Triassic Attack (2010 TV Movie) User Reviews

Tyrannosaurus Wreck

[wes-connors · 3/10 · 30 July 2014]

Three people are running away from an unseen horror. They reach a water tower. Inside, the sheriff insists a man and a woman climb to relative safety, then he opens the water tower door. Look Out! …an animated dinosaur skeleton is revealed as the monster in pursuit… We then flashback "24 hours earlier," to discover what led us here… Three skeletal dinosaurs became "animated" during an incident in an Indian (Native American) Museum. Taking responsibility for the dinosaurs is Native American rights activist Raoul Trujillo (as Dakota), who has a tantrum in the Oregon museum. However, the real bad guys are greedy land developers who want to desecrate ancient Indian land. Perhaps the dinosaurs are mad because Indians took the land from them. No, that doesn't made sense – but neither does this movie...

Director Colin Ferguson's bickering co-stars are Steven Brand (as Jake Roundtree) and Kirsty Mitchell (as Emma Neil). With any luck, they will rediscover their love before the closing credits, and make rebellious daughter Emilia Clarke (as Savannah) happy enough to do an Indian rain dance. Running with the duo during the opening minutes, resourceful Gabriel Womack (as Wyatt) is the most useful member of the cast. The worst part of the horror is when Mr. Brand takes two young recruits from the local college to shoot a dinosaur with very big guns. Brand should have known what was going to happen the first time one of the dinosaur skeletons disassembled, but he stands there with a dumb look on his face instead of telling the two young guys to run inside… like, as fast as possible. Then, everyone forgets them.

*** Triassic Attack (11/27/10) Colin Ferguson ~ Steven Brand, Kirsty Mitchell, Raoul Trujillo, Gabriel Womack

More rubbish from the SyFy Channel.

[poolandrews · 2/10 · 20 September 2012]

Triassic Attack is set in Mill City in the US where a large university have brought half the land & intends to demolish half the houses & shop's & expand the current university. A local Native American named Dakota (Raoul Trujillo) is opposed to the plans which will destroy his ancestor's heritage, he also feels his people were tricked into signing away their land & is doing all he can to stop the bulldozer's moving in. Dakota's uncle happens to be Jake Roundtree (Steven Brand) the town Sheriff who has to abide by the law, frustrated & angry Dakota decides to use ancient magic to save the town & performs a rite in which evil spirits possess three Dinosaur skeleton's bringing them to life, the rampaging skeleton's attack & kill anyone they meet & it's up to the Sheriff & his archaeologist wife Emma (Kirsty Mitchell) to figure out a way to stop them, meanwhile Dakota feels guilty & also sets out to stop them...

Directed by Colin Ferguson this is yet another of the endless line of crappy films made by the SyFy Channel, how do these keep getting made? They never get good reviews & no-one seems to like them but for some reason the SyFy Channel continues to churn them out, someone must watch them? People like me I suppose who watch in the hope their next film might be good & since they air on television for free decide it's worth the effort because we haven't spent any money renting or buying the thing, I am still waiting for that good SyFy Channel film & believe me I have seen plenty of them. First a fact, none of the Dinosaur's featured in Triassic Attack actually lived during the triassic period, go ahead & look it up I think you will find that I am right. What the hell happened to the 'Science' in 'Science Fiction'? I guess the makers just thought Triassic Attack sounded better then Cretaceous Attack. Lets not kid ourselves though, nothing in Triassic Attack makes any sense & the whole film feels random & cobbled together, the script tries to be deep & have a parent daughter conflict angle while it also tries to say that while we have to look to the future we can embrace & remember the past but these attempts at serious drama are just laughable & are there to pad the running out between the Dinosaur attacks. The living Dinosaur skeleton's also pose many questions like how can they make roaring noises? How can they see? How can that one fly without & wings? Then at the end the two join together & we get a flying T-Rex as the film just gets even sillier. All attempts at humour, scares, suspense, tension & human drama fall flat & the whole 86 minutes is a chore to sit through.

