The fauna of nightmares

JURASSIC PARK III __ Cert PG, 92 mins

HUGELY imaginative, far better than its two forerunners, but also very, very frightening for children under 15, I'd say. We critics saw Jurassic Park III in a West End state-of-the-art cinema; the British Board of Film Classification examiners saw it in their own premises' viewing room, itself technologically up-to-date, but a diminished world from the Empire's giant screen with stereo sound going full blast and making the walls vibrate.

Much as I was enjoyably shaken by the experience, I'd be failing in my duty if I didn't say I'd feel uneasy at letting very young children watch this film without their parents or guardians first seeing it for themselves.

The proof of the very lenient - I hope not lax -

censors' PG rating will be in the screaming (or not) once the kids get in, alone or escorted, or get home after seeing it.

Joe Johnston, a former visual-effects director, has concentrated the story of a return to the prehistoric theme park into little more than 90 minutes, and his skills distil its more concentrated shocks into a class of profes- sional effectiveness commoner in adult horror movies. Palaeontologists Sam Neill and Alessandro Nivola are tricked into mounting a search-and-rescue mission by parents William H Macy and Ta Leoni, whose young son has gone missing while paragliding over the monsters' holding pen. Their baptism of ire as huge jaws and claws rip their plane apart is visually and aurally frightening.

This isn't the awesome spectacle of the original Jurassic Park: this is a mosh-pit of a would-be massacre. Subsidiary characters are soon chewed up with over-amplified gnashing and crunching; then the surviving stars are made to run - they earn their fees by leg-power alone - on a nearly nonstop gauntlet of continuous attacks by needle- toothed raptors and newcomers in scaly horror, like the saw-backed spinosaurus and the outlandishly clawed ptero-nandon - the fauna of nightmares.

Escaping into an armoured refuge they discover themselves to be in a giant birdcage that

soon has the pterodactyls, their maternal instincts churned up by the theft of their eggs, winging in for a clutch-and-kill air show. One of the most disturbing scenes subjects the resilient kid (Trevor Morgan) to a mass attack by baby raptors who peck him with stiletto beaks until he's like a human pincushion.

Though a B-picture in scale and (almost) running-time, Jurassic Park III has been engineered with all the expensive looks of a first feature - and, with it, a precise and purposeful intent to frighten folk out of their skin: a quantum leap in the technology of fear. All fantasy, of course; but fantasy pitched beyond the understanding of maybe many very young viewers is a risky commodity to bring to market.

Let's hope it won't end in weeping and chattering of juvenile teeth.

Copyright 2001
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