The Adventures Of Jurassic Pet: A Jurassic Park Rip-Off
The Adventures Of Jurassic Pet is by no means the only Jurassic Park rip-off but it’s definitely one of the weirdest. Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park became an instant classic when it was released nearly 30 years ago, wowing cinemagoers with its ground-breaking special effects and gripping plot. The blockbuster spawned a multi-billion-dollar franchise that features five movies to date with a sixth – Jurassic World: Dominion – slated for a 2022 release and set to reunite Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum for the first time since the original 1993 film.
The Jurassic Park franchise has spawned many a low-budget rip-off too. Roger Corman's Carnosaur, for example, was released a few months before the original Jurassic Park to capitalize on its marketing campaign and starred Diane Ladd as a mad scientist who wants to repopulate the world with dinosaurs by impregnating women with dino embryos. There’s also Dinosaur Island, which focuses more on its bikini-clad actresses than actual dinosaurs, while Raptor Island pits a team of Navy SEALs against not only a group of terrorists but a pack of radioactively mutated dinosaurs too.
The Adventures Of Jurassic Pet is a more recent addition to the ranks of weird Jurassic Park rip-offs. Directed by Ryan Bellgardt, the movie follows a teenage kid named Chris (Kyler Charles Beck) who is gifted a mysterious egg by an even more mysterious man (Ben Hall) who owns a curio shop and soon turns out to be a ghost. Being a Jurassic Park rip-off, the egg naturally hatches a bad CGI dinosaur that Chris names Albert and proceeds to wreak havoc in the small town where he lives. Albert’s antics attract the attention of crazy scientist Dr. Jost (David Fletcher-Hall) who is conducting top-secret research into dinosaur DNA, but luckily the aforementioned mysterious old ghost man reappears disguised as a homeless dude who helps Chris liberate Albert from Jost’s clutches.
Exactly what Dr. Jost intends to do with Albert’s dinosaur DNA is never revealed, nor does The Adventures Of Jurassic Pet explain why a ghostly curio store owner came back from the afterlife to entrust a random kid with a dinosaur in the first place. Perhaps most implausibly, the movie’s full title is The Adventures Of Jurassic Pet: Chapter 1 which implies somebody intends to make a follow-up film to the weird Jurassic Park rip-off.
The Adventures Of Jurassic Pet isn’t the only dinosaur-centric movie director Ryan Bellgardt has helmed; in fact, it seems the filmmaker is carving out a niche in Jurassic Park rip-offs. Alongside The Adventures Of Jurassic Pet, his other credits include The Jurassic Games, which pits death row convicts against dinosaurs in a virtual reality game with a premise that also lifts from The Hunger Games, and Dinosaur World – a Mandarin-language movie that pits gamers against dinosaurs in yet another virtual reality game and so rips off not only Jurassic Park but The Jurassic Games too.