Carnosaur (1993)

Carnosaur

-1993

Reviewer: Indy McDaniel

Rating: 3

Director: Adam Simon, Darren Moloney

Writer: John Brosnan, Adam Simon

Cast: Diane Ladd, Raphael Sbarge, Jennifer Runyon, Harrison Page, Ned Bellamy

Run Time: 83 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Date Reviewed: December 25th, 2009

Plot: A brilliant geneticist, Diane Ladd, plans to expose a lethal virus to every human being on the planet. Her objective: to destroy humankind in favour of her new strain of prehistoric dinosaurs. Two people stand in the way of her diabolical plan, a cynical night watchman and a lovely idealistic environmentalist. The two must overcome their differences long enough to uncover the scientist’s scheme and fight her carnivorous creations in a desperate battle against the extinction of the human race.

Comments: When I was a kid, Carnosaur was kind of a big deal.  It was Jurassic Park for adults.  All the dinosaur action with twice the sex and violence.  And that is, more or less, what Carnosaur is.  It’s the Roger Corman answer to the dinosaur craze of the early 90’s.  And while an R-rated dino-fest actually isn’t a bad idea, this whole movie makes too little sense and has too many plot holes to really hold up very well.

Things get off to a fast start, involving some shady genetics company who strip-mines mountains when they’re not genetically fusing cows with vegetables for no apparent reason.  There’s a whole lot of cutting edge science going on that makes no sense and is completely sidestepped by not really mentioning too much about it.  Just accept that it all works and let the movie do what it wants.

What the movie wants is for a town full of people to contract some fever-based sickness that climaxes with the women birthing dinosaur eggs before dying.  The fevers seem to max out at about 115 degrees, which if you’re playing by real medical rules, means your brain has fried and you’re dead.  In the realm of Carnosaur, it just means you’re about to deliver a beautiful baby velociraptor.  Beautiful is stretching it pretty far, actually.  The dinosaur effects are beyond cheesy.  They look about as menacing as a stuffed iguana.  The T-Rex head actually looks alright from certain angles, but when they cut to full-body shots, the illusion crumbles fast.

If you can convince your brain to set aside the silly science of the movie for the near 90-minute running time, there’s still quite a few other plot problems to contend with.  The pacing is stilted and at times it feels like they’re running the beginning, middle and end of the movie concurrently and just jumping back and forth between them.  If the lack of actual explanation and character development weren’t bad enough, the insane pacing makes the movie almost impossible to decipher.   And the lack of decent dinosaur effects make even viewing it as a cheesy monster movie hard to do.

Overall: Mildly entertaining at best. Mostly just confusing.