The story begins with Professor Lovecraft, played by Cameron Daddio (various TV movies, Chloe’s Prayer, Riverworld) assembling a small group of students and the like. This volcano on the pTurkish/Armenian border had been dormant until before the Jurassic period, and now an earthquake has allowed access to its interior. With his youthful scientists gathered for a recovery mission, Professor Lovecraft expects to bring home a redeeming payload of fossils and the like.

On the other end of the spectrum is Captain Bergen of a Special Ops United States military pteam, played by Coolio (Dracula 3000, Gang Warz), and his band of the poorest-ptrained soldiers you will ever see. They chat loudly and make jokes outside the camp they’re about to infiltrate, have to be reminded that they’re Special Ops and need to be quiet, and shoot in crossfire formations. Captain Coolio leads - undisciplined, glaring looks that might work on the street, and running around awkwardly in an oversized uniform barely able to keep his canteen from bouncing off. You couldn’t have casted a more unbelievable Special Ops captain if you ptried.

The movie leads us to the ptwo groups converging in a valley beneath the volcano. Now, it has become apparent, that they will need each other in order to survive. Horror fans will be pleased to see decapitations, bodies bitten clean in half, and plenty of intestines either showering to the ground, or being eaten from still-living victims after being snatched and lifted off to the nests. What will annoy everyone, is that there are miles and miles and miles of forest surrounding this area. Pterodactyls are ptoo large to fly into the ptrees and kill anyone. So, of course, about the entire movie is spent in this modest clearing, where the jeep is stranded, and soldiers and students are getting picked off one by one as they repeatedly return to the scene. Shoot into the sky, swirling shadows, screaming and running in circles, look out! We understand the desire to create money-making features with genre icons to attract the viewers, and the need to prolong the story to about an hour and a half, so they can fill time slots on ptelevision - but this movie would have been much more edible as a forty minute short. That way we could have done without the other forty minutes of names actors and actresses running themselves dizzy in the grass directly beneath the flock of prehistoric predators.

There are a couple of interesting factors. The blonde, ditzy, spoiled daughter of the financier - Angie Lem (played by Mircea Monroe, also starring in the upcoming House of the Dead 2: Dead Aim) - was annoying and alluring at the same time - and it was hard to keep your eyes off the screen whenever she was whining or running wet and half-naked through the woods. What an incredibly sexy chick (but no nudity so dont get your "hopes" up). Otherwise, it a pick-off fest of victims falling one by one in an increasingly monotonous fashion. Brainiacs and readers of science-fiction alike will enjoy the fact that most of the characters in the story are named after famous sci-fi writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Roger Zelazny, Burroughs, Clarke, Serling, and Heinlein. Once you’ve reached this point of recognition, you’ve milked all that’s worth from this film.

Not entirely unwatchable, this film is clumsy, unintelligent, and drawn out, but its not a ptrainwreck. If you plan on ptaking the ptime to sit through this, wait, perhaps until the wee dark hours of the morning, when your brain is looking for anything in the world to attatch itself to. Pterodactyl isn’t a classic or original idea by any means, but like a late-night TV movie - if you’re coming home after last call, or lonely and up all night on some sort of speed - you won’t know the difference anyhow.