Warbirds (2008)

Reviewed by The Foywonder

Staring Jamie Mann, Brian Krause, Tohoru Masmune, Lucy Faust, David Jensen,

Directed by Kevin Gendreau

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Last year the Sci-Fi Channel gave us a movie set during World War 2 about American soldiers and pilots fighting gargoyles and Nazis behind enemy lines starring a cast member of the show "Charmed". This year they're giving us a WW2 creature feature about American soldiers and pilots battling prehistoric pterodons and Japanese soldiers on an island in the South Pacific, also starring a cast member of "Charmed". If the pattern continues then next year Holly Marie Combs should find herself starring in a Sci-Fi Channel original movie about American soldiers and nurses trying to save Pearl Harbor from an attack by dragons.

Warbirds tries to put a bit of a twist on things by introducing a heavy dose of girl power to the mix. That’s about the only twist it puts on tired material. This is just another movie about soldiers on an island battling a generic monster menace.

An all-female B-29 crew who sport military issued hair, make-up, and nail polish - at least that's my guess given the uncanny similarity of their appearances - are assigned a secret transport mission across the South Pacific; along for the ride is a handful of male soldiers under the command of Charmed's Brian Krause, giving a performance that screams "I’m collecting an easy paycheck.”

After something takes out one of their engines, they narrowly manage to put the plane down on a nameless atoll. They'll soon come to discover that this island is also the base of some Japanese soldiers and home to prehistoric pterodons that apparently didn't get the extinction memo.

At least I think they were supposed to be pterodons. Decent CGI, but they looked more like smaller versions of Q, The Winged Serpent than pterodactyls as we know'em. Had they called them dragons and allowed winged reptiles to spit fire most viewers would have never known the difference.

Heck, even the Japanese soldiers in this film didn't seem believably Japanese for the time. The Japanese commander at one point actually scolds his men for being too hasty to want to give their lives in battle? I kid you not.

In between griping and romance and plotting to escape the island, the ladies will occasionally take to the air, whether flying leftover Japanese Zeroes or their repaired B-29, allowing for some uninspired aerial dogfighting with the pteradons. Entirely too many cockpit headshots of the women pilots who, like all women on the telephone, simply cannot stop chattering amongst themselves over their radios, jabbering non-stop during their life or death air battles delivering stilted dialogue, damn near every line of which ends with someone saying "Over." It almost becomes comical after awhile - almost.

Writer-director Kevin Gendreau's seemed to be trying to capture the lingo of the era and even recreate some of the snappy banter heard in movies from the 1940's but neither he or his actors were up to the task; in part because everyone in Warbirds came across like they were just going through the motions, but also because nobody sounded authentic. It's not just the acting or dialogue that lacks authenticity, either; nobody even lights up a cigarette because, as we all know from having watched Saving Private Ryan, nobody smoked during the 1940s, least of all soldiers at war.

All in all, Warbirds is a nifty concept but not much of a movie. It's pretty mundane even by Sci-Fi Channel monster movie standards, not particularly bad, but very underwhelming and suffering from a serious lack of enthusiasm.

About the only surprise was my being wrong in my immediate prediction that the American and Japanese soldiers would be forced to work together in order to survive the pteradon onslaught. Not quite. Instead the Japanese soldiers end up being painted in a rather sympathetic light after it's discovered the B-29's secret cargo is the first A-bomb being delivered so it can be dropped on Japan. The movie kind of paints the US in a bad light over our atom bomb being a weapon of mass genocide. Harry S. Truman would disagree.

The most entertaining moment of Warbirds for me came not from the movie itself, but from a graphic that appeared on the bottom of the screen informing viewers that the Sci-Fi Channel is now available in HD. Yowzer! Now we'll all be able to view these great Xbox 360 cut scene computer effects in all their high definition glory. Call your cable company now!

Nessie Getting Nasty?

Bigfoot's been going on quite the cinematic killing spree of late, but what about the Loch Ness Monster? I don't think Nessie's killed anyone on film since 1981's Loch Ness Horror. And don't bring up 2001's Beneath Loch Ness, either. Nessie got killed by the even larger prehistoric predator that had taken refuge in the famed Scottish loch so that one doesn't count.

Dammit, we need a killer Loch Ness Monster movie! Get me the Sci-Fi Channel on the phone, pronto! What's that? They're already on it? Loch Ness Terror, you say? Hooray!

Ask and ye shall receive.

