With a clever pun served on a silver platter, Terrordactyl presents itself as a straight to video B-movie masterpiece ready to absorb two hours of your Saturday night. Hoping that prehistoric mayhem might be delivered with heaping extras of that same wit is a nice dream, but one that might not fully hatch.
We begin in semi-vacant truck-stop as an unwitting trucker pulls up for his last rest stop shower or friendly road reach-around; sadly, we’ll never know, as he is the first (an surprisingly one of the few) victims of said “reptiles” of terror. Terrordactyl, you had me with stereotypical trucker gets out of truck finishing bottle of liquor only to reach into back pocket to pull out another bottle of liquor.
But how quickly you lost me. After the brief setup with the trucker and horror [sic] plotline established, we’re introduced to Lars (Christopher John Jennings) and Jonas (Jason Tobias), a would-be pair of lawn renaissance men, hard at work on a Friday. Lars is the driven [sic] boss and Jonas is the ogling the random beauty in a bikini while attempting to MacGuyver the lawn industry sidekick. Lars espouses hard, honest work, while Jonas longs for more than rakes and grass trimmings—clearly though, he’d mind neither grass, nor trim, a point he makes clear when emphasizing that they must get to a bar, after all, it’s what they do EVERY Friday. And good thing they do, because the bar introduces us to the second plot line, the improbable love interest, and the means to bringing our two plotlines together: Bartender Candice (Candice Nunes) to Jonas: Hey Jonas, did you know meteorites are worth big money? Jonas to Candice: No shit. Well shucks, let me find us some meteorites. Later toots. Jonas to Lars: hey Lars, let’s head off into the middle of the desert, drunk, in our pickup truck, and find some meteorites to earn us some true green!
It’s B-movie world, and improbably plot lines like this aren’t beyond acceptance; in fact, beautiful bartenders that actually reciprocate the intereste of their barfly clientele and absurd heroes quests are the stuff that fuel B-movies. So, when our intrepid [sic] heroes find meteorite-bearing craters and return to the city triumphantly, I’m onboard. When said meteorite is actually a terrordactyle egg, something our woeful heroes remain blissfully ignorant of for far too (and acceptably) long, I’m still riding bareback on terrordactyle glory. When the battle for humanity ensues, with “reptiles” tracking our heroes’ every move as if they’ve implanted GPS tracking devices on their persons, I take it as how the universe works: the bad guys (lizards) always know where you are and no matter how fast you run, they will walk (flutter) and still be your better in speed. This is how the world is!