In any case, as I sat there on the couch, eating my Thai food whilst sweating artillery shells and trying to light a cigarette with my tongue, I noticed that something odd had happened. On my computer screen, suddenly there appeared images of chickens killing people as they grew into horrendously fake looking dinosaurs. Women were giving birth to the things. One of the women ripped open her own stomach to pull it out the dinosaur/chicken and look at it before she died like she was Ellen Ripley or something. Then a dude fought a T-Rex with a skid-loader.
This is the soooong written for the fight scene. He's trying to eeeeat Raphael Sbaaaaarge...
I thought at first it was merely a nightmarish hallucination brought on by the abundance of those little devil droppings the Asians like to call "chilies." Hell, it had Clint Howard in it. What was I supposed to think? But the next morning after I had managed to not die during the night, in my computer's browsing history was a thing called "Carnosaur." I saw the evidence, and my world collapsed.
There was a Clint Howard movie worse than "House of The Dead?!" HOW LONG HAVE WE KNOWN?!?!
"Carnosaur" is an ultra-cheesy, low-budget splatter-fest executive produced by Roger Corman, and if you don't know who that is, you should probably not bother with this one. For sake of brevity, just imagine if, instead of really bad CGI, the Asylum did really bad practical effects. Like, imagine if in "Megashark vs. Giant Octopus," the monsters had been sock puppets in a bathtub. Then we're talking. Then again, if you don't know who Roger Corman is, odds are very great you have no idea what "Megashark vs. Giant Octopus" is, either.
It's...well it's this.
So when one is watching a Roger Corman produced film, it's really best to buckle down and accept the camp, lest you want to claw your eyes out after five minutes. The tricky thing about that though, at least for me, is that there exists a point where camp is fun, and a point where camp is boring and annoying. I can't really say "Carnosaur" was fun. Despite having a plot oddly reminiscent of many a PS1 video game, this story of dinosaurs and SCIENCE and dinosaurs made WITH SCIENCE isn't really that thrilling even with its high body count, which is all it's really good for. And despite it having infamy as a gore flick, the violence is really far too corny to get much enjoyment out of.
What's going on in "Carnosaur" is that a geneticist (Diane Ladd) is trying to wipe out humanity with a virus and replace them with dinosaurs, since that seems like a thing to do on a Tuesday. So when the dinosaurs (which are hatched from chicken eggs, FYI) start running amok in a small desert town, it's up to an annoying environmentalist (Jennifer Runyon) and a very annoyed night watchman (Raphael Sbarge) to save the world. Oh joyous day.
Of course there's the usual roundup of characters who exist only to be eaten, a la "Tremors" (a FAR superior B-grade monster series, by the way). There's some hippies who chain themselves to construction equipment in protest, only to be completely boned when a dinosaur shows up, which is admittedly pretty funny, there's some Mexicans, a bunch of horny teenagers and their third wheel drunk friend, a bunch of random scientists and Clint Howard as a hick, all of whom get eaten since that's how this movie rolls. But my favorite was Harrison Page as the sheriff, since he was the most useful of all of them and managed to be something of a badass. It's just too bad he didn't yell at the dinosaurs about not doing things by the book. He probably could have whipped them into shape.
HAMMEEEEEEEEEEEER!!!! *
He's also the only one really acting in this. Diane Ladd looks like she's embarrassed to be reading her lines (as is understandable), and while Raphael Sbarge proved many years later that he is a good voice-over actor as Kaiden Alenko in the "Mass Effect" series (!), here he's kind of slumming it. Although I can't fault him too much. Out of all the dialogue he has the best two lines are a cheeky reference to "Jurassic Park" and "I hate wildlife" as the one-liner at the climax of the final showdown. That's pretty weak sauce. And Jennifer Runyon, the person he has to act with for the majority, is the girl from "Ghostbusters" that Venkman was hitting on during the ESP experiment. I don't blame him for not bringing his A-game.
So the cast isn't very strong overall, but let's talk about special effects for a second. You know, when the creatures in your film made in 1993 aren't achieving the same level of believability as the the Gorn from "Star Trek" did in 1966, then perhaps you should consider other methods of film making. Yes, it does tend to make it funny in a hypothetically intentional way (that's a fine line), but in the visual department the dinosaurs in "Carnosaur" look less like a scientist's horrible experiment and more like Shari Lewis finally snapped and went on a rampage with some new friends she found after they ate everybody at Lambchop's place. And that's just distracting.
Listen, I won't fault anyone for liking "Carnosaur." I really won't. There is a definite market for this kind of movie. I'm just not one of them in this case. While I can handle low budget, personally for me, I don't much care for when a movie's ambitions overstep it's means. It's okay if you have a small budget and have to do cheap effects. That's fine. That's perfectly acceptable. But don't try and make a "Jurassic Park" knock-off with a budget the size of what that movie probably spent on the film stock it was printed on. Just...don't, honey. It's not worth it. Make a slasher movie instead.
Damn it, a slasher movie WITHOUT THE DINOSAURS!
Ugh. I'm never eating super hot Thai food again. Next thing you know I'll have Uwe Boll in my DVD collection.
Wait a minute.
::checks::
Crap.
That's...actually a pretty good trailer. That surprises me.
THE BOTTOM LINE - "Carnosaur" is basically on the same level as any random Asylum flick, just with bad practical effects instead of bad CGI. On the other hand, it's not without its charm. It's a movie that lends itself better to being a drinking game party event rather than a cheesy genre flick to throw on to unwind. I'm not a fan of it.
* Nobody will get that reference.
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