Okay, folks, now choke on this plot synopsis:

"James Murphey is a rugged cryptozoologist, who thirty years earlier, during a trip to Loch Ness, Scotland, had a fatal encounter with the fabled "Nessie" creature that killed his father, and left James with deep facial scar. Twenty years later, James is hunting for Nessie, when his search leads him to the sleepy town of Pike Island, Ashburn, on Lake Superior. Hiring Josh Riley as his guide, James and Josh bond over their mutual scientific interests and deceased fathers, while James tries to convince Josh's mother, Sheriff Karen Riley, that the 60-foot plesiosaur is killing and breeding."

I'm so confused. So the movie is called Loch Ness Terror but it's actually about a monster lurking within one of North America's Great Lakes? Did the Loch Ness Monster migrate to the US-Canada border? Does Champ know that Nessie has crossed the Atlantic and is trying to horn in on his "Most Famous Lake Monster of North America" status? It's like Nessie has suddenly turned into Microsoft and is hellbent to run all the competition out of business.

And what's the timeline on this again? Thirty years earlier? Twenty years later? Huh? Now I'm even more confused.

Something that loopy sounding can only mean it’s a Sci-Fi Channel original movie. Brian Krause, he of "Charmed" and Stephen King's Sleepwalkers fame, stars as the rugged cryptozoologist looking to unleash a little Loch Ness deathwish. Directing duties fell to Paul Ziller, a Sci-Fi Channel regular who was also at the helm for Snakehead Terror, Swarmed, and Android Apocalypse.

And, yes, Loch Ness Terror was shot on location in Canada.

Sci-Fi has yet to schedule a premiere date but I'll go out on a limb and guess later this summer or early fall. I for one am dying to find out what the Loch Ness-Lake Superior connection turns out to be.

- The Foywonder

New massive dino species dispels previous assumptions about sauropodomorphs

12/12/2007 5:16:00 PM - Dragana Kovacevic

Researchers digging in Antarctica have stumbled upon a new giant, plant-eating dinosaur that dates back to the Early Jurassic period, about 190 million years ago.

Named Glacialisaurus hammeri, the dino is a primitive sauropodomorph - a group of dinosaurs that produced the largest animals to ever walk the earth, including the long-necked herbivores, Diplodocus and Apatosaurus.

The find helps quench two aspects of the debate involving the evolutionary development of these giants: It tells palaeontologists more about where they lived and who they shared their world with.

"They help to establish that primitive sauropodomorph dinosaurs were more broadly distributed than previously thought, and that they coexisted with their cousins, the true sauropods," says Nathan Smith, a graduate student at The Field Museum. (Sauropods are another order of the sauropodomorpha.)

These dinos were widely distributed in the Early Jurassic, appearing not only in China, South Africa, South America and North America, but also in Antarctica.

"This was probably due to the fact that major connections between the continents still existed at that time, and because climates were more equitable across latitudes than they are today," Smith said.

The recent discovery of a possible sauropod from the same region that dating back to roughly the same period lends additional credence to the theory that Glaci coexisted with sauropods.

All that remains of the dino today are a partial foot, leg and ankle bones, but these are enough to tell scientists how big the creature was: About 20 to 25 feet long and weighing roughly 4 to 6 tonnes.

Scientists discovered Glaci's remains on Mt. Kirkpatrick, near Beardmore Glacier, at an elevation of 13,000 feet.

"The fossils were painstakingly removed from the ice and rock using jackhammers, rock saws and chisels under extremely difficult conditions over the course of two field seasons," says Smith.

The findings appear in the online edition of Acta Palaeontological Poiloncica.

Dino-killing rock more deadly than previously thought

1/25/2008 5:42:00 PM - Dragana Kovacevic

The theory that pins the Chicxulub asteroid impact to the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago may need some revision.

It may now need to account for the fact that the impact in question made a bigger splash than scientists previously thought, according to a new study.

University of Texas research scientist Sean Gulick and colleagues analysed the most detailed three-dimensional seismic images to date and found that the crater site was in deeper water than earlier studies suggest.

The particular location of the site and this minor detail would have carried grave implications in what's been dubbed the "KT Extinction Event" - an event largely thought to have killed off about 70 per cent of life on Earth.

A worldwide extinction

By landing in deeper water, the impact would have released 6.5 times more water vapour into our atmosphere than previously thought. The impact site also contained sulphur-rich sediments called evaporates.

According to Gulick, these factors combined would have made the impact deadlier in two ways: by altering the climate (sulphate aerosols in the upper atmosphere have a cooling effect) and by generating acid rain, which would have made the oceans more acidic.

