Jurassic Domination Movie Review – Asylum's Dominion
“Get on out here!” “Shoo!” “Hey, Bill. You see anything yet?” “Not yet.” Hello, world wide web. I’m Decker Shado, the internet personality with the best hair and continuing Dinocember 2022. Oh, Jurassic January 2023. Let’s take a look at a big movie that came out just last year in 2022. Jurassic Domination, which sounds an awful lot like another Jurassic movie with another D word that came out that year. Must be because this is one of the latest offerings by our friends at the Asylum, a mockbuster of Jurassic World Dominion. Jurassic Domination has nothing to do with
that movie. As expected, they only needed the plot to be close enough to have the name that’s similar enough to that movie. The rest is all just happenstance and a multi-part story about future technology and cloned dinosaurs with all kinds of interesting things happening with lots and lots of big name stars. That’s that’s awful dang expensive sounding. And if we know anything about the asylum, it’s that they like to make their movies on the budget of your average Chinese lunch special takeout. So what is the epic tale of Jurassic Domination? A small group of soldiers
must help an even smaller group of scientists when an even smaller group of dinosaurs escape and begin tormenting an even smaller civilian population. However, it turns out that an even smaller
to be seen again. Because the important thing is this little transport vehicle nowhere near there. Captain Visitch, played by Eric Guilmette, drives the package along with Sergeant Ajax, played by DeAngelo Davis and Private Connors, played by Torrey Richardson. What exactly are they carrying? They weren’t told. “Just want to know a little more then uh, Here’s a weird gun. Keep it hush. And oh, and don’t mind the growls.” You’d think having so few people to pull off this job, the people doing it in secret could have just done it themselves. But. But. But you got to
remember, the people in the know is only like two of them. And they needed three guys to pull this off. This is the opening of a movie, though, so things have to go wrong. How does that happen? Well, the cage’s constant growling seems quiet to Private Connors, so she goes to poke around with a cattle prod when bam, they tear it from her hand. And the beasts escape! Stopping to check, Sergeant Ajax discovers the payload is not there. “They got out!” “Where’s Connor?” Open the door. Get on the floor. Everybody feed the dinosaur. The last
one standing, Ajax, is cleaned up just the same as the dinosaurs are loose! Anyway, better introduce some new characters fast. Major Tanner, played by Jack Pearson, informs Corporal Higgins, played by Kahlo De Jesus Buffington that while he also doesn’t know what the package was, he does know the opening went bad and now they got to deal with it. So while Higgins goes off on that task, we’re introduced to Colonel Ramirez, played by Jamie Bernadette. Who I’m going to go ahead and assume already knows about the whole dinosaur thing. She asks the science person Carrie, played
by Alissa Filoramo, how long until the eggs hatch? She’s like ‘soon.’ And the Colonel’s like, Nice, good old valuable assets. Keep a close eye on them, okay? That way, nothing will go wrong. I mean, unless you count what’s going to happen to these two. The guy in the coveralls with the name tag Bob is credited as Raymond, played by John Crosby. He and his friend Bill, played by Trevor Champion Rogers, hear a weird noise, which, of course, is a dinosaur. Who tears Bill to pieces before Raymond attacks it with a boomstick. But the shotgun does
nothing. Just his luck at the asylum saved that much more money by not having any visual effects for that weapon. It’s around this point that Higgins calls Tanner back, like, Hey, just got to that opening set. Yeah, it went just about as well as the opening of most horror movies. So now Tanner’s got to figure out what to do. Later. First, we need to introduce General Greer. “Colonel, the operation in South America was a massive success.” Played by Eric Roberts. Because, let’s face it, the asylum’s just putting him into everything they make anymore. As he
collects his paycheck for a full day’s work, having all his scenes be phone calls, and most of them taking place in a single set. The colonel’s like, Hey, escaped dinosaurs kind of a problem. But Greer’s like, Don’t worry, the dino soldier program is way too fucking expensive to screw up. So you have to fix it. Therefore, it will be fixed, and there’s nothing to be concerned about. Her mission, should she choose to accept it or not, is to get the escaped dinosaurs back alive and do her absolute best to make sure no one else dies
in the process. With that in mind, she calls in the big guns. “Major Tanner.” Or the guns, anyway. Movies only got so many people cast in it. She doesn’t really have that many options. Preparing things, the dinosaur is still doing the same walk cycle and Carrie has been replaced by Jerry, so that’s close enough. She plays the dinosaur call to summon the beasts. Oh, yeah. But she called Tanner. Surprise! The convoy was taken out by a biological weapon. It escaped and we need it back. What kind of weapon? Well, you ever seen Jurassic Park? “Dinosaurs?”
