- Written and directed by Adam Simon, based on the novel by “Harry Adam Knight” (John Brosnan)
- Starring
- Diane Ladd
- Raphael Sbarge
- Jennifer Runyon
- Harrison Page
- Clint Howard
- Produced by Mike Elliott
- Executive produced by Roger Corman
In our homage to the female mad scientist sub-sub-genre (or, as we’ve dubbed them, “Pretty Mad Scientists”), the combined might of the B-Masters Cabal has been brought to bear on the following movies, the reviews of which should all be active by November 11, 2000:
And You Call Yourself a Scientist! reviews Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter
B-Notes reviews The Sorcerers
Bad Movie Report reviews Lady Frankenstein
Badmovies.org reviews Devil Girl From Mars
Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimension reviews Teenage Zombies
Opposable Thumb Films reviews Flesh Feast
Stomp Tokyo reviews The Last Man on Planet Earth
Teleport City reviews In Like Flint
The opening is promising enough — in fact, the opening credits are the most distubing part of the film, inasmuch as they are superimposed over documentary footage of chickens in a poultry slaughterhouse. Along with the credits are cryptic superimposed messages relating it to genetics stuff — enough to let us know that Something Is Going On.
We go directly to our necessary exposition: Seems that genetics wunderkind Dr. Jane Tiptree (Diane Ladd) has been working in silence for Eunice Foods of late in their poultry division. A certain representative of Our Government is suspicious; why would an award-winning genetic engineer be working on building a better chicken?
We guess rapidly, as something hatches in the poultry farm and starts terrorizing the personnel. Should be a simple monster-on-the-loose film, right?
Wrong.
From here on out, we’re going to be exposed to more underdeveloped plot threads than you normally find in a full dozen Albert Pyun films. Let’s see if we can catalog them:
First up, we’ve got “Doc” Smith (Raphael Sbarge), the drunk and underachieving night watchman of a construction site which may or may not be connected to the Eunice factory (it’s never really made clear). His nickname is apparently a reference to the fact that he couldn’t wait to finish med school before becoming a drunken sot (again, it’s never really made clear). He begins sort of a love/hate relationship with the Gaians, enviro-commune group who want to sabotage the heavy equipment, most especially with beautiful but belligerent member Thrush (Jennifer Runyon, best known from Charles in Charge and the clairvoyance experiment in Ghostbusters; this film was apparently the final nail in the lid of her career’s coffin).
We’ve also got the guards searching for the escaped dino-thingie, which grows at a rate that’s incredible for a mammal, and flat-out impossible for a reptile: from chicken-sized to full man-in-suit sized in 72 hours. It manages to take out the delivery truck driver, three joy-riding teens, a Mexican who apparently just wandered into it, the two guards hunting it… Again, quite a voracious appetite for a reptile.
We’ve also got Sheriff Fowler (Harrison Page), who takes up far too much screen time for the little he contributes here; he discovers some bodies, trades ignorance with the M.E., and is the first to discover that the chicken eggs have gone weird, yielding either green goo (no ham is in evidence) or, in one case, an embryonic dinosaur, still alive despite having sat in the refrigerator with the other groceries for several hours.
Oh yeah, there’s also the big-ass carnosaur that Tiptree keeps in her basement and feeds the occasional employee to.
Eventually, with all of this going on, Doc makes his way into Dr. Tiptree’s lab and spends a good forty-five minutes of the movie simply talking to her (cementing her Mad Scientist status, as if there were any doubt, with the line: “Young man, I doubt you could possibly understand”). Here’s where we get the Mad Science quotient:
See, Dr. Tiptree despises what man is doing to the earth, so she’s made a two-pronged attack on the problem, namely humans: First up, she’s got the whole chicken-egg thing going. Next, she’s engineered and released a virus that causes all fertile women to become both sick and pregnant with little tyrannosaurs, the birthing of which naturally kills the mother. This, she says, will put everything back the way it should be.
I tell you, there are some days it doesn’t pay to visit the video store. This is ludicrous on so many levels, it’s almost not worth it to enunciate them, but here are the big ones:
- Isn’t it simpler simply to wipe out humans, without all the dinosaur rigmarole? (I know, she was probably one of those girls who loved dinosaurs as a kid, so any scheme she had to destroy the world would have to include dinosaurs. That or giant spiders.)
