Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video that explores the “first feature-length mashup,” Dinosaur Hunters.
Dinosaur Hunters makes good on the implicit pitch of late-career films like The Expendables. Namely: wouldn’t it be great if all the action movie stars from the ’80s and ’90s, as you remember them, were in a movie together? Don’t get me wrong, the modern-day vintage of Sylvester Stallone has his charms, but those team-up films aren’t really marketed on how cool it would be to see geriatric geats prove they’ve still got it. No, the impossible promise is that you’re going to get to see Rambo and Predator‘s Dutch in a film together.
Well, time travel isn’t possible, but mashups sure are. Introduced with a title card claiming it as “the first mashup feature film in movie history,” Dinosaur Hunters uses the power of editing to bring all the greats together under one roof. Styled like a classic Hollywood adventure film, Dinosaur Hunters is about exactly what its name suggests: a group of deadly, gun-toting experts who specialize in hunting dinosaurs. Hell. Yeah. What separates Dinosaur Hunters from its mashup peers is the sheer audacity of its length. Sporting a two-hour runtime, an original story, and an obsessive love for action aesthetics, Dinosaur Hunters pushes the limits of what a mashup can be.
The film stars, in credited order: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris, Dwayne Johnson, Sean Connery, Wesley Snipes, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and Nicolas Cage. With: Steven Seagal, Gene Hackman, Robert Redford, Harrison Ford, Sam Neill, Bruce Campbell, and Bill Paxton. Plus dinosaurs from a variety of Jurassic Park installments and other movies. And it features a mashup of scores by James Newton Howard. All in, its visuals have been taken from forty-nine movies.
Watch Dinosaur Hunters:
Who made this?
Antonio Maria Da Silva is a Paris-based director, editor, and, as his Vimeo evocatively puts it: “mashuper” whose production company is AMDS Films. Da Silva “takes on Hollywood and wins. Score one for France,” his YouTube bio boasts. For more wit and mashups, you can also follow Da Silva on Twitter.
More Videos Like This
- I am an enormous fan of Hell’s Club, a mashup short film by Da Silva that uses the power of editing to merge multiple cinematic club scenes under one roof. Tom Cruise from Collateral shooting a dirty look at Tom Cruise from Cocktail? Are you kidding me? Pure genius
- And because the universe provides, sometimes, “Hell’s Club” has a sequel, Hell’s Club 2
- Oh, right, and Hell’s Club has a spinoff: Bathroom Secrets. This mashup is a dang cinematic universe!
- It would be cool to see the Terminator fight RoboCop. Here’s Da Silva’s take on how the confrontation might look
- Again, Da Silva has used the power of the edit to make to giants of cinema fight one another. This time, it’s Michael Myers vs Jason Voorhees
- Finally, in a roundup of different approaches to the art of the mashup, see how Da Silva organizes a boxing match between Rocky‘s Rocky Balboa and Raging Bull‘s Jake LaMotta.
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