Let’s get this out of the way immediately. Save for some implausibly preserved footprints, there are no dinosaurs in this film. None. Nada. Not even a bloke in a rubber suit wandering in from the wrong film. It’s called Massacre in Dinosaur Valley and delivers precisely zero dinosaurs. Jesus Christ film, if you made my balls any bluer they’d be able to join the Blue Man Group.
What you’re actually getting here is an Italian cannibal adventure film, which already tells you roughly what you’re in for: jungle setting, a group of deeply unlikeable people, and varying degrees of sleaze, violence, and questionable decision-making. The twist here is that it’s actually… kind of fun?
But before getting into that, a quick bit of context. Cannibal films, particularly from Italy in the late 70s and early 80s, were about as subtle as a brick to the face. Stuff like Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal Ferox leaned heavily into extreme violence and bleakness, and sometimes even skirted the law. They were designed to shock first and do literally anything else second.
Massacre in Dinosaur Valley sits somewhere adjacent to that, but feels like it wandered in from a different genre entirely. It’s lighter, more adventurous, and often intentionally funny. Less “harrowing descent into human depravity,” more “cheap jungle romp with occasional cannibalism.”
Before we even get to the jungle, though, the film takes its time introducing its cast of models, fossil hunters, sleazy hangers-on, and generally questionable human beings before sticking them all on a plane headed deep into South America. Naturally, the plane crashes – because if you’re not crashing a plane in one of these films, what are you even doing – and the survivors are left wandering the Amazon, dealing with cannibal tribes, slavers, and each other.
Most of the cast are utterly disposable, literal meat in the room just to get killed off when the film requires it. Our leading man Kevin (Michael Sopkiw) is probably the best of the bunch. He looks and behaves like a strange hybrid of Bruce Campbell and Harrison Ford, and has this breezy and slightly smug, “I’ll sort this out” energy, even when everything around him is clearly going to shit.
He’s also surrounded by some of the sleaziest blokes you’ll ever see put to film. Every other male character feels like they need a shower and a police record. Special mention goes to the cab driver early on, who genuinely looks like he’s having a private moment with himself while watching the models during their photo shoot. Subtlety is not this film’s strong suit.
I did also like the character of John (Milton Rodríguez), a Vietnam vet who butts heads with Kevin over who gets to lead the group. Their conflict drives for the first half of the movie before he unceremoniously meets his end. He brings a certain unpredictability to proceedings, not least because he has that Germanic look where he could either be a pornstar, white supremacist, or techno producer.
There’s also that classic oddity you get in European films where supposedly American characters behave in ways that feel… off. There’s a moment early on, where one of the women is showering with the door wide open in a room she shares with her “father,” and the only thing that shocks her when Kevin walks in when she calls out for a towel is that it wasn’t her dad. It’s that kind of slightly skewed logic that crops up throughout, like someone had a vague idea of how Americans behave and just ran with it.
Tonally, this film is an absolute mess. There are moments that veer into genuinely unpleasant territory – particularly involving the female lead and her treatment at the hands of the slavers. She gets brutally raped, only for the film to almost immediately pivot into something bordering on a bad action movie. One minute it’s dealing with something very dark, the next it’s all “my hero” as she falls into Kevin’s arms like nothing happened. The whiplash is real, and not in a good way.
There’s a real sleazy vibe to the whole thing as well, as though someone is getting off to it. It makes liberal use of strategically torn clothing to ensure that there’s always just enough on display – bit of skin here, bit of tit there, the occasional flash of underwear and bush – like it’s contractually obligated to remind you what kind of film you’re watching. It’s sleazy, no question, but in a way that feels more opportunistic than outright malicious.
And then there’s the ending, which feels like it escaped from a completely different film altogether. It goes full-on action mode, complete with over-the-top heroics that feel wildly out of step with everything that came before. It’s not good, but it is memorable.
It almost feels like a parody of this specific subgenre of exploitation film. Director Michele Massimo Tarantini throws in so many clichés – plane crashes, cannibals, slavers, jungle peril, gratuitous nudity – and often pushes them to such an exaggerated, almost comedic level that it’s hard to tell how seriously you’re meant to take any of it. At times it feels less like a straight entry into the genre and more like someone taking the piss out of it from the inside.
Adding to the chaos is the version I watched, which seemed to be held together with tape and wishful thinking. Scenes where the sound just drops out entirely, moments where the English dub suddenly gives up and switches back to Italian mid-sentence—it was like being schizophrenic.
Which, to be fair, fits with the film’s multiple identities. Like many Italian productions of the era, it’s been released under about fifty different names (including Cannibal Ferox II – fucking lol), depending on where you are and who owns the rights that week. Continuity and consistency clearly weren’t priorities. Neither was making art, to be fair.
In conclusion then, I rather enjoyed this film, more so than I expected. Perhaps this is because, compared to most of ts contemporaries, it’s almost light entertainment. It doesn’t wallow in misery the same way other cannibal films do, and there’s a kind of accidental charm to how all over the place it is. It’s stupid, it’s sleazy, it’s tonally confused, but it’s rarely dull.
Still, it’s called Massacre in Dinosaur Valley. And there are no fucking dinosaurs. Don’t give me that “oh well, it’s obviously not the original title so it wasn’t the original intent” treatment either, when there’s a scene that clearly shows dinosaur footprints that are either fresh or, somehow, surface level after millions of years. They’re the ones who decided to put the focus on dinosaurs for no real reason. If the writer wanted to give the characters an elusive creature to fruitlessly search for, perhaps it could have been a female character who doesn’t get her fucking jugs out.
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