SuperCroc (2001)
Film:
DVD:

Written by Simon Boyce
Narrated by Sam Neill

Features:

• Trailers for Inside the Vatican, Africa and Pearl Harbor: Legacy of Attack
  

Anamorphic: N/A; appears in its original 1.33:1 format.

My Advice: Rent It.

Welcome to the Sahara. It's sandy, hot as hell--you know, exactly how you would imagine the Sahara to be. Paul Sereno is here. He's a paleontologist, and he's just found a fairly decently intact skeleton of a Sarcosuchus imperator. That name translates loosely into "bigass crocodile". He decides, hey, this is pretty keen: let's make a life-size model of the thing. In order to do that, he enlists the services of Brady Barr, a lunatic National Geographic keeps on their payroll whenever they want somebody to go wrestle with something that's large, scaly and pissed off. They go all over the world collecting data that inevitably ends up in creating a forty-foot long replica of something straight out of a horror movie set in the sewers of New York City.

This...is an impressive National Geo special. At first, the idea of having Sereno and Barr go traipsing about the planet looking for crocodilic specimens in order to get measurements and whatnot sounds a bit lame, and a lot like filler. However, when you have that little adventure, coupled with a great deal of information about the creature in question and his much (thankfully) smaller descendants--all the while this model is being built--it actually clicks very well. The filmmakers were also very smart in that they saved the unveiling of the monstrosity for the very end--and damnation. I can say "forty foot long croc with a six-foot skull" all day long, but there's no way you can prepare yourself mentally for Barr and Sereno seeing this thing, the fruits of their researching labors.

Sereno and Barr are very interesting foils--watching Barr react to working on bones in a desert couples nicely with Sereno having to ride the backs of a living example of what he's been studying. Also, the informative bits are nice--did you know that crocs can make water "dance" on their backs? I sure as hell didn't.

Anyway, the only thing lacking on this disc is, unfortunately, features. I'm sure National Geo has a score of other cool shorts about reptiles, but there's no bonus program to be found here. There's not even a text bio of Barr and Sereno, something you'd think would be a no-brainer. But still, it's worth renting at the very least--though reptile fanatics will want to own it so they can relive the unveiling again and again. I mean--damn, that thing's big.