Verdict
Summary
Released directly to video the same year the much bigger Jurassic Park exploded into theaters, Full Moon’s cute, corny low budget family film Prehysteria! capitalized on the dino craze of the season and cashed in a quick buck in the home video market.
Plot: A young boy and his family embark on a series of adventures when the boy finds some mysterious eggs, which hatch to reveal a brood of baby dinosaurs.
Review: A widower and his two teenaged kids Jerry (Austin O’Brien) and Monica (Samantha Mills) accidentally end up with an igloo filled with ancient, magical dinosaur eggs pilfered from the Amazon jungle. The eggs hatch in their barn (they’re country folk), and their household suddenly becomes the playground for a bunch of miniature, lovable dinosaurs! Enter the villain: the conniving scumbag who claimed the eggs from the Amazonian temple, whose igloo was mistakenly swapped with the family’s cooler at a grocery store. The two kids and their father (and a pretty woman the dad is trying to date) must thwart the bad guy and his bumbling henchman and save the dinosaurs!
Released directly to video the same year the much bigger Jurassic Park exploded into theaters, Full Moon’s cute, corny low budget family film Prehysteria! capitalized on the dino craze of the season and cashed in a quick buck in the home video market. Charles and Albert Band’s co-directing credits on the film adequately sum up what to expect from the movie: miniature creatures, innocuous plotting, and a general sense of mundanely executed events. It’s not bad at all … just tame and unimaginative. Seen in today’s marketplace, it’s literally a dinosaur.
Full Moon has just released a blu ray /DVD combo of this title, and it’s available for the first time ever in the widescreen format. Special features include a newly recorded audio commentary by Charles Band and Austin O’Brien, and “The Moonbeam Videozone.”