Anonymous Rex (2004)

Very well executed

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Preposterous premise, bad acting, annoying camera speed ups, and ninety minutes of nonsense. That would accurately describe "Anonymous Rex", an amateurish wannabe sci-fi. It's sad to see the likes of Faye Dunaway and Isaac Hayes in this disaster. The presence of Daniel Baldwin is not surprising, as he has an almost unblemished record of appearing in rubbish films. This is supposed to be a science fiction / detective drama investigating an underground society of surviving dinosaurs, that somehow have adapted to human size and form with holographic disguises. If you can buy that premise, then I guess this is your movie. Others beware. - MERK

I've read the comments prior to mine (7 or 8 as of this writing). I think some folks put a little too much expectation into these things. This is a SciFi channel effort. They don't get many viewers, so they can't charge much for commercials, so they can't pay much to film an original movie. Question: If any of you dissenters think you can do better, then why don't you have a basic cable channel of your own? Answer: You can't do better.OK, they used cheap, older generation CG effects. Just 20 years ago you'd have been blown away by them. 60 years ago people would've been peeing in their theater seats. Kids that grew up knowing nothing before Terminator 2 are jaded.Also, remember that the story is a fantasy. If you can buy into a silly story like The Wizard Of Oz, Harry Potter, or Lord Of The Rings, you're loopy enough to buy this too. The difference between great and lesser fantasy movies depends on budget. If Spiderman was made on half a million bucks, it would've been on SciFi too, with all the complaints I've read here tonight.Anonymous Rex wasn't that bad, as long as you understand where it came from. Hey, if you were ever entertained by an ignorant show like HEE HAW (which had almost 600 episodes!), this movie is an EPIC!

Looked like it might be a fun scifi-monster movie—mutated dinosaurs living among humans AS humans? Nice spooky little shot of a normal-looking guy walking along, close up on his face, and one eye turns all yellow and feral with vertical pupil, then he walks on, looking just like everyone else. Fun stuff.But guess what? The story is being told by the monster. How's that grab ya? In flashbacks. And not only that, before you can decide this is too crazy for words, the movie starts jabbing a little bit at itself. It's funny. The "dinos" get high on ordinary spices, like basil and rosemary and thyme. Shades of Alien Nation slags getting pie-eyed on sour milk, but why not? And guess what else. The dinos aren't as bad as all that. They have families and jobs and friends and species-specific quirks (everybody knows that triceratops are herd beings and like to have lunch in groups) and—how timely can we get?—radicals who don't like being made to fit in for the sake of survival and would like to let dinos be dinos. That is to say killer carnivores. The top of the food chain. Thus the central conflict of the movie. There are also some pleas for toleration of differences that might strike some as heavy-handed, but actually they didn't do a bad job of showing how painful it can be to spend a lifetime "passing," or living in the saurian version of the closet, which used to involve rubber disguises which evolved into 21-century hologram-creating electronics.They touched a lot of bases in this movie, kept it moving, kept the characters interesting and more than one-dimensional, and took themselves just seriously enough to give you something to think about. And then there was the secret of the big bad private eye's daughter… but that would require a spoiler alert.Dinos. You gotta love 'em, claws and all. They're tough, they're smart, they're adaptable, and mostly don't act like they should all be deported to Jurassic Park. But still, would you want your daughter to marry one? Maybe the moral was We aren't like you, and maybe we aren't as benign as we'd like you to believe, but we aren't as bad as your worst nightmares about us either. We are what we are, but you'll never know what that is as long as we have to pretend to be what you are. That isn't an abstraction for a lot of people living on the planet right now, it's just what they have to deal with. Ask anyone in Michigan who has to live with the consequences of Proposal Two.But I don't want to end on a surly note. It was a pretty good movie, if a bit hard to categorize. It had action, love, murder, intrigue, food for thought, even comedy. Anonymous Rex. Shoulda known from the title.

In case you didn't know, the dinosaurs didn't become extinct, they developed holographic disguises and now live among us. These disguises don't work very well, and in the two hours of the movie we see quite a few of the dinosaurs running around in public looking like bargain basement CGI versions of the Sleestaks from Land of the Lost, but apparently this has worked to keep their existence a secret for thousands of years. They also get stoned on common household spices. They each have their own scent, which only other dinosaurs can smell. As you might expect, these scents include things like flowers, crabs, and even peaches and creme. They are ruled by various secret councils who sit around and play some sort of dinosaur dominoes in the back of Chinese take out restaurants.So, you buyin' all that? Okay, then here's the plot.The story focuses on Vincent Rubio (Trammell) and his partner Ernie Watson (Baldwin), a pair of detectives who uncover a secret dino society which wants to go to war with the humans. Ernie's daughter (the peaches and creme girl) gets kidnapped, and in the movie's most climactic scene Baldwin's head changes into a miniature stegosaurus and he charges the bad guy (imagine an out of shape grandpa playing make believe with the grandkids) and impales him. It actually would have looked more realistic if they would have gone to K-Mart and bought a dinosaur Halloween costume (surely they're on clearance this time of the year?).The movie takes its ridiculous premise and winks (a lot) and chuckles at it, while at the same time trying to pull off a detective drama. I guess it sort of works on some level, if you're extremely bored and there's nothing else on TV and you you spent all day watching paint dry or something. It also takes dullness to new and unprecedented lows, of course as soon as you see the name "Baldwin" in the credits you know that's a given. The only "excitement" is when either of the female leads show up and you at least get to see an interesting character on screen for a minute or so. Some movies provide us with interesting characters throughout; It would probably be a good idea to watch one of those instead. Maybe you could check out an old episode of the Sci-Fi Channel's Invisible Man series, which was basically the same thing as this except its attempts at humor were successful. And its characters were exciting, and its CGI wasn't comedic, and its plots were interesting, and... Okay, maybe not a good comparison.