I have got to stop watching so many horrible movies. I don't know how long my brain is going to hold out.

The thing is, I and a couple of movie-watching friends rented this movie, boldly flying in the face of our better judgement, and we sat down to watch it. We determinedly sat all the way through it, trying hard to hold up under the crushing badness, making spunky wisecracks to dull the pain, but by the end none of us could do more than lie on the couch and groan, felled by the magnitude of what we had witnessed. I think we were all stunned. It was so far beyond ordinary badness that our minds couldn't quite contain the horror. It was phenomenally awful. It was so awful it was funny, and then so much more awful than that, that it wasn't funny anymore.

I'm groaning again just thinking about it. Ooooooooooog....

Anyway, here's the deal: this movie is nothing either more or less than a Godzilla rip-off. I mean, a giant prehistoric lizard monster comes to life, trashes cities, becomes good, fights another giant monster and saves the world? Haven't we heard this already? And you might think, hey, a Godzilla rip-off...giant lizards smashing cities...it can't be all bad, right? That's what we thought, but we were wrong.

Oh, so wrong.

Our movie begins with a dramatic and confusing scene of archaeologists digging in a cave, and finding something weird, and an explosion.
Later we meet more archaeologists, now working to unearth a giant dinosaur "50 times larger than T-rex." Members of the crew keep dying in weird accidents (the giant bones apparently grow at night and impale people, plus there's electricity shooting out of the sky--alien target practice or something), but the main archaeologist is determined to press on by hook or by crook, whether it means doubling his men's salary or threatening to report them all as illegal workers. They all speak English, but we never did figure out exactly where all this is supposed to take place, so I don't know where they're supposed to have illegally arrived from.

Presently another archaeologist shows up, muttering grim warnings about a prophesy of a dinosaur that will come back to life and destroy the world. I think the official name of the beast is Yongarry, but it sounds like Young Gary, so we called the monster Young Gary for the rest of the movie. Anyway, the main archaeologist ignores the warning, despite the fact that the other guy looks old and venerable and has white hair and pale blue eyes that make him look either blind or demented. The main guy's young assistant Holly, however, is shaken by the numerous deaths and the general weird aura of the dig, so she quits.

Later she meets up with Mr. Old and Venerable (I believe he's actually called Dr. Hughes), and becomes convinced that he's telling the truth and that something terrible is about to happen. Meanwhile, there are some funny looking aliens up in space in a funny looking ship, talking about how cool it will be once the bones are all dug up and they can bring Young Gary back to life and use him to conquer the earth.

And after a while the excavation is completed (we get to see a lot of bones that look oddly like big hunks of plaster), and the aliens shoot down this ray of blue light, and Young Gary comes to life in a dramatic series of computer graphics shots! And he squashes some people! And he rampages off towards 'The City,' which is never otherwise named!

I can't go on. It's simply too awful. All right, all right. Deep breath.

So we get some scenes of the monster, which by the way looks really bad, trashing cities, and many, many scenes of the humans trying to fight back by shooting missiles at him. The thing is, he just ducks every time a missile goes by, so it hits a building instead. I think in the end the humans did as much damage to the cities as the dinosaur (if it is in fact a dinosaur, considering it breathes fire, which most scientists today do not believe dinosaurs did). This was pretty funny the first few times, but it goes on and on until it loses its charm. "OK, that didn't work 'cause he ducked, let's try the same thing again! He ducked? Let's try the same thing again! He ducked? All right, let's try the same thing...."

And the aliens are beaming the monster here and there to smash other nameless cities for no clear reason, or maybe it's the same city, and there's another weird professor (not the old and venerable Dr. Hughes) with some sort of agenda that I never did figure out, and there are top-secret security people directing the battle, with a looming threat that if they don't defeat Young Gary soon, the president's going to order that The City be nuked.

And all of the acting is so bad, bad, bad.
I have a theory that it wouldn't have been so horrible if the dialogue had been printed at the bottom of the screen in subtitles. One expects that from a Godzilla movie, or a Godzilla rip-off. But hearing these horrible lines of deadly awful dialogue actually spoken aloud in English was just too much. My friend has a theory too: his theory is that since the director is Korean, he might not really understand English that well, so maybe he didn't realize how badly the lines came off. "OK, they said all the words that are here in the script," we can picture him thinking. "Great! It's a wrap!"
And of course the actors, all sub-B-movie types who will probably never be in another film in their lives, weren't going to mention to him that they sucked, were they?

Anyhow, there's a lot of fighting, and eventually Young Gary becomes good through a laughable act of self-sacrifice on the part of a laughably heroic soldier with a jet pack on his back (because hey, if we can't take out the beast with planes and missiles, maybe we can do it with some guys with jet packs and guns!), and then the aliens pull out their trump card: another monster! This one is a sort of scorpion/centaur/crab/dinosaur/something, and it fights long and hard, and things look very bad for Young Gary and The City and indeed our entire world, and the tension would be building and building--if we could bring ourselves to care one whit, which we can't.

And every time there's a lull in the action, people from the city (last seen running screaming in fear in traditional fashion) will materialize from the rubble to stand around and look interested. They don't take advantage of the calm to get as far away as they can, they don't start digging their friends out of the debris, no, they just cluster around to ooh and ahh at the fallen monsters. People in these cities should really re-evaluate their priorities.

I won't give away the dramatic conclusion, but let me just tell you, in case you couldn't guess, that it's very bad.

Pretty much everything in the film is, well, almost too awful to conceive. The dialogue is horrendous, and the acting is just about equal to it. There's nothing like a really bad line spoken by a really bad actor to a really bad special effects monster to make your brain reel.

Speaking of monsters, the monsters seem to be mostly computer effects, but not very good ones. Also they look amazingly unrealistic and not at all like things that would ever actually be alive; someone must have very carefully designed them to be terrifying (or something) but did not bother to take advantage of modern technology to an extent that would make them look anything at all like a real animal. Young Gary and the other beast also always look drab and blueish, and so what creativity there may be in their design is mostly lost.

The story, such as it is, is nonsensical. It doesn't even try to present any real characters or to maintain any semblance of coherent plot. The action, other than a few not-too-bad shots of crashing buildings, is uninspiring. The monsters wave their arms and breathe fire and walk through buildings and dodge missiles, and there are only so many ways to film that.
The whole movie has a drab look to it, too, as if it were never completely digitally remastered, so it's no treat for the eyes.

I guess in the end it was kind of funny because it was so awful, so it may not actually be the worst movie I've ever seen in my life. But Lord, it wasn't good.

In the interests of fairness I should note that if you're in the right mood and really like bad movies, you might be able to enjoy this one: however, all those present at the showing I'm speaking of like bad movies to varying degrees and were in the mood to watch one, and this particular film still managed to present us with more badness than we could handle.

I would recommend staying far away from 'Reptilian.' Its slight amusement value did not make up for its ponderous and deplorable wretchedness, and watching it will bring you nothing but suffering. Such is my warning. Beware 'Reptilian!'
Oh--and the Ides of March. You can't be too careful these days.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: None of the Above