Gargantua

This was a movie?

I'm really not sure what's worse....a hyped-up film that turns out to be a major flop or a TV movie that was quickly made to cash in on a hyped-up film that turned out to be a major flop.

GARGANTUA is in the latter category, created as the FOX network's answer to GODZILLA, and there's really nothing good I can say about it. The acting was bad (save Baldwin....no relation to the Baldwin brothers), the special effects were bad (it was a good thing that daddy dragon was only in it for about twenty seconds of screentime....he was a joke), the storyline was miserably cliched and boring (even down to the Australian villian...oooooh....), and even the music by J. Peter Robinson, who's usually pretty good, is disappointing.

The plot...about a small son finding a baby dinosaur and its increasingly bigger family who searching for it....is probably the worst TV movie idea ever established for the nineties. In fact, the premise sets itself up as a [bad] episode of the Twilight Zone, and keeps going for an hour and a half. It even ends up rooting for the monsters and defending their actions, even after they thrash some cities and eat some people (I'm sorry...but if a giant dinosaur was stepping on my house, I'D shoot him with a rocket launcher....Was there a Greenpeace member behind this thing?). By the time the film was over, I was ready to quit the film-reviewing business, and I couldn't figure out how in the world they ever allowed this thing to be made.

All in all, terrible. Go rent King Kong vs. Godzilla if you want some real, smashing-buildings fun.

1/2 out of ****