The special effects as you might suspect are poor, from the electricity bolts at the end to the Dinosaur skeleton's themselves, they just look absurd & the whole concept behind is daft. There's not even any decent gore either, there's a couple of dead bodies & a arm in a tree but nothing else worth mentioning. It's even odd that the hate figures of the film survive, I mean the university dean who is shown as a money grabbing white guy doesn't get so much as a scratch on him & Dakota the guy responsible for bring the Dinosaur skeleton's to life & is therefore indirectly responsible for at least a dozen death's is seen as the hero & saviour at the end!

Although set entirely in the US this was apparently filmed in Bulgaria, the production values are cheap & it looks like the television film it is. The acting isn't great, the cast look nice enough but unremarkable.

Triassic Attack is yet another instantly forgettable made for television SyFy Channel creature feature that is just as boring, badly written, incompetently made & silly as most of their other's. Don't bother wasting your time.

Lame, but not the worst I've seen from SyFy

[TheLittleSongbird · 3/10 · 24 March 2012]

I'll give some credit where it's due. I did think the locations did look beautiful and there is one good character, Wyatt, played with quirky enthusiasm by Gabriel Womack. However, while SyFy have done far worse than this(just look at Camel Spiders, Quantum Apocalypse, Titanic II and Alien vs. Hunter for examples) Triassic Attack is pretty lame. The skeleton dinosaurs' designs are a step above designs with dinosaurs in flesh and blood, but they still look substandard. The audio is overbearing at times and sometimes overshadows the dialogue. Nothing exciting musically either. The script apart from Wyatt's amusing quips is generally weak and unimaginative, and the story feels leaden and the usual suspend disbelief moments with a lack of thrills and suspense. Wyatt aside, the characters are clichéd and dull, and the acting more often than not look very stiff here. The direction is somewhat efficient, but ultimately joyless. Overall, not the worst I've seen from SyFy, but apart from the scenery, one good character and Womack, there was little good, in my opinion that is. 3/10 Bethany Cox

goofy

[trashgang · 5/10 · 18 November 2016]

I admit, the only reason I wanted to see this flick is the fact that Emilia Clarke is in it. This was her first full feature and made just before her stardom via Game Of Thrones. It's a SyFy flick and have seen a lot of them I knew what to expect.

This one is a bit goofy because by accident dinosaurs are brought back to life. It shouldn't be SyFy if they added something silly, the dinosaurs are only skeletons. The skeletons do break out of course and are attacking a town.

So it's naturally CGI to create the Dino's. To be honest for a SyFy flick it was rather above my expectations. And attacking they do but in a rather stupid way, they eat , the T-Rex for example, but existing only of bones the bodies fall out of his mouth. And at a beach after an attack the beach is full of separated body parts but it all looks funny and not believable.

Mediocre flick, goofy in many ways. Luckily Emilia has chosen dragons in stead of Dino's.

Gore 0/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 1,5/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5

Fun Romp In Bulgaria With Some Boney Creatures

[rakasome · 4/10 · 28 November 2010]

What a FUN movie. Beautifully shot in Bulgaria. Sure it was a LOW-budget production, sure some of the actors should have other jobs at the drive-up Dairy Queen, but hey, it was still fun.

The joker that played the sheriff was probably the weakest cast member. Pretty flat character that should have done a little more FREAKING OUT when danger was on the Jeep. Dontcha think. The rest of the cast was well suited for their parts. Especially the quirky and funny Gabriel Womack that was part McGyver, part stand up comedian. Loved his hair after the "wire-connection."

The reincarnation of a FLYING T-Rex was fabulous!!

All in all a good outing for the Sci Fi channel.

We all loved it, Gabriel!!! Missoula out....

This movie should have been a fossil that was never dug up or discovered.

