Rating summary

Movie		0.5
Video		1.5
Audio		1.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		1.0

The Jurassic Dead Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Martin Liebman March 21, 2021

The Jurassic Dead may as well just be titled Dead. For a movie about breathing life into the unliving, there’s little life in the movie which is essentially dead on arrival. That’s not much of a surprise; one can pretty well judge this one by its cover (which is a lie itself…the dinosaurs are neither huge nor rampaging through a city), at least well enough to know it’s only going to be good for a laugh, at best. The only question, really is just how bad it really is. The answer is really bad.

Plot is basically nonexistent, but here goes a shot at a summary: a university professor is dismissed from work when he uses a radical new serum -- one that enters the brain and sparks it back to life -- to bring life to a deceased cat in the classroom. Some time later, the serum is used on a dinosaur. Later, four teenagers and five heavily armed mercenaries, one of whom looks like Duke Nukem, are stranded when an EMP blast stalls their cars and kills their electronics. The two disparate groups converge on a secret military facility in the middle of nowhere only find themselves fending off the dinosaur and the professor who is no longer the man he once was.

The Jurassic Dead obviously takes much of its inspiration from Re-Animator (though in the commentary the filmmakers allude to inspirations from Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Jaws). The reanimation serum is a bright green color and injecting it brings the dead back to life, first a cat in a controlled classroom setting and, later, dinosaurs. The rest of the movie is pretty well disjointed. Between the terribly written characters, Z-grade performances, awful green screen environmental inserts (this whole movie could have literally been filmed in someone’s garage lined with green screens), sloppy storytelling, and a general sense of confusion and inability to really figure out what is going on and why, it’s just a mess that should have taken Yoda’s advice: “Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.”

The Jurassic Dead Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Weak production values and ultra-cheap digital effect define The Jurassic Dead so it's no surprise to find a lousy picture quality at play. At least it's presented in MPEG-2 1080p high definition – it could easily pass for 1080i or even 720p – but little time is needed to find the image in a fairly sad state. Banding and macroblocking are evident in the opening nighttime exterior. Such issues – the banding in particular – follow for the duration. The movie was shot almost entirely in front of a green screen and the drop in digital backgrounds are soft and sloppily defined and the soupy banding and compression artifacts ruin whatever semblance of detail was once there. Forget tight definition to humans; there's practically none beyond crude essentials. Colors are lifeless, favoring either overcooked exteriors with zero tonal finesse or hopelessly flat and bleak grays and blues and blacks inside the compound. Skin tones are all over the place and black levels are hardly the definition of rich and deep. What an ugly transfer, though admittedly it seems most of the problems stem from the source, not Wild Eye's Blu-ray.

The Jurassic Dead Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

In a dinosaur movie it might often be descriptive of the Blu-ray audio track to say it "roars," but truth be told the sound quality here might be below a battery powered toy dino pulled off the shelf at Wal-Mart. The Dolby Digital 5.1 lossy soundtrack is puny and wholly uninteresting yet somehow the perfect compliment to the bottom-scraping movie where cheapness abounds so, why not in the audio department, too? Disbalance in the 5.1 track is evident within the first two minutes. A dialogue scene in a dark exterior location features blowing wind (maybe) or passing traffic (perhaps) that comes and goes in muddled, uneven, stop-and-start fits. The remainder of the scene is horrifically shallow. Music barely registers, dialogue is hushed, and the whole scene is hard of hearing. The first few moments essentially define the entire listening experience. It's tepid at best, barely audible at worst. Gunfire offers no sense of power or potency in any scene. One can't help but laugh when one character fires his large caliber revolver at a broken computer panel and another character complains that it's going to blow his eardrums out. Too bad it sounds weaker than a toy cap gun to the home listener. When a meteor hits in the 16-minute mark the sonic impact is virtually nil. There's also a 2.0 lossy track which is a little more pronounced, actually, with wider front end spacing, more aggressive musical notes, and firmer, albeit off-center, dialogue. It's probably the way to go; it's not like the 5.1 track really takes full, or even much of any, advantage of the surrounds and subwoofer, anyway. Both are poor, but the 2.0 track is actually most of the way audible with a bit of separation and detail at its back.

The Jurassic Dead Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Wild Eye's Bu-ray release of The Jurassic Dead actually includes several extras, including an audio commentary track. No DVD or digital copies are included with purchase but this disc does, or at least did, ship with a slipcover.

• Behind the Scenes (1080p, 8:05): This featurette, which is exponentially better than the movie, takes a light-toned look at the making of the movie: green screen work, costumes, miniatures, the miniscule budget, and everything else that expresses how the film overcame its micro budget to get done. The piece ends with what amounts to a gag/blooper reel.
• Audio Commentary: Co-Directors Milko Davis and Thomas Martwick discuss Sony cameras, the budget restraints, the film's pluses within that budget, green screen work and special effects, inspirations, editing, performances, and more. If anything it's nice to listen to two individuals who have a passion for filmmaking and did the best they could under time, budget, and technical restraints. The movie is not particularly good, but one cannot help but admire the picture for at least getting made and these men for doing the work and standing behind it.
• Theatrical Trailer (1080p, 1:04).

The Jurassic Dead Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Jurassic Dead typifies the bottom-scraping modern Z-movie. It seriously looks and sounds like it was put together over a long weekend. Filming could have very well taken place in a small room in front a green screen. Digital background inserts are about as poor as possible, the acting is atrocious (cast, it almost seems, from a community college and a local gym), and put together with crude and minimal know-how for photography, editing, and special effects. It's not so bad that it's good. It's just bad: tedious, tiresome, and thankfully not very long. Wild Eye's Blu-ray delivers poor video and audio but does include a few supplements for anyone who, for whatever reason, wants to subject themselves to even more. Skip it.

It's worth noting that the image on the box, as seen above, is entirely false advertising. The movie isn't about massive dinosaurs invading a city and a military response. It's about Velociraptor-sized dinos battling it out with some mercs and some teens in a bland, gray, lifeless government facility.