Carnosaur 2

The first "Carnosaur" was muddled but ambitious. It featured dinosaurs hatched from chicken eggs -- and occasionally people. The dinosaurs grew from small bitey critters to T. Rex like monsters. It featured Diane Ladd as a mad scientist who tricked the government and a corporation into backing her crazy scheme. There was lots of goo and a military takeover scene at the end.


"Carnosaur 2" loses all of that. In fact, the only references to the first film is a huge triangle cage that once held the T. Rex sized monster and a reference to the military keeping some dinosaurs "on ice" after the cleanup at the end of Carnosaur.

The movie is set at a government facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. In this facility are: atomic waste, nuclear weapons and dinosaurs. But the dinosaurs are on a top secret level, so very few know about them. In the intro to the movie, the dinosaurs escape and kill everyone in the place, except for Jesse -- a precocious kid who knows all about the facility -- who is traumatized by seeing his father killed by a dinosaur.

Our "heroes" are a systems repair group. Apparently, when things break down, these guys are called in. They have the demeanor of a grizzled Army troop. It makes me wonder what kind of systems they are normally repairing. The main character is Jack Reed. Actor John Savage does his best Harvey Keitel in the role as Jack takes a father-like role over Jesse. The whole movie is set in the rooms and hallways and outside heliport of the Yucca facility.

I almost can't call it a giant monster movie as most of the dinosaurs are raptor size. But in the last few minutes of the movie, we get the big T. Rex dinosaur to chase the heroes around, and Jesse has his revenge thanks to an "Aliens" ripoff and the line "Eat This Barney!"

The movie is an entertaining slasher flick with dinosaurs (which, if you think about it, so was the first "Jurassic Park"). There's more focus on character than the first movie in the series, but less ambition in what it tries to pull off.

There's few other reviews out there for me to link to. Also, there's little to say about the crew. It is, of course, produced by Roger Corman (happy birthday!) to tap into the dinosaur craze created by "Jurassic Park." This movie came out after the first movie, but a year before "The Lost World," which despite better production values isn't much better than these movies. The writer is Michael Palmer whose only other credit appears to be "Watchers III," also produced by Corman. (The Web offers a unreliable credits because searches seem to bring up medical thriller novelist Michael Palmer quite often.) Louis Morneau has a few more credits (also mostly Corman-produced efforts), the most famous of which is Bats.

"It came out of a damn chicken egg!"

"Carnosaur" was as much fun as I remember. It was weird and wild and a total cheap exploitation film. Roger Corman produced the film, which was released in 1993 to cash in on the big budget release of "Jurassic Park."
The film stars Diane Ladd (of movies like "Chinatown," "Christmas Vacation" and "Wild at Heart") as Dr. Jane Tiptree (a reference to James Tiptree Jr., the science fiction writer?) a mad scientist creating an apocalyptic virus that will wipe out the human race and make way for dinosaurs. Her work is funded by an evil corporation, Eunice, which is in turn funded by the government (and thereby, the movie creates a trifecta of B-movie villains: Mad scientist, evil corporation, evil government.) Ladd spends most of her time in a dark control room talking to people in gray rooms by camera. I imagine all her scenes were shot in one day.
Our hero, Doc, is played by Raphael Sbarge, an actor who started his career co-starring with Tom Cruise in "Risky Business" and now spends most of his time doing voice overs on Star Wars videogames. Here he plays a drunken night watchman at a quarry site. What the quarry is digging for, I have no idea. Apparently, the site is environmentally important, so the company's equipment is constantly under attack by a commune of environmentalists.
Doc drinks all the time, carries a rifle and yet has books about Gandhi and sketches the landscape. His trailer includes a poster of Alfred E. Neumann saying "What Me Worry?" as well as Doc's medical license, crossed out with the words "Just Do No Harm" written over it.
Eventually Doc meets one of the environmentalists, Thrush, (Jennifer Runyon who apparently hasn't done any work since this movie). Her only role in the plot, besides vague love interest, is to get in the Carnosaur's way.
Enough with the actors. The movie begins with a batch of chickens on a truck getting out of Ladd's lab just as quarantine begins. Among the chickens is a baby dinosaur, which of course kills the driver and escapes. Meanwhile, everyone is getting sick.
Apparently, Dr. Tiptree's plan has two parts. The first is the spread of a disease which makes women give birth to a giant green egg. The birthing process kills the infected women. The second part is baby dinosaurs born in chicken's eggs.
It's the loopiness of this plan that really makes the movie fun. A couple of dinosaurs get loose while feverish women give horrible birth. Neat.
The special effects are humorous but effective. There seems to be a combination of stop motion, puppets and animatronic models. If you've ever seen the TV show "Land of the Lost," the dinosaurs are about one step up from those. There's also some gore as the baby dinosaur rips the intestines out of people, but nothing spectacular.
The movie rips off scenes from "Alien," "Night of the Living Dead" and, believe it or not, a satirical final shot reminiscent of "Citizen Kane."
The movie is ridiculous, but a lot of fun. It never gets boring (though it veers close with static scenes in Ladd's lab and Eunice's board room.) Best of all, Clint Howard is in the first half hour of the film. Clint Howard makes any movie better.
The director, Adam Simon, also wrote the film "Bones," starring Snoop Dogg. The last two films he directed were "The American Nightmare," a documentary about horror films, and "The Typewriter, the Rifle & the Movie Camera," a documentary about director Samuel Fuller.
The film is based on a novel by Harry Adam Knight, which is apparently a pseudonym for John Brosnan, an Australian writer well known in science fiction fan circles. He died this year of acute pancreatitis. Apparently, the book is very different from the movie. In fact, some of the Amazon reviews claim Michael Crichton ripped off this book when he wrote "Jurassic Park."
The "Encyclopedia of Science Fiction" says about Brosnan's pseudonymous works "these written equivalents of exploitation ovies are slightly self-mocking but quite exciting as sf horror; all are variants on the humans-being-destroyed-by-monstrous-things theme." The Encyclopedia also points out "The initials of the pseudonyms were no accident." Brosnan also wrote as "Simon Ian Childer."
I'll have to pick up the novel and see what I think.
Finally, here are some other reviews of Carnosaur:
Dino-Source; Trash City; The B-Movie Film Vault; Cold Fusion Video Review; Stomp Tokyo; Bad Movies; At A Glance Film Reviews; Night of the Creeps; Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review; Mutant Reviewers; Broke Down Cinema; DVD Cult and Rotten Tomatoes.

Carnosaur!

Deep Discount DVD has a good bargain on the Carnosaur collection. This is the three Roger Corman produced "Carnosaur" movies. These are not what you'd call high art, even for giant monster movies, but they're fun and, now, cheap to buy! The films were produced to cash in on the "Jurassic Park" hype. Personally, I love the films. I can't wait to see them again and will write more after I've viewed them.
UPDATE: Carnosaur review here.