This week’s spotlight is a movie by the name of A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell (1990). Talk about a catchy title. I watched this on the recommendation of one of my fellow writers. Although I usually have reservations when it comes to B movies, this one had me hooked with its ridiculously awesome name. Here’s what was going through my head after reading it: Nymphoid (Ooo, hot chick), Barbarian (Conan!), Dinosaur (Jurassic Park), Hell (Hell yeah! But you already had me at Nymphoid).
This movie definitely delivers. There is a nymphoid barbarian. She is rather cute and wears almost nothing. There are a lot of evil dinosaurs who are pretty cool looking in a funny, clay-mation sort of way. There are also mutants, guns, crossbows, and a recital of Jabberwocky. The plot: In the near future, humans have gone and blown up half the planet and have saturated everything with radiation. This radiation has mutated animals into dinosaur-like monsters and has turned a lot of the humans into mutants as well. Every humanoid in the movie wants to get with our nymphoid barbarian.
So what did I think of the movie? It was… OK. I appreciate a really bad movie, especially when they are royally screwing up, and this movie does it in droves. However, I think many of you would actually find a few stretches of the movie to be rather boring. It came close to being serious a couple times (Whaaat?!), though fortunately, you never go longer than 10 minutes without having someone eaten by a dinosaur. The acting is pretty non-existent, but that’s to be expected. I’d say it’s worth watching if you like laughing at bad films. It’s definitely funnier than the animated Titanic movie, but not quite as funny as The Room.
There’s a special place in my heart for dinosaurs. The first movie I can remember seeing in theatres was actually Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993). I was four years old at the time, and I thought it was the greatest film ever. This is still my favorite movie of all time. Flash forward a few years to when I was still but a kindergartener. I wanted nothing more than to become a paleontologist and spend the rest of my life digging up dinosaur bones. It wasn’t until grade 6 that I decided I wanted to be an engineer instead. That being said, I’ll still watch just about anything if it’s got dinosaurs in it. On a side note, an interesting tidbit about Jurassic Park is that originally, all the dinosaurs in the movie were stop motion (think The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)), and they were changed to CGI half-way through the movie’s production. This week’s spotlight has stop motion dinosaurs. When done correctly, stop motion can be creepy and eerily real. When done poorly, it’s hilarious. These effects are hilarious, but they are really hard to get right. There’s this one really funny scene at the beginning of the movie where one of the main characters is fighting a giant dinosaur worm and shoots it with a tiny crossbow. I laughed so hard I coughed hummus (and perhaps some chip crumbs as well) out my nose. I’d forgotten how awesome dinosaurs were.
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