Carnosaur (1993)

Still waiting on NECA's figure of this bad boy.

Bring yourself back in time to 1993, Jurassic Park is looking to be the big movie of the year and you're so excited for it that you can barely contain yourself. But wait, what's this? Four weeks until it opens and there's another dinosaur movie playing! Yes, this is a real thing that happened. Even better than all of that, there's a direct link between the two films as Laura Dern's mother, Diane Ladd, is in this one. And to top it all off, this movie is produced by none other than Roger "I was in The Howling" Corman.

No, really, he was in The Howling. That happened.

Based on the novel of the same name, Carnosaur is something of a cult classic that has spawned four sequels that generally have fuck-all to do with the original film. Don't worry, we'll be looking at those eventually. The movie also got at least one favourable review from Gene Siskel of all people, so that's has to be a good sign, yes? Well, there's only one way to find out. Let's grab some chicken and dive stomp our way towards one of the weirder dinosaur films of my youth.

After all, how many dinosaur movies feel like they could take place in the same universe as The Crazies?

The movie opens on some corporate types talking a literal mad scientist named Dr. Jane Tiptree, who they apparently want to work for them on something. What's she actually working on though? Chickens. Specifically, she's working on a virus that will cause all female creatures to give birth to dinosaurs. And she's spreading this virus through chickens. We get to see the result pretty quickly too as a very large egg hatches and the little dino inside attacks a guy's face. But that's just a scratch, when do we get to the real shit?

There we go.

Yes, not long after that a driver transporting the chickens notices a commotion in the back, so he pulls over and opens the back only to become Carnosaur chow. Meet our little stinker of the movie. Sure, he's small now, but just like in a Got Milk ad campaign, he's gonna get a lot bigger. And with that comes a steady diet of screaming victims, because the little bugger is a carnivore. Thus, he finishes his meal and wanders out in to the night, seeking more people dumb enough to hang out in the middle of nowhere. Even better if they handcuff themselves to something so they can't run away.

FORESHADOWING! YAY!

From that mess, we get introduced to our hero finally, Doc Smith, because if your name sounds incredibly made-up then you're probably in a Roger Corman movie. He's got a bit of drinking problem, where sunglasses at night like the hardcorest of hardcore Corey Hart fans, and tends to watch weird shows about lobotomies rather than patrol, but that doesn't seem to be getting in the way of him doing his job as a night watchman for a construction site. I mean, it's not like anyone can just wander up while he's not paying attention and...

Wow, you suck at your job, Doc.

He chases off a few trespassers but one more lingers around looking like every generic burglar ever, so of course this is his love interest. No, really, meet Thrush. She's a young environmentalist and he takes her into his trailer to call the sheriff to come pick her up, but the sheriff's hands are a bit full picking up the pieces of the dead truck drivers from earlier. So, since the sheriff asks him to hold onto her until he can send a car to pick her up, surely Doc does just that.

And he's immediately in a deep booze-sleep. Our hero, folks.

After a long scene of the coroner cutting off a wound sample from one of the bodies (that looks remarkably like a piece steak) to send to the lab, we then return to our villain as she tells her co-worker that they knew all this would happen. Thanks for that update that you're evil, Dr. Tiptree. Back to our hero as he wakes up from his whiskey coma to the sheriff showing. They go off to look for the rascally hippies that trespassed the previous night and Doc passes on identifying Thrush, because she's too cute to throw in jail.

Look at her in her overalls with unnecessary suspenders. That's silly and adorable.

Meanwhile, Tiptree's fellow badguy corporate type has a teenage daughter who decides to sneak out while he's on the phone telling goons to find the freaking dinosaur running around, so I'm sure the teenagers going off together won't end in a bloodbath. Enough of that though, let's get to some romance! Yes, Thrush and Doc get to have their moment together as they bond talking about how where they're at used to be a highway for dinosaurs. I guess that's a decent enough segue into a dinosaur attack, right? Bring on the drunk horny teenagers!

That bodycount isn't going to pad itself out.

In the most unexpected of turns, the drunk teenagers trying to get laid all get butchered by our titular monster. See? It doesn't matter if you're at New Jersey camp with a dark past or in the middle of the desert, something is still gonna kill you for not using condoms. No glove, no internal organs. Also, fun fact: the tiny little dinosaur currently murdering everyone? Yeah, that's actually more scientifically accurate to the actual size velociraptors were. Basically, imagine chickens that mostly existed to disembowel you and there you go.

Bringers of finger lickin' death.

Back at evil corporate headquarters, we see a phone call about turnip cows...yes, really...and the results from that coroner's test earlier shows that the drivers were killed by a chicken apparently. Back at the romance subplot, Doc gets Thrush to take a ride with him by threatening to drive aimlessly around and pollute the atmosphere. How cute, he's so adorably disrespectful of her political beliefs. Such a lovely couple. Cue the dead body! Yeah, they run across one of those dead teenagers who is not quite dead and is whole lot more Latino now, despite talking like a surfer/stoner brah earlier. Guess having a tiny raptor eat your dick makes you revert to your cultural dialect. Where is that dinosaur, anyway?