“That’s correct.” There’s the mom right there. Just doing the walk cycle. She loves that walk cycle. The colonel explains that civilians in South America made them intent on selling them on the black market. That is, until Uncle Sam swooped in and decided they’d make much better indiscriminate killers for the Stars and Stripes. Tanner asks why they never told him. And the colonel says that’s because it’s above his pay grade, despite his fantastic credentials. “You’re Special Forces, two Silver Stars. You have an incredible ability to handle tactical analysis.” And you smell intoxicating. And that’s why he’s
perfect for the dinosaur hunt. But they’re not just any dinosaurs. They’re tried and true. The US already used them to slaughter an extremist group. Tanner wonders how they got them back the first time, and the colonel explains that they used a recording of their mother’s call to bring them back. “And we put the tape in the crate and open it up and they walk right in.” “Where are the crates now?” “Unfortunately, they were destroyed.” And we might still have the recording and we could make more tapes. And we have plenty of crates around here. But…
Eh? “One more thing. Bullets don’t work.” Well, of course they don’t work. You don’t have to establish that. It’s common horror movie procedure that guns don’t work, cars don’t start, and no matter how fast you sprint away from the slasher killer, he can easily just slow walk up to you after you trip over nothing. The reason she gives is that they are genetically modified organisms and being bullet proof was just magiced into them with the power of science. That and to prioritize agility, they are shrunk from standard allosaurus size to approximately Jurassic Park velociraptor size.
But don’t you worry. If bullets don’t work, a newly invented plasma rifle might do the trick. “They’re limited to a single shot before the fuze needs to be replaced.” Okay, so you’ve got magazines loaded with fuzes instead of cartridges, right? Do you get an active reload bonus from pressing X at the right time? Actually, they didn’t think that far ahead. The guns fire once. And that’s it. Fuzes are just so hard to come by. Anyway, he’s got that team, so they got to be brought up to snuff. Going to have to, as the colonel is
sending everyone else home, spare a skeleton crew and a small squad of soldiers just in case. Not that they’re important. We got to introduce the rest of Tanner’s crew. Lieutenant Richardson, played by Jenny Tran and Lieutenant Peters, played by Azeem Vecchio. That out of the way, we can induce the big guns. Prototypes, still incredibly flawed, but it should be enough to knock out the Dinos so they can bring them in alive. “Hits hard, but it is slow. The tech team likes to call it the slug gun.” Yes. Slugs, well known for their unmatched aggression. Based
on the recent activity, they believe that the dinosaurs will head to the base very soon. And from the north, going through the utility tunnels, a natural choke point. So heading that way, they ignore that choke point thingamajig and just split up in various directions. Higgins stays with Tanner, but Peters and Richardson are both flying solo and as such, the movie monsters have no problem picking them off one by one, especially considering they pretty much serve themselves up for their convenience. Bullets don’t work but the handy dandy slug gun does the trick. Blasting a hole clean
through the dinosaur, killing it. Damn works better than advertised. Richardson is still very, very dead, but that’s hardly their biggest problem. “Your orders were to capture the assets alive.” Shoot the damn things with the prototype energy weapon in the leg, you moron. “She was a good soldier.” “Don’t focus on her now.” “I just…” “Focus on what’s in front of you.” Focus on what’s in front of me. Focus on what’s in front of me, right. Right. Like. Like Richardson’s dismembered corpse. Oh God, why?! Oh, well, one down, one to go. Heading inside, intent on teaching the
dinosaurs it’s nerf or nothing. The bad news just keeps coming. As surprise! The asylum saved even more money on cast members by having the dinosaurs absolutely slaughter all the soldiers left behind, conveniently off screen. When they report the incident back to the colonel, she surmises the dinosaurs must be heading straight there looking for their mother. “These are just animals colonel. Right?” “Not anymore, Lieutenant.” I mean, we already established that, right? Bulletproof military grade, mini allosaurus. Don’t exactly sound vanilla. She’s like these are second generation, so they’re even more deadly. Probably. I mean, you killed one
with our super stun gun, but which one? Oh, the one with the scar on its face. Well, no wonder that was the small and weak super advanced second generation dino soldier. And her sister is the real badass who gave her that scar. “She put that marking on him on purpose to keep him in his place.” Or his sister. The dinosaurs being all female or not isn’t exactly decided on scene by scene. They got three guns and therefore three shots left. And the colonel thinks that’s not enough. However, Peters thinks they can just blow him up.
