Carnosaur (1993) Review

Carnosaur (1993) Review 

You might remember going to the video store as a kid and being told by your parents there were certain movies you just weren’t allowed to rent until you were older, no matter how much you begged. Carnosaur was the preeminent example of this for me. I loved dinosaurs, I wanted to see every dinosaur movie in the video store, but this one was R-rated, so it was a no-go, which only made me want to see it even more. When I finally saw it many years later, I wasn’t disappointed, but that’s only because I like cheesy, cheaply-made sci-fi horror films. 

A crazy scientist, Dr. Tiptree (played by Diane Ladd, the real-life mother of Laura Dern, who played Ellie Sattler in Jurassic Park) does some genetic tampering and engineers chicken eggs with rapidly-growing dinosaur embryos in them. She also has a T. rex contained by force fields in the basement. Oh, and she creates a virus that makes women give birth to dinosaurs. It’s nuts. Near the lab is a quarry, where a bunch of hippies are protesting and clashing with the night watchman. He’s a drunk, and basically the main character, but none of the characters matter, they’re just prey for the dinos. The concept is actually kind of interesting and not a complete rip-off of Jurassic Park, but it becomes too convoluted for its own good and stoops to absurdity pretty fast. 

The opening credits play over some truly disturbing footage of chickens in a factory farm, but then there isn’t another scary thing for the entire runtime. Instead, there are many laughs, generated by the bizarre plot, bad acting, and most of all, the dinosaur special effects. There’s no cgi here, just floppy puppets and stiff animatronics. Only two species appear, a raptor called Deinonychus, and the T. rex, but both rack up a number of kills. 

Carnosaur was hastily-made and came out in theaters only a month before Jurassic Park to cash in on the impending hype, but it was an inferior film in every way, except for one. Jurassic Park, while inarguably awesome, was only PG-13. Carnosaur features the kind of R-rated violence and gore Jurassic Park couldn’t show, with people getting disembowelled and having limbs ripped off. The effects are all practical, and this carnage is the undisputable highlight of the whole film.  

Just like Jurassic Park, Carnosaur is based on a novel, but it isn’t a very close adaptation. It’s also not a good movie, but enjoyable because of how low-budget it is. Some of the dialogue is laugh-out-loud bad. When the raptor attacks the hippies, an old hippy says “Greetings, green brother!” Then is killed.  After Dr. Tiptree explains her evil plan to the main character, he says it would “make a great theme park.” Wow, subtle. 

Carnosaur is bad in so many ways—even in little ways, like the intertitles showing names of people and places filled with redundant information, and the music recycling an annoying digital beeping soundbite over and over. But the filmmakers made the most of what they had to work with, and its earnest low-budget charm makes it at least fun to watch, even if it’s intended to be taken seriously and can’t be taken that way at all. It’s hard to make any legitimate complaints, but there’s a stretch in the middle where we don’t see any dinosaurs for a while, and it almost gets too tedious to keep watching, but then the dinosaurs return and make it worth sitting through the whole thing.   

Carnosaur is essentially a cheaper, trashier, gorier Jurassic Park, so take that as you will, but I find it to be an entertaining so-bad-its-good dinosaur flick. Even though its box office total was tiny in comparison to that of Jurassic Park (Carnosaur: just under one million, Jurassic: just under one billion), it still made enough profit for a sequel to be made. We’ll have a look at Carnosaur 2 tomorrow.