Ask ‘Squatch: “What’s That Movie About a Kid with Pet Dinosaurs?” [Prehysteria!]

It’s time for another edition of Ask Squatch, where we pick one of the weird, random search queries formed as questions that lead people to the site and answer them, Dear Abby style. I didn’t want the second post in this series to also be about dinosaur movies, but I couldn’t pass up writing about this movie from my childhood.

It was a VHS rental that I remember getting quite a few times, and it’s one of the few movies from my nostalgia that hasn’t been released on DVD yet. I included it on my list of the worst dinosaur movies of the 90s, but I loved it when I was little. So, what is it? Prehysteria!, a direct-to-video movie from 1993 that went direct-to-my-heart because dinosaurs and that kid from Last Action Hero.

Prehysteria!

Prehysteria! was released in 1993 by Moonbeam Entertainment, the lets-make-crappy-kids-movies division of Full Moon, which released the Puppet Master movies. Apparently they realized that kids were the only ones watching their movies anyway and decided to go after that audience on purpose. I remember seeing their movies at the video store when I was a kid and renting the heck out of a few of them. Prehysteria!, Remote (a Home Alone knock-off), and Dragonworld are the only ones I remember.

The movie was the second film of 1993 to feature newcomer (and never-againer) Austin O’Brien. Austin played Danny in Last Action Hero, a very very underrated movie that I loved as a kid and for some reason haven’t written about here yet. Also, his action figure from Last Action Hero was one of my most played with toys as a kid, probably because I had a weird obsession with normal people-looking action figures and he was just a kid in a hoodie and sneakers.

Anyway

So, I found myself in Video Barn in 1993 going “Hey, that’s the kid from Last Action Hero!” and “Whoa, tiny dinosaurs!” and that about sealed the deal. I literally remember nothing about this movie except for the fact that it had tiny dinosaurs and Austin O’Brien. I don’t know if at the age of eight I was really aware of the concept of direct-to-VHS movies or not, but if not I was probably wondering why I missed this movie when it was in theaters.

Apparently there was a whole trilogy of these movies, but I don’t think I got that into them. I tried finding Prehysteria! someone on the shady depths of the internet to download and watch before writing about it, but the only torrent I could find was oddly dubbed over in Russian.

So there you have it. That 90s movie about a kid with tiny pet dinosaurs was Prehysteria!, and you should probably just forget it ever existed. Go watch Adventures in Dinosaur City instead. Or a Last Action Hero/Jurassic Park double-feature.