Strangely, the Colonel is okay with that idea, so long as the mother is contained. So Peters and Higgins set up the booby trap while Tanner has the best job of them all. Live bait, not firing the super stun gun at it and fleeing for the trip wire. But the dinosaur senses something and tossing a handy dandy trash can, The trap blows the fuck up! “What the hell just happened? How’d a damn dinosaur know how to do that?” Honestly, with how long was struggling with the trash can? I was beginning to wonder whether or not even
knew how to do that. Out of ideas, they head back to the lab only to find that Jerry is dead. Played by Miranda Meadows. No worries. That means that Carrie can come back out and continue her role as the science type. “What was it waiting for?” “It was waiting for her to open the door.” The fuck was it waiting for that for, when it could apparently just smash through the fucking wall? So, yeah, the momma’s gone and she took her eggs with. With that in mind, they regroup, so they can think of a better strategy.
“We need to regroup. Think of a better strategy.” Yes. So, as you were. So, Oh, darn it. They were fine to go and kill the dinosaur on the loose. But now that the mama and eggs are out there, they have to take them alive again. But two adults and a few unattached eggs. There’s no way they can use three shots of super tranquilizer energy to stun them. And they still haven’t perfected the technology within the last 10 minutes. “See the fuze, It goes right in there.” The fuze is fucking tiny, smaller than most military calibers.
Why has nobody thought to just load them into a magazine and, I don’t know, use a bolt action to change them or something? Carrie, though, thinks they might be able to get it working with the mystical healing properties of quartz or other magical properties. Anyway. “It’s been used for thousands of years for its specific electric resonance.” It’s piezoelectric, not conductive Fuzes need conductivity to work, lots of conductivity. And Carrie just so happens to have some quartz back at the lab. So Tanner heads out for that while she can stay behind and figure out where the
dinosaurs are nesting. So this is uh, tense, I guess. I don’t know. He walks through hallways for a couple of minutes, finds the quartz and they upgrade their weapons. “This quartz modification will enable the weapon to shoot multiple times without needing to be replaced.” You hear that? They could have just replaced the fuzes. Maybe loaded into a box with a spring mechanism to automatically feed them with a electrically assisted action or manual. “Amazing. They’ve been working on that for weeks.” It’s not really that impressive when the fact is your R&D department is woefully incompetent. Wonder
if Greer knows about this? “I hope you have good news.” I’m afraid not. Pretty much no other character in this movie has any friggin idea what they’re doing. “Explain.” Honestly, I’ve already gone into a lot of detail. You can check out the video for yourself and subscribe. “All right. I have to go.” Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. “Yes?” Now before you go, it would really help if you like the video as well. And hit the bell notification, maybe if that does anything anymore. I was honestly trying to hit 300,000 subscribers before the end of
the year. “Get it done.” Huh. Let’s hope this goes viral. Point is, now that they have unlimited ammo, they can hunt down the two remaining threats. Carrie believes the mother is nesting, so they narrowed the possible locations down to warm areas, narrowing further to safe areas and then high probability they have three promising locations to check. However, when they go off to neutralize one threat and contain the other, Carrie goes off to pee and the colonel calls up Greer to update him on the situation. “I don’t want you taking down all our assets.” “Of course,
sir. I’ll preserve one egg and one female.” Revealing that she intends to keep some dinosaurs alive, which is exactly the orders she gave them. It’s not exactly a secret. The next thing they’re going to reveal that she’s secretly working for the government. Anyway, on the way to the first potential nesting spot. They find the nest immediately. “Where’d it go?” “I can’t see it.” Well, fuck if I know that was the same walking animation loop with the lab background. They could be anywhere. And an egg has hatched! As they have lost their targets, they call back
to command to ask them…. “What’s the next location? The next warm area on the map?” Dude… you just found the nest. It was literally the first spot you checked. You really think that the mama just set up multiple nests around the base just for funsies? Well, it keeps them moving. Sure. All the locations look the same anyway, but it’s the thought that counts. But what’s this? It seems the dinosaur was not where they were going, but where they had already been. Who could have guessed that? Thus, Higgins is dead. “He’s gone.” Peters, Peters. I understand.
