On 13 July 2020, I watched another of my Jurassic-entitled monster movie DVDs. This one was Jurassic Island, directed by Canyon Prince, and released earlier in 2020.
The premise of Jurassic Island is that a teenage arcade video-game player named Jake is sucked into a strange new game named Rancala that seems to have a life of its own, and when the very same Rancala game mysteriously reappears 10 years later in a soon-to-be-opened major new arcade run by his sister Sarah who has blamed herself constantly for his mysterious disappearance a decade earlier, she and two friends find themselves sucked inside the game too, whereupon they are transported to Rancala itself.
As they soon find out, Rancala turns out to be an island fraught with danger, including live sharks hurled at them from a sea-tornado – and that's just Level 1 of said game. So the intrepid trio boldly set out to rescue Jake and return with him to their real world, but to do so they must successfully battle all of the monsters and warriors confronting them on each level of the Rancala video game.
As I have never been remotely interested in video games and have no knowledge of the jargon and only the most fragmentary knowledge of how such games play out, it will come as no surprise to learn that I found this movie very heavy going, with much of its gaming detail going completely over my head.
Moreover, apart from one very brief conflict with a single theropod dinosaur, the Jurassic aspect of this movie's title was a complete misnomer, notwithstanding the very prominent presence of a tyrannosaur and a trio of pterosaurs on the front cover of its official DVD. Nor did it feature any notable human stars, or at least none that I recognized.
Released directly to DVD earlier this year, Jurassic Island was a movie apparently conceived much more for game fans than for monster fans, but seemingly hoping to trade off the Jurassic monicker to attract a wider audience than may otherwise have been drawn to it.
(Incidentally, this present film should not be confused with a same-titled but imho far superior movie released in 2014 by Arclight Films, featuring two children who are sucked into a kind of temporal black hole inside which is a lush tropical land containing all manner of objects that have been drawn into it from many different time periods. These include a diverse range of prehistoric animals, whose CGI creation is spectacularly executed.)
To get a taste of what to expect from Jurassic Island, click here to watch its official trailer on YouTube.
And to view a complete listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE!
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