Clearly, he's off killing the guy he scratched earlier when he hatched. Better late than never.

Our little boy has gotten quite a bit bigger. it's all those hormone fed teenagers, I tell ya! After finishing off the guy he probably should killed at the beginning of the film, it's back to the evil corporation as we see the guy in charge getting disturbingly excited about blueberry pie. But that whole thing is interrupted by this whole killer chicken dinosaur nonsense, which he's just not interested in. Where's Tiptree, our real villain? Well, after the co-worker whose daughter got ate earlier shows up in a very unhappy state to her lab, she prepares a little surprise for him in the form of another fucking dinosaur that's much bigger. Though I should mention she tells him he's going to see his still alive daughter, because Tiptree is kind of sick.

The violent trashing of his limp body in the giant carnivore's mouth really helps with the grief management.

But that's not enough blood, we need some more dead people in here! Bring me some hippies who think handcuffing themselves to construction equipment when lots of people are turning up dead is a good idea. Does our hero get them loose or stay to protect them? Nope, he goes off to get food at the local diner. Honestly, I kind of love Doc and his complete 'give no fucks' attitude to all of this. And hey, he brings us to Clint Howard! One can never have enough Clint Howard. Anyway, how're those hippies managing out in the middle of the desert while chained up with no way to escape?

She's probably rethinking this whole thing in a very big way right about now.

They all get brutally murdered except for Thrush, the only one smart enough to be inside the cab of one of the vehicles, which means Doc's got some hope for romance still. Over at the coroner's office, the doctor tells the sheriff that all the recent deaths are the result of the same creature, only that it's getting bigger. back at Doc's trailer, the traumatized Thrush wakes up just in time to get attacked by a wandering dinosaur who's clearly still in the mood for hippie meat. Luckily for her, Doc left his shotgun and she shoots it. I mean, it's obviously not dead, but at least she's not being eaten. While that's happening, Doc sneaks into Tiptree's lab using the van that belonged to her dead workers that were out hunting for her pet dinosaur. She unzips the bodybag she assumes contains a tranquilized dino and instead finds one her lackeys dead.

"Surprise, muthafucka!"

She lays out her whole evil plan to him, since he has her at gunpoint. Basically, she wants to wipe out humanity and give the planet back to the dinosaurs and the best way to do this is with her little virus making all the women give birth to little womb-bursters. No really, we get to see one of these fuckers pull an Alien later. While Doc's letting all that info sink in, the sheriff finds a dinosaur fetus in a carton of eggs, which I'm fairly certain is putting him off omelettes for a while. All this information gets back to the company Tiptree works for, and since they're clearly more on the Umbrella spectrum of large companies, they decide the best call is to just kill everyone in the area and sterilize everything to make sure the infection is contained entirely. Let's ask the citizens of Raccoon City how well that works.

Insert zombie moans here.

Final act here, so that means everything goes to hell. We've got women giving birth to stillborn dinosaurs, guys in hazmat suits gunning down people, and Tiptree sics her big dinosaur on Doc since the little one is busy killing the sheriff while he also kills it following it eating all the animals in a pet shop. But there's good news because Doc has a serum that can save everyone! Bad news though, he's still got a giant dinosaur to deal with. Now if only he had access to some large machinery to fight it off with. We'll get to that James Cameron rip-off scene, because first we've got a Ridley Scott rip-off scene to see.

Congratulations, it's a lawsuit.

Doc makes it back to Thrush, who is clearly sick, but that's okay because he's got the cure. But wait, wasn't there a big dinosaur chasing him? Oh shit, he better go handle that in the most badass way currently available: fighting it with a piece of construction equipment while protecting his sick sorta-girlfriend. I'm sure it won't remind anyone in any way of a scene from a much more famous scene starring Sigourney Weaver.

"GET AWAY FROM HER, YOU BITCH!"

Doc kills the dinosaur, takes Thrush back to his trailer, gives her the cure, and the day is saved. Oops, we forgot all about that hazmat kill squad wandering around didn't we? Yes, in a twist straight out of a Claudio Fragasso movie, the film ends with Doc and Thrush getting shot to shit and being set on fire as they and the cure all burn, dooming humanity forever. At least, it would if the sequels actually followed that plot point up rather than ignoring it outright.

At least they didn't turn out to be mutant rat people.

Overall, Carnosaur is an entertaining little monster movie that, despite the bleak ending, still managed to result in enough staying power to become a franchise. Not an especially good franchise, mind you, but at least they're better than some other ones I've talked about in the past. Again, I will be returning to these films sooner rather than later. If you love dinosaur violence and don't mind rubber puppets gnawing on legs, I'd say you should check this one out. Decent performances, some solid low-budget practical effects work, and at least one scene for all you pie fetishists out there. Later days, bleeders!