Hello and welcome back to KID NOSTALGIA, your online guide to monster, science fiction and horror movies ranging from the oldies to more modern releases, from the classics to more… obscure movies – ones like this! Roger Corman presents a New Horizon Pictures production – Diane Ladd in CARNOSAUR, an Adam Simon film based on the novel of the same name by John Brosnan. Skipping ahead nearly 40 years, we reach the Corman produced CARNOSAUR. When Jurassic Park (1993)’s advertising campaign was doing so well, CARNOSAUR quickly went into production to cash in on that success.
The film is based on the 1984 novel which bares many similarities to Jurassic Park… despite being written six years before the Jurassic Park novel. I’ve never read either book, but I’ve seen both movies, so let’s compare them on that front… And I’ll tell you now, Carnosaur is nothing like Jurassic Park. According to the DVD cover, Gene Siskel liked this movie, which is probably the strangest thing about this movie. Ebert however called it the worst film of the year. This is filling me full of hope. And why is the film called Carnosaur?
If this was made in the early 2010s, I’d say it would be half car, half dinosaur, but Corman’s not quite there yet. And is someone gonna mention the fact that this Jurassic Park cash in has Laura Dern’s mother as the star? The movie was rushed together quickly due to budget and deadlines, so I’m impressed the dinosaur on the poster looks as good as it does, as most of the film was made in a span of two and a half weeks. The effects though took 10 weeks to be made, and what you are seeing on the DVD cover is just a little animatronic hand puppet and the one on the theatrical poster a full sized T-Rex.
Effects were primarily handled by Charles Band frequent, John Carl Buechler who made a hand puppet Deinonychus for when its still small, a full sized Deinonychus, a hand puppet T-Rex for the more complicated full body shots, and a 16 by 25 feet T-Rex puppet. I first discovered the film as a shot of the T-Rex was on the front cover of a monster movie guide I had when I was little… which seemed a little odd to me considering that the writer actually hated the movie.
Enough chit-chat though, time to get into the movie… after I warn you that, as always, this post will contain spoilers, so viewer discretion is advised. Jane Tiptree (Diane Ladd) is a renowned yet secretive scientist working on something by splicing chicken DNA with a few other things when one of her little experiments hatches, kills a chicken, scratches a guard and stows away on a truck. When the driver notices something odd, he goes to check and is killed… by something about the size of a chicken.
We meet our two main characters, drunk security guard Doc and environmental activist whose name is… Thrush? What the hell kind of name is that?! The truck driver’s body is discovered and Tiptree sends out several of her employees to hunt the thing down. The creature then attacks three teenagers and we get a good look at it as well as how big it is and… how the hell is this thing capable disemboweling people?! It’s titchy! It kills two of the employees hunting it and OH MY GOD IT’S A LOT BIGGER NOW. Tiptree then lures the father of one of the teenagers into a strobe room where a T-Rex turns up and eats him.
Not what I expected, I thhought a band was about to start playing or a James Cameron movie was gonna turn up. Thrush and her group of environmentalists chain themselves to the construction machines that Doc guards that totally won’t be used to kill the T-Rex at the end of the movie and the creature that we get a full look at that has gotten even bigger attacks them, and for all those people who think it’s a Velociraptor, it’s a Deinonychus, attacks them and kills all of them but Thrush who… somehow survives. She’s attacked again at Doc’s trailer, but wards it off by shooting it.
Doc finds the corpse of one of Tiptree’s employees and sees the Deinonychus running off after killing the environmentalists and so, uses the employee’s uniform to get into Tiptree’s lab, so I guess ID badges don’t matter, and holds at gunpoint to explain everything. And here’s where it gets… you’ll see. But first, let’s see Clint Howard get decapitated by the Deinonychus. And wait a minute, how come he knows Tiptree’s responsible? Tiptree explains that the fever going around is her doing, and its an air borne virus that… impregnates women with dinosaurs.
That’s totally not a crime against nature. The plan is to wipe out all women while simultaneously repopulating the dinosaurs and stopping men from repopulating to end the human race and return the world to its rightful owners… the dinosaurs? Are we forgetting that dinosaurs weren’t the first animals to have existed? Really, the world was made for worms and fish. The plan is to make the world peaceful, but, I don’t think that’s possible considering that the only two species that she’s engineered are carnivores…
The government catch on when women start laying eggs, so instead of looking for a cure, they quarantine the place and start shooting anyone infected. Okay… The sheriff manages to kill the Deinonycus, but not before it impales him through the back because he decided to get up and close and make a one liner instead of just shooting it in the head from a safe distance.
Tiptree gives up the cure to Doc when he threatens a set of dinosaur eggs she has… which seems odd considering loads of women are impregnated by dinosaurs, so the loss of a few eggs doesn’t seem like a big deal. Instead of taking the way that he came in though, Doc goes down the corridor to the strobe T-Rex room.
He escapes, but it comes after him and we get a look at the full sized animatronic and, I must say, Buechler outdid himself. Doc cures Thrush who for a second I forgot was in the movie, but the T-Rex reaches the trailer by the construction vehicles, and so Doc gets into the tiniest vehicle on the property to fight the T-Rex.
The T-Rex tips it over pretty quickly, so he gets in another one… also one of the small ones but manages to disembowel the T-Rex, killing it… until the special effects team patch it up for the sequel. Then the hazmat guys from earlier turn up and shoot Doc to death before setting him and unconscious Thrush on fire. The end. Seriously, that’s the end of the movie. The film is dreadful and if it weren’t for Buechler’s impressive puppets, the film would be unwatchable. That said, it’s entertaining in that 90s cult video store movie kind of way that kids from the 90s would enjoy for the nostalgia, as I imagine if you were that age in that era, you probably recognise the VHS art even if you never actually watched it. The film did well enough though to get two sequels, two or three movies using footage from these and another movie using the puppet T-Rex and Deinonychus. If you like dinosaur movies and are patient enough, it’s worth seeing the once. For now though, that’s it for me. Later!
Kid Nostalgia 