[Thangalang21 · 2/10 · 27 November 2010]

I was expecting a great Syfy movie; my family would sit down, watch it, enjoy it, and laugh at the guilty pleasure with it's clever effects throughout. However, this just made me feel like fast-forwarding the entire show with my DVR remote. Here's why:

The story was just boring; it felt like that it could have sped up a little bit. At least they did a flashback to show how the events came about, but mostly, the writers used all these unnecessary pauses and dialog for filler that just made the movie seem longer. If they were to cut out those certain scenes or shorten them, the movie could have made a solid hour and I would have enjoyed it much better.

The characters, mostly between the main characters--Jake and Emma--were just irritating and painstakingly annoying. As before, the writers just used filler techniques in situations with dialog or pauses. Surprisingly, the other characters that were further introduced were slightly better, but the pacing felt unbalanced. The acting was off- balance; some scenes looked like they were a complete joke--not funny, some were so overdone that they seemed to last too long.

The effects were okay some of the time, but mostly, they were the cheapest graphics ever put into a Syfy movie--more cheap than the other movies. In fact, they were so cheap that it made the other effects from other Syfy movies, as well as low-rated universal productions, appear ten times as good.

Lastly, the concepts of the movie: dull and unrealistic. In fact, one scene actually felt uncomfortable and very unusual and it lasted for about a minute. Another one was a ritual ceremony that caused it to magically rain from the sky. The fact that dinosaur skeletons are able to roar without the required organs, and fly without any muscles, is beyond ridiculous.

As for consistency, Syfy premiered the movie Jurassic Park, a more successful spin-off of realistic dinosaurs, directed by Steven Spielberg, before this movie aired. I assume that it tried to keep us interested in dinosaurs, just without the whole body structure, but that plan failed miserably.

Overall, this is one of the worst Syfy movies that was ever made in the history of this channel.

Dreadful, although not entirely the worst

[geekgirl101 · 2/10 · 3 March 2013]

Well, this is yet another of those movies that I wasn't paying attention to until part-way through and realised what a total bunch of cobblers it was and that I'm glad I never got to see the boring buildup at the start.

So we have 3 dinosaur fossils that are attacking a small village, a bunch of so-called Indians who have mystic powers, and a very small police force protecting the town.

The dinosaur fossils raise a bunch of questions such as how can they see with no eyes, how can they shriek and growl with no vocal chords or lungs, and how are they capable of flying with no wings. What's more ridiculous is about 3/4 of the way through the film the bones join together to create - Ptero-Rex, a flying T-Rex with glowing red eyes.

The settings are quite decent, the music is pretty OK and dramatic during the... well, what is supposed to be the dramatic scenes, and the acting is pretty good too, and they've done well in having the actors and the monsters in the same scene instead of it being here's a person, here's a dinosaur, here's a person running away, and here's the dinosaur chasing them. It's just the storyline is completely naff and ridiculous.

Worst. Actors. Ever.

[Sandcooler · 3/10 · 10 August 2016]

I rarely rip on the acting performances in creature features from the SyFy Channel, but Jesus H. Christ. Where the hell did they find all these people? A project like "Triassic Attack" isn't going to attract the cream of the crop, but this cast goes well below the minimum requirements. For one thing: nobody in this quiet, rural American town manages to hide their British accent. For another, the inevitable comic relief character has the comedic timing of an orphanage fire. The Native American character does seem to be pulled straight from an SNL sketch, but I think those scenes are supposed to be taken seriously. The effects are never that good in SyFy movies, but they are especially bad here. These dinosaur skeletons seemed very difficult to animate, they move in a really unnatural way. There are several scenes where we get dangerously close to "Birdemic" territory. Overall though, the most bothersome thing about this movie is that it just doesn't give the audience what it wants. All you want to see is dinosaurs eating people, and it barely has any of that. And on the rare occasions you do see it, it appears to be completely bloodless because adding CGI blood is more work. Not even good for a laugh.

