Carnosaur Reviews

A low-budget dinosaur picture with a darker edge than Steven Spielberg's blockbuster JURASSIC PARK, CARNOSAUR benefited from canny marketing. Dr. Jane Tiptree (Diane Ladd), pioneer in genetic research, is working on a top secret project for corporate conglomerate EUNICE. Ostensibly a venture to build a better chicken, it is in fact something altogether more ambitious: she's already hiding a full-grown T-Rex in her research facility when a smaller predator escapes and begins preying on unfortunate locals. Doc (Raphael Sbarge), an overqualified night watchman, stumbles onto a curious series of events. The local sheriff discovers several horribly mutilated bodies, people are falling ill with a mysterious virus, and white-suited government functionaries have set up roadblocks, isolating the town. As he tries to piece things together, Doc falls in love with ecology activist Thrush (Jennifer Runyon), whose anti-big business paranoia seems increasingly reasonable. Meanwhile, Fallon (Ned Bellamy), sleek corporate Mephistopheles, tries to convince politicians that his company's genetic patents--including one that increases blueberries' shelf life by coating them with extract of goat embryonic fluid--are harmless, while conducting his own investigation into what Tiptree is up to. Doc soon discovers the horrifying extent of Tiptree's mad plans: she doesn't want to end the world, "just one unruly species," and has created and unleashed a virus that kills women, dooming mankind. And she's mixed human DNA into her dinosaurs, equipping them to rule the earth. Tiptree dies giving birth to a dinosaur, and Fallon and his cohorts concoct Strangelovian plans for the survival of the human race. Doc flees with the antidote to Tiptree's virus and returns to Thrush, who's already ill, but they're both killed by federal functionaries out to eliminate everyone within the quarantine area. First and foremost, CARNOSAUR is a low-budget attempt to cash in on the success of an expensive studio film: the event of the summer of 1993, JURASSIC PARK. Veteran exploitation producer Roger Corman timed CARNOSAUR's release carefully, and reaped a tsunami of publicity as the press leapt on the idea of two competing dinosaur movies. No stranger to the value of an outrageous remark, Corman graciously declined to suggest that JURASSIC PARK was a rip-off of CARNOSAUR, though he did mention that his script had been around longer. Though its dinosaurs are clearly not in the same league with JURASSIC PARK's state-of-the-art creations, CARNOSAUR delivers solid, low-budget fun. Adam Simon's clever screenplay, adapted from the novel by Harry Adam Knight, is chock-a-block with quotable quotes, of which "That's really fabulous--make a great theme park," is only the most obvious. Diane Ladd is chillingly over-the-top as Tiptree ("Jane Tiptree, the fairy godmother of military biotech, the woman who could think 50 unthinkable thoughts before breakfast, building a better chicken?"); she was also the casting coup of the year, since her daughter Laura Dern--with whom she was nominated for a Academy Award, for RAMBLING ROSE (1991), the first time mother and daughter were nominated for the same film--was one of JURASSIC PARK's stars. (Violence.)