticket #146: Prehysteria! 2

Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Kung-Fu Ticketmaster On A Rampage...Two!

Jurassic Joy Ride June continues, Ticketholders!

And as you will see after today's review of Prehysteria! 2 (as opposed to Prehysteria 2, Prehysteria 2!, or Prehysteria, Too!), any use of exclamation points herein can be considered an act of excessive generosity.

And even though it might feel to you like an act of excessive generosity, perhaps you could contribute more than view statistics to Just the Ticket by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, post your favorite dinosaur (or anything else, really) in the comments section at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read to help pay for that huge crate of loose raisins I bought last week, 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. Please?

Ticketmaster's Note: In the intervening days between my last New Piece Offerings on the subject and Thursday night, when I am currently banging out the second half of the following review, Google has fixed their link insertion issue with a browser update, so post editor behavior is back to normal. I suppose I can take partial credit for bringing this to their attention, so, thank you Google, for also being actually, unironically, non-sarcastically awesome, just like my Ticketholders out there, and, you're welcome; please include my name in the playtest credits for this latest patch.

I don't remember my original feelings about Prehysteria! 2 from when I was a dinosaur-obsessed kid begging my mother to let me rent "tiny dinosaur movie...again!" from the scrambled purgatory that was the center aisles of Blockbuster Video (which is also where I remember seeing the box art for that Shazam movie with Sinbad that no one will admit existed at the same time Shaquille O'Neal's Kazaam was on the New Releases wall). But on this second watch, it feels every bit like a case of "You! You're Not the Taylor Family! You're one of the direct-to-video sequels that can't afford a recurring cast of human characters because children only care about the tiny prehistoric creatures on a rampage that ate up your effects budget...Two!"

That's a reference to an episode of Garfield & Friends, wherein the non-Chris Pratt-or-Bill Murray-voiced fat cat got caught up in an invasion by multi-eyed, eggplant-anteater-vase-looking aliens who hijack every channel and movie theater with a movie franchise called Kung-Fu Creatures On the Rampage. It's kind of a comedic satire, Twilight Zone homage that makes fun of the 80s and 90s trend of "the sequel is just the first one again, but with the index finger crooked slightly different" (which is a reference to an old Dana Carvey stand-up routine from Critic's Choice where he's trying not to buy his son/hundred-year-old man an action figure). So if you want to kill an hour and a half by watching something nostalgic and good, watch Dana Carvey and an episode of Garfield & Friends.

But since you're here, Prehysteria! 2 is Moonbeam Entertainment's 1994 sequel to the previous year's original, with Albert Band returning to direct solo, Michael Davis returning as co-writer, storyboard artist Pete Von Sholly getting a concept credit for the "let's do the Full Moon, tiny creature schtick, but make it dinosaurs and market it to kids" premise, and Frank Welker once again providing the vocalizations for Elvis, Paula, Jagger, Hammer, and Madonna (the puppet for which was damaged between films, so they had to work the "injury" into the plot).

Said plot has our featured pygmy quintet trick their visually impaired caretaker, Mr. Cranston (the late Owen Bush, who had guest roles in everything from Bonnie & Clyde and Vanishing Point to The Last Starfighter and Rover Dangerfield), so they can escape the Taylors' greenhouse (the family are mentioned by name, but do not appear as characters in this movie or the next sequel) and break into their barn to eat raisins (this movie brought to you by Sun-Maid). It just so happens that the Taylors are expecting a pickup that day, so the escaped dinos are shoveled into a box by people who can shovel enough raisins to hide a two-foot-tall dinosaur without noticing the weight increase or their heads poking up out of the box of raisins. That box ends up in a freight car where a boy and girl of differing social classes find them and fight over them, then later bond over them, and teach the audience about the wrongness of classism and that "fun good, family good, work bad."

The boy is Brendan (the Phantasm series' Kevin Connors), son of the monotonously short-tempered Mr. Wellington (Dean Scofield, best known as the voice of Johnny Sasaki in the Metal Gear Solid games), a rich and successful businessman who buys his son useless pieces of plastic (there's that Dana Carvey reference again!) because he's too busy making deals to spend time with him (or even pay attention to him). This lack of attention has made Brendan a rebellious shut-in who dresses like a Spirit Halloween gangster from Jersey and terrorizes his Russian stereotype gardener, Ivan (The Princess Diaries' Greg Lewis) and Asian stereotype chef, Mr. Hiro (Jimmy Neutron's Michael Hagiwara), who "sings" food pun kaaraoke that would make Weird Al sue for damages. He is, in turn, watched over, tormented, and locked in his room by Miss Winters (the late, versatile Bettye Ackerman), who is framed and lit like a Rule 63 Tall Man, and even gets to say, "BOY!" in one scene. And because this is the 90s, Brendan's dialogue is written and delivered by someone who doesn't know how rich kids, or kids of any class, actually talk, so he comes off sounding like a snooty version of Billy from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

The girl is Naomi (the only film credit of Jennifer Harte), the daughter of a railroad laborer, thrower of decent right hooks, and utterer of the interjection, "yo!" (because, again, screenwriters are our fellow kids, and they totally know how children talk, but it's okay because the script acknowledges this several times in the course of the kids' banter). She has a friendly antagonistic chemistry with Brendan that actually serves his character arc in a more tangible and meaningful way than one would expect from a Full Moon, direct-to-video sequel for children, she likes dinosaurs and trains and has an insecure sort of pride for what her unseen father does for a living...and that's about as deep as her character goes. Granted, Brendan and Naomi are much richer characters than the "motherless boy who likes rockabilly and dinosaurs" and "motherless 90s girl who likes pop music" that we got in the last one, and that is something to be praised.

But then you have stuff like the kids dressing up in Dragnet spy costumes to get stuff from the gardener (they put a speaker in Ivan's favorite tree, leading to a scene where a preteen girl hits on a grown man while pretending to be a talking tree) and the cook (I had put the movie on as background noise by this point because the tree scene was so cringeworthy, so I wasn't paying attention to how they trick Hiro or what they get from him), and Miss Winters (stop me if you've heard this one) hiring two incompetent goons (this time, they are a pair of exterminators with PTSD--because, like bipolar and Tourette's, that's funny, too?) who get the bargain bin Home Alone treatment and barely matter to what remains after the best hour of the movie is over. I guess it's kind of a fun reference that they think the Wellington mansion is haunted by ghosts, and Frank Welker was the voice of Slimer in The Real Ghostbusters, but Ketchum (Billy Madison's Larry Hankin), Killam (Tales From the Crypt's Alan Palo), screw 'em.

I liked the main character stuff more here (though I would have liked to see the Taylor family come back for some long-form character growth instead), the dinosaur stuff less (they don't do much, thanks to the increased human focus, rushed production, smaller effects budget, and Madonna's "injury"), and found everything else to be uncomfortable, awkward, pointless, irritating, and/or unbearable to get through. Maybe I should play with trains more?

D-

Next week, I continue Jurassic Joy Ride June with a review of Prehysteria! 3, so Stay Tuned and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, post your favorite dinosaur (or anything else, really) in the comments section at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read to help pay for that huge crate of loose raisins I bought last week, 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...Two!