Back in the 70's Roger Corman and his New World Pictures could be counted on to cover all the bases when it came to entertaining low-budget cinema. If you wanted women in prison, bikers, guns blazing, people running pedestrians over in cars, or plain old monsters attacking people; you could count on Corman. Then came Corman's next projects under the Concorde (and eventually New Horizons/New Concorde) banner and over the years came with them lesser distribution and less quality B-movies - one such movie is the one we're looking at here, the oft-delayed (and pretty junky) creature romp Dinocroc.

Costas Mandylor (who was briefly considered a "sex symbol" when co-starring in 1991's Mobsters before a long career in B-flicks) gets to do his best 'Crocodile' Dundee impersonation as outbacksman Richard Sydney, who is called in by Gereco laboratories when their experiments with accelerated growth technology have gone awry. Seems that Gereco has been testing a new drug on animals that is meant to speed-up their growth and useful production (as in cows giving more milk than ever before), but they weren't thinking of the side effects and instead had dollar signs in their eyes. This proves to be a fatal mistake, though, when one of the crocodiles they've been monitoring goes bonkers, kills it's fellow cage mate, and escapes into the woods surrounding the lab.

From here Richard teams-up with animal control officer Diane (Jane Longnecker, given the thankless task of mostly pointless love interest) and a pretty pointless artist type in Tom (Matt Borlenchi) to try and stop our Dinocroc from making everyone who gets in its path a potential smorgasbord.

Nothing at all inspiring, but not as terrible as it could've been, Dinocroc wasn't worth the wait us low-budget monster movie fans endured. Instead, we get a sloppy waste of time that sports some really poor CGI effects (the crappiness of this is most evident during a scene where our croc is tailing a tracker's boat on a lake), a few okay deaths such as when someone is eaten through a wooden floor and their head flies at the camera, and a story (that took three writers!) that doesn't move as quickly as a movie like this demands it to.

Debuting director Kevin O'Neill uses his knowledge as a visual effects supervisor (he's done over forty movies in this capacity both Hollywood and non) to good use by shooting his attack scenes with quick cuts and trying not to reveal much of the creature (perhaps he realized it looked pretty mediocre) but doesn't do much with his actors as nobody here makes any sort of impression - although it is fairly amusing to watch Mandylor poorly do his thing, which is made even more amusing due to the fact he was actually born in Australia but can't play one to save his life. And just what the Hell is with that opening dream sequence?

If you want to see lower-budgeted creature romps done right check out something like 1986's Critters, Neil Marshall's Dog Soldiers, Lewis Teague's Alligator or even the 70's/80's Corman produced romps Piranha and Humanoids From The Deep - you're sure to get more entertainment from either one of those than this 85 minute flick can deliver. And you'll certainly have more fun. (Chris Hartley, 10/11/06)

Directed By: Kevin O'Neill.
Written By: Frances Doel, Dan Acre, John Huckert.

Starring: Costas Mandylor, Bruce Weitz, Charles Napier, Jane Longnecker.