If I were in an asylum movie, I’d want to be killed off early too. “Why didn’t we hear him? Why didn’t he scream?” The foley guys were on lunch break? I don’t know. Tanner says it’s because they ambushed him. He didn’t have a chance to scream. No word on how these two couldn’t hear a man being ripped apart by a dinosaur five feet behind them, though. If anything, this tells Tanner that trying to hunt the dinosaurs isn’t working out for them. “So we change the plan.” “Yeah? And do what?” “We don’t go to them. They
come to us.” “And do what?” Set for pulsar level five, susbsonic implosion factor two. “And do what?” Just shoot the damn thing. But Tanner has an even better idea. They can make a dinosaur lure! An audio lure. He just has to call Carrie to get her to isolate sounds of the baby dinosaurs from the security cameras and use that to lure the dinosaurs. Kind of exactly like the audio lure they already established they had and were using before the movie even begin. They will avenge the loss of Corporal Higgins. All things FUBAR, however, Greer is
growing concerned. “We need to figure out a story to spin this, if it gets out. And the most likely will.” Dinosaurs? Eating people? No, no that.. That’s just a parade baloon, got a… Got a little snagged. “Perhaps we can portray this operation as a recovery and containment operation. The assets were developed in-house and somehow they just got out. And we’re holding them, we’ll say, to do more research on their origin, their purpose. How does that sound?” Well, that sounds like the the plot of this movie, like you haven’t covered it up at all except for
the fact that you didn’t mention anything about the private sector yet. “The big thing is we’re going to need to pin this on a private sector company.” Oh, how about. the one in South America then? The one that originally made this? That one work for you? What kind of fucking cover up is this? Anyway. They’re back to the original nest area. I think? All these damn rooms look the same. And Tanner has the audio file to lure the beasts into his trap. Which sounds nothing like baby dinosaurs. Sounds more like the audio that the Colonel
used earlier in this movie to lure the dinosaurs back to the base in the first place. The one that they used before for the cages that they didn’t use this time because this plot makes no sense. We can be pretty sure that this isn’t going to work, though, because in the middle of all this, suddenly we cut back to Carrie, musing about a volcanic lightning and how she can somehow supercharge their plasma guns with the power of a number two pencil. Jesus. MacGyver wasn’t even this resourceful. But why would they need supercharged plasma rifles? Well,
because their current plasma rifles were nerfed in the last patch. And don’t do diddly to the dino. “Why isn’t it working?” “It’s skin’s too think. We need to find a weak spot.” Look closely. Is any part of the dinosaur glowing or flashing? And that is how a baby dinosaur sounds in this movie. It really makes me wonder how the hell Carrie screwed that up so badly, considering her scientific wizardry for the rest of it. But Peters is attacked shortly before Carrie blows the baby’s brains out. Peter is well and truly dead, but oh, well, free
gun! Tanner and Carrie Electrify the dinosaur. Now, alone with Tanner, she has a secret to share. “They want to keep one of the hatchlings alive. And the mother, too.” You know the orders he was already given? Yes, he knows. Everybody knows. Even the cover story for this incident is exactly what actually happened. What the hell are you trying to do, playing double agent here? He looks surprised by this. I guess he wasn’t paying attention earlier, and neither of them paid much mind to the strategy that clearly worked instead returning to hunting down the dinosaurs. This
wasn’t the nest, apparently, and they have to go find it. First, though, better stop off in the break room so we can introduce Grace, played by Nicole Starrett, and she just run into the hallway like a moron and be murdered by a baby dinosaur. “She was just scared.” No, she was also pretty stupid. Thus Tanner decides, Hey, fuck the nest, Let’s head back to the lab so you can upgrade my plasma rifle as well. This also gives them the chance to run down the important details. Right now, number one, pretty much everybody is dead. Even
the miscellaneous background characters we never saw. Number two, they don’t know how to deal with baby dinosaurs. And if Deep Blue Sea 2 is anything to go by, they’re screwed. And three. “Get me eyes on that nest.” They know how to cut the power. Maybe. At this point in the movie, I wouldn’t be surprised to just find out that they forgot to pay the light bill. However, there’s only one place they could have cut the power from, so that means that they know where to hunt the dinos. It also just so happens to be a
warm spot perfect for nesting. Thus they strike out in the dark. But that’s hard to film in. So fuck it, let’s just turn the lights on and pretend like nothing happened. Seeing a baby dino zip out, Tanner and Carrie have to press on towards the nest while the colonel suits up to take on this straggler. But before she can… “Colonel, I want you to pull up your team immediately.” Even Eric has had enough of this shit and just wants the movie to end already. He says there has been too much collateral damage, and therefore the
