Three hunters are walking through the field with their quarry thrown over their backs.  One states, "I love hunting, the kill.  Makes you feel top of the food chain."  At this point a huge pterodactyl swoops out of the sky and bites one of the men in half and kills the other two.  A college professor on a field trip with a few members of his class, including, of course, the ubiquitous buxom blondes that always trip while running from danger are attacked and lost several of their classmates.  A small band of American army special forces are in the woods capturing a terrorist end up saving the college group when they attacked by the terrorists and by a dozen or so pterodactyls.

On this blog, I've torn up the SciFi Channel for their total ineptness presenting us with a movie that is worth watching.  (See Alien Apocalypse and Alien Express.)  Previous movies were presented with very poor special effects. This movie was well worth watching.

We are so used to seeing aliens on the big screen with full high-quality surround sound, multi-million dollar budgets and paying $7, that we forget that an alien movie we see for free, designed for the small TV screen, a couple of 6" built-in speakers, and a budget of a couple hundred thousand, just won't have the same quality of effects.

At no point in history has there ever been pterodactyls that looked life-like.  Pterodactyls, and most dinosaurs in general, are poorly rendered in movies, with the exception of the Jurassic Park series.  But even in those movies, pterodactyls looked wrong.  So I was able to watch this movie without the expectation of well designed dinosaur birds.  I expected the effects to be bad, and am happily surprised that they aren't actually horrible.  A few scenes are hokey and cheesy, but only a few.

I expect real pterodactyls to be far more bat-like, than are ever put forth in movies.  That would make them believable, and very hard to animate.  In this movie, we find out that they are a lot like spiders and bees, in that they collect food and put it with the eggs, so that the babies will have something to eat when they hatch.  This is why the pterodactyls are attacking the people and dropping them in the nest full of eggs and newborns.

I spoke too soon.  Looks like SciFi ran out of budget for the last 30 minutes.  The worst effects scene?  A guy crossing a rope hand over hand.  I mean, how expensive is that to film?