This modification of the extinction theory would account for why reef and surface dwelling ocean creatures were affected along with large vertebrates on land and in the sea. There is also some evidence that marine organisms more resistant to a range of pH levels survived while those that were more sensitive did not.

Gulick acknowledges, though, that the mass extinction event was probably not caused by a single mechanism. Rather, it was the combination of several environmental changes on different time scales, in different locations that led to the extinction of some of the largest creatures our Earth has ever known.

Details of the study appear in the 2008 edition of the journal Nature Geosciences.

Another big dino find in Alberta

Another day, another big dino announcement out of Alberta.

A dinosaur first found over thirty years ago by a high school teacher was confirmed to be a new species, a herbivore with a bony frill and horns on the back of its skull and bony structures above its eyes.



Philip Currie, the University of Alberta paleontologist who seems to be in the thick of almost every major discovery in Canada, told the Edmonton Journal that “We eventually realized it was not only a pretty rare kind of ceratopsian (horned) dinosaur, it was also a new species…. Horned dinosaurs are pretty weird anyway, and this is probably the most bizarre of all of them.”

The Globe and Mail goes into detail about the find, and the struggle of Al Lakusta, the high school teacher who discovered the fossils, to get the bones taken seriously by authorities.
According to the Globe and Mail:

Pachyrhinosaurus means thick-nosed lizard, but lakustai is in honour of Mr. Lakusta’s determination and hard work. It is also a recognition of the importance of what he unearthed.

The dinosaur bone bed he found is exceptional, and contained 27 individual creatures, including youngsters. They died together 72.5 million years ago, perhaps crossing a river or in a catastrophic flood.

 

EDMONTON -- Scientists at Alberta's Royal Tyrrell Museum have unearthed a unique ancestor of the Triceratops, a dinosaur with a skull the size of a Smart Car.

This newly discovered genus of horned dinosaur, named Eotriceratops xerinsularis, was recently put on display at the museum in Drumheller, Alta., after being painstakingly assembled over the past five years.

Dave Eberth, senior research scientist at the Tyrrell, said the specimen was originally found in 2001 by the camp cook on a dig in the Horseshoe Canyon formation at Dry Island Buffalo Jump, about 70 kilometres northwest of Drumheller.

Drumheller is about 100 kilometres northeast of Calgary.

The parts of the three-metre-long skull and skeleton were found in a 20-metre-thick layer from an era that doesn't yield a lot of dinosaur bones in Alberta, Eberth said.

The Triceratops is believed to be 66 million years old, but this specimen goes back 68 million years, which makes it an early version of the three-horned plant-eater.

It was an unlikely find, Eberth said, and the skull was in about 45 pieces embedded in shale.

"When you go out and look for dinosaur material, you find a lot that's not up to snuff. . . . Usually you walk on by and look for something better," he said.

"Basically, it's a road kill. It looks like somebody ran over it in a Cretaceous Hummer."

While they didn't get the entire animal, they got the "business end," the most important part around the skull.

It looked a lot like Triceratops, but turned out to be a more primitive version.

It's also bigger than any Triceratops found in Alberta, and the skull is a "monster" at three metres long, he said.

Edmonton Journal

2008 Will [WAS] be Dino-Rific!

What once was old is new again, especially if we're talking about rampaging dinosaurs - movies about rampaging dinosaurs, that is. To be more specific, Sci-Fi Channel original movies about rampaging dinosaurs. Sci-Fi will be unleashing the extinct predators by land, air, and sea for our viewing pleasure in 2008.

With a title that sounds tailor-made for a lucha-themed punk band, Tyrannosaurus Azteca looks poised to combine Ray Harryhausen's classic The Valley of Gwangi with Mel Gibson's Apocalypto by pitting gold-hungry Spanish Conquistadors against angry Aztecs and even hungrier T-Rex's. Set in 1519 A.D., Hernan Cortes leads a scounting party of thirteen fellow conquistadors through hostile Aztec territories just inland from the Gulf of Mexico into a remote valley that turns out to be home to some Tyrannosaurus Rex that the Aztecs worship as gods. If you know anything about the history of the land now known as Mexico and how Sci-Fi Channel original movies tend to play out then you can probably ascertain what direction things go in from there.

Directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, he of Night of the Demons 2, Leprechaun 4: In Space, and Megiddo: Omega Code 2 fame, expect to see Tyrannosaurus Azteca on Sci-Fi sometime later in 2008. If you need any extra incentive to watch, what would you say if I told you they've grossly miscast former "Beverly Hills 90210" goofball Ian Ziering as a certain historically famous Spanish Conquistador? Yeah; the blonde guy with the toothy grin is playing Hernan Cortes. I guess being able to dance the "Pase Doble" on "Dancing with the Stars" convinced the producers he could pass for a 16th century Spaniard.

March of 2007 saw the Sci-Fi Channel premiereReign of the Gargoyles; that one pitting World War 2 pilots against demonic gargoyles unleashed by unscrupulous Nazis - a cast member of the show "Charmed" co-starred. Now the Sci-Fi Channel will be giving us another WW2 themed monster movie also starring a former cast member of "Charmed". Sometime in 2008 we'll get Brian Krause in Warbirds, from writer/director Kevin Gendreau, in which members of the greatest generation square off with a menace from the prehistoric age - pteradons, to be precise.

Set during the final days of World War 2, a band of WASPs (Women's Air Service Corps) are enlisted to ferry a top-secret weapon to an American airbase in the Pacific, only to get swept up in a violent storm that forces them down onto a deserted Pacific island. Not so deserted after all; they find themselves having to contend with pteradons, flying dinosaurs that devastated what was left of the Japanese Imperial Air Force. I'm assuming there are some male soldiers also along for the ride and a case of Brian Krause in drag.

But Mr. Krause can't seem to get enough Sci-Fi Channel dino flicks and so he's going to be kicking off the Sci-Fi Channel original movie year of 2008 with this Saturday's premiere of Beyond Loch Ness, the latest aquatic creature feature from Snakehead Terror director Paul Ziller. This time Brian Krause plays a cigarillo-smoking cryptozoologist hunting the Loch Ness Monster that he watched kill his father thirty years earlier. Somehow, for reasons I can only hope the movie explains, his vengeance-minded Nessie hunt takes him to a small town on Lake Superior where a 60-foot plesiosaur has begun killing and breeding. Well, technically speaking, going from Scotland to the US-Canadian border means they will be beyond Loch Ness.

A trailer for Beyond Loch Ness - back when it was originally titled Loch Ness Terror - has been up on YouTube for a couple months (see it below) and I must confess to being taken in by it. The CGI doesn't look too shabby for a Sci-Fi original and the pudgy little baby versions of the monster (that doesn't look like any plesiosaurs I know of) are quite funny to see in action - sorta like a homicidal versions of The Waterhorse.

And still waiting in the wings is the sequel the world has been clamoring for: Planet Raptor: Raptor Island 2. This sequel to the impossibly lame Raptor Island (review) looks to have next to nothing to do with its predecessor, what with it being set in the year 2066 and all. Long story short: soldiers in space happen upon a planet populated by vicious velociraptors; you can insert the rest of the blanks. The cast includes the likes of Ted Raimi, Vanessa Angel, Steven Bauer, Musetta Vander, and Peter Jason. I do believe the film is currently available on DVD in some former Soviet republics. When we'll get to see it is anyone's guess at this point. But if and when we do, no doubt a Sci-Fi Channel premiere will herald its coming.

It will truly be a dino-riffic 2008 on the Sci-Fi Channel.

Dinosaurs in Science Fiction Literature

(compiled by M.K. Brett-Surman)A Guide to Stories, Novels, Anthologies and Pulps.
(This list does NOT include comics, Young Adult or juvenile stories.)L(please send additions/corrections to brettsur@si.edu)

The original "DINOSAURS IN SCIENCE FICTION" file was compiled by Michael K.Brett-Surman in the 1980s. A printed version of this file, covering publications only toDecember, 1996, appeared in the award winning book THE COMPLETE DINOSAUR, IndianaUniversity Press, edited by J.O. Farlow and M.K. Brett-Surman, 1997. That version iscopyrighted by Indiana University Press © 1997.

This version is copyrighted by M.K. Brett-Surman © 2006. All U.S. and internationalrights reserved. Copying, distributing, or publishing the data in any manner or media for personal or corporate gain is not permitted. The DINOSAURS IN SCIENCE FICTION file is presented for non-commercial, personal use only.

Thanks to the following people for additions and corrections: Forrey Ackerman, DeanHannotte, Donald F. Glut, Jeff Poling, Walter J. Williams, Stephen Dedman, Robert Sawyer,Tom Tyrberg, Bob Walters, Walter J. Williams, Thomas Diehl, Stephan Pickering, Steve Carper,Tom Hopp, Tom Wright, “ValourX”, “majalak”, and Václav Petr.The last update was in May, 2006.

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