plan is to just blow the base the fuck up. So it would behoove the Colonel to GTFO before that happens. She says there’s only like 10 minutes of movie left, so they should be able to take care of the dinosaur problem before the credits roll. He agrees to give her some time, but then… “Get me Tactical Air Command.” She’s got as much time to accomplish it as it takes for the jets to arrive, so let’s hope they enjoy farting about as much as this group does. As she hunts one of the dinosaurs, the little ankle
biter bites her ankle and another goes for the throat. Hearing her screams on the radio, Tanner goes to save her, but she’s fine. Dinosaurs tearing your throat out only kill you if you’re off screen at the time. Thus, she’s disappointed in Tanner for abandoning the nest and failing to take out the big mama Dino. Oh, well, she can at least drop some random exposition about how this climax doesn’t even matter. If the dinosaurs do escape, they’re all female, and thus can’t reproduce. “They can reproduce through parthenogenesis. They don’t need traditional sperm to egg. That’s what
makes the females so valuable.” Well, females are generally more valued when it comes to breeding programs, which is why when you have the ones that run out and do the killing, you’d like them to be the nice expendable males. So they have to kill them all before they are all killed. The two babies and Big Mama Dino must die. So they blast one baby to bits before blowing it’s sibling’s bulbous head off. All right, job done now. Just got to take out the big one. But wouldn’t you know it? The asexually reproducing monster has been
reproducing asexually. Now, she could easily keep that asset unharmed, but when Tanner and Carrie unload on Mama Dino only to find out their supercharged plasma cells were nerfed in the last patch, the colonel gets a mama’s attention with the egg tossing it as well as a grenade! Which somehow works this time, despite the fact that the explosions didn’t really do anything before anyway. And the super plasma rifles weren’t doing dick. But I guess explosions had to work on dinosaurs now, if the airstrike was supposed to be a threat. Speaking of which, the air strike is
on the way, that means we get our predictable scene of the heroes desperately trying to call Greer to tell them the dinosaurs had been neutralized and he must call off the airstrike. While, of course, the radio is cutting in and out, making it so he can’t relay the order to call off the strike until mere seconds before the missiles were to fly. Therefore happy ending. Everyone fucking died except for these three assholes. The End! Literally they just roll credits over that as if that ending was supposed to be satisfying. At the very least, they didn’t
throw sequel bait in our face. Anyway, that was Jurassic Domination. God, it was boring. You know, I watch a lot of bad movies. I like bad movies. Two out of five. I love it is a saying over here for a reason. I find the redeeming qualities in a lot of things. Then then end up saying stuff like Matrix four wasn’t that bad and people tear me a new asshole over it. But with the prospect of the films coming in an entire spectrum of quality, Oh God, Jurassic Domination really fails to deliver. It’s got the trappings
of classic asylum Mlockbusters, being hastily thrown together with a barely coherent script and no concern for actual entertainment quality without other classic trappings like constant topless women and charmingly shit CGI. What we get instead is a dinosaur movie where the dinosaurs have less screen time than Michael in Halloween Ends and a handful of generic as fuck characters filmed in inexplicably shaky cameras occasionally interrupted for that afternoon worth of filming they got out of Eric Roberts. Not to mention the story itself doesn’t seem to care enough to be coherent, let alone interesting. The stakes are high
because they are. The guns work until they don’t. Until they do and then don’t again. But explosives don’t work. But then they do because fuck you, that’s why. My biggest gripe about the way it all comes together, though, is just how astonishingly boring it is. They somehow turn the prospect of military trained dinosaur monsters wreaking havoc and hunting soldiers with their superintelligence powers into a slog. It took effort to stop myself from checking Twitter in the middle of watching this movie. It simply wasn’t doing it for me. So it should come as no surprise that
Jurassic Domination comes in at one highly disappointing super gun dinosaur tickler out of five. It had it’s moments, but oh who am I kidding? No it didn’t. Thank you all for watching. I have been Decker Shado. And remember, as much as people will say that Jurassic World Dominion was one of the worst movies ever made, you got to admit. No, it isn’t. “I don’t know what that means.” Hey, Greer, what’d you think of the review? “I’m beginning to think this isn’t salvageable.” Yeah, that’s what happens when you do enough asylum movies. You, of all people
should know that. “This has gotten sloppy.” No no no. There’s always more reviews to watch, and some are surprisingly good, actually. “Okay, proceed. I spoke too soon.” If you’re interested in more asylum mockbusters trying to ride the coattails of the Jurassic World movies, there’s always Jurassic City to check out. “Okay, Well, that’s good to hear. Promising.” And then there’s a recommended video chosen by, I don’t know, YouTube employees? “You killed two of them.” People know about the second? “Yeah, there’s been another incident discovered. I’m on my way there now.”