- The massive re-introduction of a single species is supposed to somehow create a new, stable eco-system? And not just any species; a predatory species. Seems to me that a gazillion hungry carnosaurs roaming the landscape is going to decrease the spotted owl more than the encroaching of loggers. (It only took one critter to decrease the population of pro-environmental Gaiens to exactly one — the pretty one, naturally.)
Meanwhile, as Doc and Tiptree are having their insufferable philosophical conversation, the government catches on to what’s going on here — so what do they do? The same thing the government does in every one of these movies: comes goose-stepping in wearing environmental suits, quarantining the town, holding women in giant birthing tents, and shooting their husbands down in the ditch. While I know several people in the Armed Forces and none of them seem like the type to fall back on the “just following orders” crutch, I also used to live in the downwinder belt of Southern Utah, so I know even We American Good Guys have a government that’s not above draconian measures for “the greater good.” (The one honestly disturbing image in the entire movie is of an impregnated woman screaming, “Get it out of me!!” while the (male) brass stand around, examining her and mulling her over as if she were a fascinating bug. The only other scene that comes close is the nearly ten minutes of Clint Howard eating messily.)
It all ends not a moment too soon, with a conclusion that tries to be both Dr. Strangelove and Night of the Living Dead (or, more accurately, The Crazies), but which just comes off as lame.
Where does the fault lie? Partially it lies with the underlying material, the novel by “Harry Adam Knight” (aka John Brosnan). Two of his other novels have been adapted for the low-budget screen (one of them being Proteus); though I have never read any of these novels, I’ll go out on a limb that such uniformly bad movies may be able to attribute their failings to the original novels.
Another huge slice of culpability pie must land on the plate of FX man John Carl Buechler. His effects are usually cheap but effective, but in this outing his reliance on hokey hand puppets, hokey cable puppets and hokey rod puppets completely destroys even the suspension of disbelief that a hard-core dino fan brings to the proceedings. This on top of the fact that “carnosaur” is really vaguely used as the title, “carnosauria” being an underused classification for larger theropods (allosaurus, megalosaurus, etc.); one would expect the dinosaurs in question to be T-rex style thingies, but the majority are definitely cast in the raptor mode. Yeah, I know, it’s a nitpick beyond those for which I normally award demerits; I’m in a particularly vindictive mood.
But a large part of the blame must be placed on Roger Corman’s productions style; while serviceable for “frothy” direct-to-video fare, it simply isn’t adequate for a serious, multi-threaded storyline like this. For a good contrast, look at the sequel Carnosaur 2, which jettisons the huge uber-story for a standard but well-executed Alien ripoff. It’s far less ambitious, but because its reach doesn’t so far outstrip its grasp, it’s vastly more enjoyable.
And I must add: The insufferable “cutesy” factor in character names here only adds one more insult to injury. They’re all bird names, see. In addition to Thrush and Sheriff Fowler, mentioned earlier, we’ve also got characters named Dr. Raven, Swanson, Peregrine, Mallard, Wren, Siegel (”seagull” — get it?), Jay, Downey, Heckel (without Jeckyl)… It’s an annoying little bit of self-indulgent cleverness, and it probably wouldn’t annoy me so bad except I can only think that someone sat around thinking these up when he should have been constructing a story that wasn’t a chore to sit through.
A Notable Quotable:
“So you’re going to give the earth back to the dinosaurs?”
“Well, you might say that.”
“That’s really fabulous. It’d make a great theme park.”- Doc and Tipree, making sure we knew which movie they were cashing in on
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 26
- breasts: 0
- explosions: 0
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek:
- Raphael Sbarge (Doc Smith) played “Michael Jonas” on a string of second-season Voyager episodes
- Clint Howard (Friar) was the little alien kid “Balok” in the classic episode “The Corbomite Maneuver”, and “Grady” on the DS9 episode “Past Tense Part 2″
- Frank Novak (Jesse Paloma) was “businessman” on the DS9 episode “Babel”
- Lisa Moncure (Mallard) was “Latia” in the DS9 episode “The Quickening”
- Martha Hackett (Kroghe) played “Seska” in a long string of Voyager episodes, a Terrellian in a TNG episode, the Klingon “T’Rul” in the DS9 two-parter “The Search,” and Pok’s mother in the video game Star Trek: Klingon
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