Sad

[teebear817 · 1/10 · 5 May 2021]

I am ashamed of Colin Ferguson for directing this crud. Silly me, i thought he might insist on quality. Nope. He tried to infuse about 40 comic lines ala' Frank Drebin, but they failed everytime. In fact it was very irritating. Skeletal Pterydactals who fly with just boney arms and no feathers, dinos who hear with no ears, see with no eyes, oh it goes on and on. Its just garbage.

Simple yet flaccid

[TheDudeReviewsStuff · 5/10 · 4 September 2023]

The amount of enjoyment I received watching this I realized was based on how I looked at it. When it started and I was thinking "Jurassic Park", the reality of how well the directors and cast stretched what seemed a very tight budget. Fair play to them for making a derivative and formulaic script somewhat watchable.

When I started thinking of it as a "Sharknado" but with dinosaurs instead of sharks, things came more into focus. The at times over-the-top acting, low budget special effects, and ponderous music, became part of the show.

Common sense rarely exists in this kind of movie. But that is part of the fun. If you enjoy campy pseudo-horror movies, then this is worth a gander.

The audio.

[catpantry · 10/10 · 13 February 2020]

There were some real greedy players in this thing. They park in the wrong spot; the coffee house drive through to sit for some time before heading to a landfill to start a weaponless battle between each other. Songs like, 'raise yourself' (Britney spears), and put your mouth on a fence (Britney spears) were featured. Full movie soundscape performed by Britney spears.

Help I need a sense of peril

[nd_d · 6/10 · 27 November 2010]

Could more effort be put forth in the composition? Sure.

Could we have a lower budget film with 3D effects that had lighting more like the environment? Sure.

I think some of the audio/soundtrack deterred me a bit during the dialog.

But even with this I still had fun with this film. It had some funny moments that kept me in it but I think what got me the most was the sense of peril that was genuinely lacking at most times.

I would like to see more good quality sci-fi native American lore based films.

Please don't give up. This movie had good bones.. but where's the beef!

Pretty terrible

[candries-1 · 3/10 · 18 June 2019]

Game of Thrones it ain't. Even Emilla (sic!) Clarke can't save this. Worst special effects I've seen in a long time. Do something better with your life.

Non-American Bad American Scifi movie

[ulyssescpt-1 · 3/10 · 10 January 2022]

I saw this movie years ago. Typical SYFY movie.... Right. Then I saw it again recently, and noticed Emilia Clarke. I figured this must be early in her career. Because I can't see Mother of Dragons doing this movie. Then I started doing a bit of research. Most of the cast is British or Scottish. Only two of the actors are American. And it was filmed in Bulgaria. We Americans can't make low budget bad scifi movies anymore? Where is our pride. "YES WE CAN!!!!" Let's bring back bad low budget scifi movies back to the old U. S. of A. The sad part, this isn't the worse example of fake Non-American bad low budget American scifi movie I've seen. I can't recall the name of the movie. But get this. The whole movie takes place in a English High School. EVERYTHING... literally everything is English. The school, the uniforms, etc. Except for 2 little things. The accent, and the attitude of the movie. It was a bad low budget movie. Having the cast and the theme stereotypical American bad movie, was suppose to save it???

Poor

[neil-476 · 5/10 · 3 March 2013]

We have some unwanted property development impending near where we live. Sadly, we don't have any native American medicine men who can summon up - wait for it - magic dinosaur skeletons. Yes, that's what we have in this entry in SyFy's increasingly rubbish made for TV critter movies (increasingly? No, they've been rubbish all the time). The only reason to see a trite, hackneyed, predictable piece of tosh like this is the critters, and they are so lame that it negates the point of seeing the film in the first place. I have trouble seeing how a pterodactyl comprising only bones can fly. Ah, magic. Yes, of course.

When I said "lame", I may have omitted to say that the dinosaur skeletons don't convince visually, particularly as they are startlingly badly composited into the background plates.

Another SyFy channel winnah!

