"I do not wish to find gold. I wish to find natives who’ve already found gold."

- Hernan Cortez in Aztec Rex

Certain things click. For me, the moment I saw an advertisement for Aztec Rex on the Sci Fi Channel, I swore to see it. Having been a fan of the ridiculous from an early age, there’s no way I’d miss out on a movie where conquistadors wind up battling dinosaurs! 

And right from the beginning, what do we see? Human sacrfice! To keep the terrible gods of the thunder lizards at bay, of course. Funny, I took a class on History of Latin America & the Caribbean in college. The whole human sacrifice issue among pre-Columbian tribes really split the class down the middle. Half of us were fascinated, the other half wanted to argue that it couldn’t possibly be anything more than blown up legends. I have no idea, but I’m pretty sure no T Rex’s were mentioned. Ah well, history’s more fun when we get to monkey with it, right? There’s not a great deal of story to be found in Aztec Rex. Basically, a conquistador stumbles into a settlement of Aztecs and gets scheduled for sacrifice to appease the angry dinosaurs - a local custom. Of course, one of them (Gonzalez - played quite well by Marc Antonio who I can’t find any other credits for) falls in love with the chief’s daughter. Granted, I can’t really blame the guy because ‘Ayacoatl’ sets a new standard for beauty. She’s played by Dichen (pronounced "Deechen") Lachman, a stunningly gorgeous girl who’s the daughter of an Australian father and a Tibetan mother - how’s that for exotic? Kathmandu, Nepal, that’s where Dichen was born. She’s played on the Australian soap opera Neighbours and was in a movie called Aquamarine. Aside from her natural glamour, she plays her role well as the sort of butt-kicking native princess type. Diggin’ it! Plus, according to the captions she speaks Nahuatl!

So, Gonzalez loves Ayacoatl, but her papa, Big Chief Matlal has her set to marry the tribal shaman Xocozin (which totally sounds like a drug to me!) and Xocozin don’t like the Spaniards one bit. He’ll go to all sorts of sneaky methods to ensure he gets to kill whitey. And with the general attitude of Cortez and company, who can blame him? Xocozin’s played by a guy named Kalani Queypo who’s Hawaiian and Blackfeet (the Native American tribe). He’s done a good deal of work, notably in The Royal Tenenbaums and voicing Hiawatha in Age of Empires III, the video game. He plays one tenacious looking warrior-shaman and does his job playing the heel to the point where you kind of want him to get eaten eventually, you know? I admire the guy, I mean how much could they have possibly paid him to scamper around the jungle bare-ass with a goofy top-knot hairdo blowing a horn? That takes cajones!

Cortez himself is played by Ian Ziering and the reason I’m noting him is not because he was in Batman Beyond: The Movie, but because he voiced the character Vinnie in Biker Mice from Mars! How cool is that? All in all, he does his job but.. Biker Mice from Mars!

If you’re hungry to see people get eaten by CGI Dinosaurs, Aztec Rex won’t leave you disappointed. Plenty of folks get chomped and of course, you’ll see a dino or two die, as well. Although I first believed this film to be shot in Central America, after a while it began to look more familiar. It was shot in O’ahu, Hawaii (which is allegedly part of the United States, but I dunno, sounds a bit sketchy to me - probably more revisionist history.) The film originally went by the clunky title Tyrannosaurus Azteca when it first came out in 2007. Obviously you’re not going to sell too many breakfast cereals or Chef Boyardee products with a cumbersome title like that, so they revised it to the far more fun Aztec Rex.

Oh, and a final note we’ve got a Catholic priest/monk guy named Gria (played by Jack McGee from 21, Rescue Me and who voiced Mr. White in the Reservoir Dogs video game) who’s in the village because he got captured or lost or something. The priest drinks like a fish which is pretty hilarious, but here’s the real kicker. When things get tough for our heroes, he bails! Very un-RPG of him. When I saw him do that I was just like, "Dude! He’s a monk!" Sad.

All in all, I feel Aztec Rex provided a good deal of cheap entertainment. Will it win an Oscar? No. Can I give it 5 out of 5? No, because it’d need more nudity to get that. HOWEVER, I feel it does deserve a 3 out of 5 for trying to present a weird story and succeeding without making me angry for having watched it.

Until next I speak of dinosaurs and exotic women, this is GlowStormLion, sacrificing good taste in order to calm the thunder lizards.

-- by GlowStormLion of http://www.happyhorror.com

Tags: dinosaurs, movie, sci fi channel, television

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 3:37 am and is filed under Horror Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.