Notes: 50th
Street Films / Troma Entertainment. 97 minutes.
Pixie Chandler: Beverly D'Angelo Dick Chandler: Brad Wilson Sam / Salvadore Dali: Brion James Susie: Moon Zappa Dr. Egbert: Stephen McHattie Tommy: Aron Eisenberg Jenny: Sharon Martin Dr. Harold Harold: Carmine Zozzora
Executive Producers: John F. Remark, Jay Rifkin
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Summary: We
see "Beverly Hills: Two Million Years Ago" - that is,
footage from Planet of Dinosaurs
(1978). In present day, Dick Chandler and his coworker discover
fossilized pterodactyl eggs
but are cursed by a witch doctor for defiling sacred land: "You'll
be in deep waste matter discharged from the alimentary canal."
Dick's wife will become a pterodactyl and the other paleontologist turns
into a lizard. This is dismissed initially as an experience of
sunstroke.
Pixie Chandler starts acting weird, unattributingly
quoting Dorothy Parker ("Trapped like a trap in a trap")
and telling her friend Susie, "Don't disempower me with
infantilisms."
Eggs make her uneasy and when she is disgusted by marinated chicken
feet she decides to become a "vegetarian" (except she
loves fish). She dreams she was flying over L.A. as a pterodactyl,
ends up in a tree in the morning, lusts after raw carp, and indeed
transforms into a werepterodactyl.
Pixie and Susie visit a guru, Sam, who serves
blue martinis and tells Pixie to reconcile herself to her occasional
dinosaur form. A government cryptozoologist is on the case and
Pixie is convinced to turn over an egg she has laid. Her family
changes its collective mind and retrieves the hatchling, as Dick
recalls the curse in the desert.
Sam visits Susie in his own pterodactyl form
as the family ventures off in search of the witch doctor towards
"dreamtime land" where they ironically point out stock
footage, claiming to see "Stoposaurus Motioncus." It
turns out that Sam had dug up the witch doctor's great grandmother,
but Pixie is off the hook if the family leaves the baby pterodactyl
there. Sam wanders off into the desert, and maybe it was all a
sunstroke dream again.
Commentary:
This film is weird and good. The humor is bizarre and usually
not forced. And the Blue Martini song certainly belongs on the
CD collection of dinosaur movies' greatest hits.