A typical SyFy movie

[Leofwine_draca · 3/10 · 29 October 2018]

TRIASSIC ATTACK is another laughable effort from the SyFy Channel, a cheap and often unintentionally funny television flick in which a trio of dinosaur skeletons get up off their plinths at a local museum and proceed to wreak havoc. It's a movie chock-full of cultural stereotypes, very bad CGI effects, and laughable scripting. The one twist is that it features a pre-stardom Emilia Clarke - yes, Daenerys - playing a central role. You've never guess her to be on the cusp of stardom.

Powerful Science Fiction and Epic Survival Film

[jlthornb51 · 10/10 · 22 June 2015]

Actor Colin Ferguson proves he is a gifted director with this exciting science fiction adventure and what he accomplishes with a limited budget is extraordinary. The original and sharp script from screen writers Russ Friedman and Tripp Reid gives a brief nod to giant reptile movies of the past and proceeds to turn them all on their heads with wit and insight. When a Native American roadside attraction operator inadvertently awakens huge dinosaurs, they wreak havoc upon a small town and university in horrific fashion. Especially clever is Ferguson's choice to select an actor who looks like himself to play the sheriff and have him drive a Jeep much like the character Ferguson plays on the imaginative SyFy show Eureka. That actor is excellent and the entire cast brings a depth and humanity to their characters that's unusual in this kind of science fiction film. Superb special effects bring the ghostly dinosaurs to live remarkably and they prove to be quite frightening indeed. Certainly a superior entry in the Rampaging Dinosaur genre and a truly fantastic thrill ride.

Appealing actors + preposterous premise = fun

[skoyles · 6/10 · 26 December 2011]

One test for a good show of any type is a simple question: did you care about the characters? I cared about the sheriff (who reminded me a bit of the sheriff in "Eureka"), about his estranged wife and about his daughter. Three likable actors portrayed the parts and I thought did good solid work. I objected for a moment at the skeletons breathing and bellowing without lungs but they were animated by *magic* after all. This is not a National Geographics special; it is a daft little fantasy. With good supporting actors, a couple of imaginative twists and a minimum of gore "Triassic Attack" became a fine little movie. Low expectations and being ill may have had something to do with it but I thoroughly enjoyed the time I "wasted" on this. I am confused about the title: none of the bony critters looked to be from the Triassic to me!

Perfect

[finianscott · 8/10 · 22 January 2014]

Well i think this movie was great The fact that they got the mother of dragons to come down from HBO and film something for the scyfi channel blows my mind. And the progression that the sheriff went through in the film was beautiful. Truly an art-house movie. I myself felt many a tear fall from my eye as i realized the dinosaur skeletons were an allegory for corporate expansion in the United States. Truly sublime. The animation for the dinosaurs was better than most movies in theaters today. The only place i felt the movie lacked was in the score. The music clashed with the morose theme of the film. But other than that perfect.

"Jurassic Park" on the mainland, but with animated dinosaur fossils

[Wuchakk · 6/10 · 8 September 2017]

RELEASED TO TV IN 2010 and directed by Colin Ferguson, "Triassic Attack" takes place at an Oregon university town where the skeletal remains of a tyrannosaurus, a pteranodon & a velociraptor come to life due to the mojo of a Native American (Raoul Max Trujillo) frustrated about the University taking over Native lands. CAST: Steven Brand plays the sheriff, Kirsty Mitchell his ex-wife, Emilia Clarke their daughter, Gabriel Womack a helpful electrician who stinks and Christopher Villiers the venal president of the college.

This is basically a TV-budgeted "Jurassic Park" with better characters (generally speaking), Native mojo and taking place on the mainland rather than a tropical island. Of course, it lacks the great Tyrannosaurus and velociraptors-in-the-kitchen sequences, but it's pretty entertaining for what it is. The movie starts out thoroughly serious, but eventually adds a little humor. The opening act features a great tantrum scene involving Raoul's character, Dakota. Speaking of Dakota, the story angle of his traditional beliefs/practices NOT saving someone in the past and how it ill-affects his relationship with someone else is insightful.

It's interesting to see Emilia before she shot to fame with Game of Thrones and "Terminator: Genisys" (2015), not that I'm a fan, which isn't to say I DON'T like her. She's a'right.

