- Directed by Louis Morneau
- Written by Michael Palmer
- Starring
- John Savage
- Cliff De Young
- Rick Dean
- Produced by Roger Corman
It’s a sequel, it’s from New Horizons, it features dinosaur effects from John Beuchler — so why’s it so dang good?
Largely ignoring the “end of the world” finale of the original Carnosaur, this movie opens at the Yucca Mountain Facility, a government-run mine which is experiencing problems with its new monitoring and security system. At least, that’s what the last crackly transmission said before the communications system also went dead.
A speedy five-person civilian repair team is recruited by Major McQuade to fly out by chopper and repair the damage. Strangely enough, the station personnel have all disappeared — except for some bloodstains. They do find one survivor, a teenaged boy named Jesse, but he’s practically catatonic; whatever took the rest of the staff wasn’t pretty.
It doesn’t take them long to find problem #1: The government has used this facility to store dinosaur eggs, apparently from the first movie, which have somehow hatched — now the place is crawling with velociraptors. Problem #2: The lower levels are actually a storage area for weapons-grade plutonium from dismantled nukes — and the containment is failing. Not only is the radiation cutting off all communications with the outside, but within a couple of hours it’ll reach critical mass and bathe the entire facility in a deadly dose of radiation.
Sounds simple: just get the hell in the chopper and vamoose, right? But after a raptor attack, the chopper pilot goes apeshit and runs for it herself — but right after liftoff, she finds an unexpected stowaway raptor in the chopper (um, did it open the door, get in, and close the door?). She crashes. Big fake explosion.
Eighty miles of desert every direction.
Now, from here on out it’s pretty standard Alien stuff, with the crew trying to barricade themselves in a safe area while figuring out how to contact the outside world and fight off the raptors. But somehow it’s all done right. To wit:
- Each member of the crew is a separate character, from Reed (John Savage), the nominal protagonist, to Monk (Rick Dean) as the annoying but intelligent loudmouth, to McQuade (Cliff De Young) as the rigid but powerless major (played in plainclothes, no less), to Jesse, the wonder kid who is NOT played as a Wesley-type know-it-all (even though it’s his knowledge of the system and the layout that saves him and Reed).
- The sets are honestly industrial-looking, as opposed to the normal sci-fi facility sets which look like an HVAC wet dream. (OK, the fiberglass rocks in the deeper tunnels look really poor, but cut them some slack, OK?)
- There’s both a survival deadline (waiting until someone can get there to rescue them) and a ticking clock (the imminent containment leak).
- The raptors are very good for man-in-suit designs, and photographed well to play up their strengths and veil their weaknesses.
- The little tongue-clicking noise the raptors make (similar to Jurassic Park) is used to great effect.
That said, there are some gaping plot holes and other flaws, the most notable of which is the title. Sorry to tell you, but raptors don’t qualify as carnosaurs — that’s a title reserved for more massive predators, such as the t-rex and allosaurus. (To be fair, there is a t-rex type thrown in at the very end in a scene that apes the finale of Aliens, but it’s completely extraneous to the plot; it was just thrown in for the “big bang” factor.)
Other problems:
The idea that a petulant teen has fairly free reign of a classified site is ludicrous.
The scene at the beginning where Jesse is playing around with a huge forklifty-thingie just has “FORESHADOWING” written across it in neon letters. (I don’t like giving spoilers, but think about this, think about what I said above about ripping off the Aliens finale, and put two and two together.)
The raptors seem to be able to get to any part of the facility with the greatest of ease. One even shows up in the ops center and makes short work of a crewmember, but that room is later used as the impregnable fortress.
They finally get a rescue team to come by crashing the system entirely, trusting the notion that there’s got to be an emergency line or something to alert the outside world (there are nukes here, remember). So they do so, and an evac team arrives at the last minute, but with just one chopper. They should have been planning to pull out at least twenty people.
Overlooking those flaws (which largely show up in mulling it over afterward anyway), I quite enjoy this movie. In fact, this has got to be one of the best low-budget dinosaur movies around.
One other comment: In looking over the cast’s filmographies on the IMDb, I discovered that one of the evac team officers (he has one line, I think) is the little pudgy Caucasian kid from Gamera vs. Guiron (1969). His career has been limited to single line “Man #2″ roles all his life. Just thought you’d like to know.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 19
- breasts: 0
- explosions: 11
- dream sequences: 0
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 4
- John Savage (Reed) played “Captain Ransom” on the Voyager episode “Equinox”
- Cliff De Young (Major McQuade) played “Croden” on the DS9 episode “Vortex”
- Christopher Daye (Hal, the team leader), was “Y’Sek” on the Voyager “Think Tank” and “Kaybok” on the DS9 two-parter “Way of the Warrior”
- and John Davis Chandler (Zeb, the cook) was “Flith” in the DS9 “Honor Among Thieves”
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