THE FILM RUNS about 87 minutes and was shot in Bulgaria. WRITERS: Russ Friedman & Tripp Reed.

GRADE: B/B- (6.5/10)

The good type of bad

[tfrager · 6/10 · 23 November 2021]

I'll be straight with you. This is not a great movie. It is full of well-known tropes, stereotypes, and impossibilities. But it is the type of bad movie that is so bad it's actually good. It's fun. It's the type of bad movie that you watch with a group of friends and sit around and make fun of it while you watch it. Which is why I give it six stars. You can certainly enjoy your evening, or your afternoon, or whenever, watching this with a group of like-minded friends who enjoy bad movies. However, if you're looking for an actual good science fiction flick, one that is believable and has real science in it, this is not the movie for you. If you're just looking for fun, ridiculous, goofy evening, then this movie is perfect.

Typical if somewhat flawed Sci-Fi Channel Creature Feature

[kannibalcorpsegrinder · 7/10 · 14 June 2016]

Upset about the building on his sacred land, an Indian shaman summons an ancient spirit to stop the construction, but when they take the form of the dinosaur skeletons housed nearby, he joins with the police to stop their rampage before they eat the entire town.

This here turned out to be quite the decent Sci-Fi Channel effort. One of the film's better features is some rather fun and enjoyable action scenes here that give this some fun and enjoyable scenes, as the ceremony to bring them back to life is one of these highlights. There's some fun to be had with the gathering of the different elements needed, the flashing images as the connection occurs unknowingly during the ceremony and then finally unleashing the skeletons which leads into the secondary attack on the construction site outside in a wholly impressive scene, while the student attacks in the forest that eventually results in their bloody discovery later and the escape in the police car trying to dodge the creatures always breaking in, bursting the creature to pieces before chasing them into a water- tower. Later action scenes here are a lot of fun as the big school-site ambush as it begins rampaging through the gathered faculty members at the ceremony which brings on plenty of fun action with the encounters of the staff and the others trapped inside while giving this some rather fun action. That doesn't even get to the film's two main highlight scenes, the big attack on the beach where skeleton creatures goes on a rampage at the fraternity initiation and begins chomping down on the members quite gruesomely in an extended and enjoyable sequence, while the finale comes off as a lot of fun with the secondary spiritual ceremony and the different attacks on the town before finally getting to the unique and creature finale that's wholly fun here. Along with the novel idea of the skeletons instead of the flesh-and-blood creations, there's some good parts here though it does have a few small issues. The biggest problem here is the film's use of those skeleton dinosaurs, as they're an absolutely horrendous execution filled with several problems as this absolutely kills off the gore here by never giving the kills anything to go on as this barely even contains any blood. None of the kills here have any of that, and it's such a detriment that the cheesy atmosphere is completely gone. That also gives way to the film's other problem with such ludicrous and pathetic CGI that's beyond laughable and becomes such a severe flaw considering the screen time they have as this continues on with the same flaws as usual. Otherwise, this was a decent enough effort.

Rated Unrated/R: Violence and Language.

Hey it's a zombie dyno film and it has Amelia Clark in it and it's not that bad

[demodokos · 6/10 · 12 December 2023]

I mean I don't know what people are expecting. It's not like you have to pay to watch this or something. There's a lot worse sci-fi movies on the sci-fi channel and elsewhere and this really isn't that terrible. I mean it's a zombie dino movie. And yeah the young woman playing the university professor is far too hot and it's got Amelia Clark in it as the daughter of the professor and the sheriff who are of course having marital issues and all but divorced, a typical sort of backplot. I don't know if I've ever seen a movie involving a homicidal dinosaur skeletons conjured up accidentally by an American Indian. But hey all in all, it's not much more improbable than bringing them back to life with DNA preserved in mosquitoes covered with amber. The acting is fair and once you get over the premise the story holds together and if predictable it's still a bit of fun!