Carnosaur

• Written and Directed by Adam Simon
• May 13, 1993 (Ogden) / May 14, 1993 (US)
• Loosely based on the 1984 novel Carnosaur by John Brosnan

Two people race to stop a scientist’s plan to exterminate the human race with a virus and replace humanity with genetically created dinosaurs.

There are a fistful of things tossed together in Carnosaur. Genetic experiments to bring back dinosaurs. A mysterious disease. Environmentalists trying to stop something though they may not know what. Despite all that there is not much story here and the characterization is poor with individuals showing up mostly to die.

Chickens are very important to this movie. It opens with stock footage from a farm but there are also numerous instances of characters munching on drumsticks and whatnot. Not sure if it is meant as a joke or an artistic visual allusion.

Being a Corman production, things are definitely cheap. We barely see the monsters and when we do they are a lot closer to detailed puppets than they are tricking you into thinking they could be real. Jurassic Park set a standard for dinosaurs that this was trying to compete with by getting out of the gate first. 

The acting is passable. Then again none of the characters are really that well done. There is a kind of romance between environmentalist Ann Thrush (Jennifer Runyon) and security guard “Doc” Smith (Raphael Sbarge) but maybe because Corman engaged in some of his famous page tearing we don’t get much of it. The villains are a little hammy with the evil scientist Dr. Jane Tiptree (Diane Ladd) and the explanation for why nobody checked up on her a little hard to swallow. 

More importantly with everything going on in this movie and the assorted characters some of them never appear to interact leaving the viewer with the sensation it is more than one movie edited together. And maybe it was. They didn’t have enough with A so they tried to add with B and seeing that did not stretch things out added C. But the issue is there weren’t enough scenes to pull them all together.

The movie never gets too gory or too campy or too scary. Carnosaur lands on this weird middle road making it, well, not much of anything. There aren’t enough entrails or enough shocks or enough jokes or enough of anything. It lacks definitive bite.

The sets are extremely minimal. The shots are exceedingly tight even in the outdoors. Sometimes filmmakers need to throw caution to the wind and go for it. In this case, pull the camera back a little bit and cut the claustrophobic vibe. It’s not like these are characters fighting monsters in a building. You can’t get away with it when you are in an open lot.

Writer/director Adam Simon aimed for a “We’re screwed” ending. Those are always tricky endings to pull off in a satisfying way and I don’t think it quite lands here. Not sure if it follows the book but we get a climax with the events that cause the ultimate fix to be lost being connected to one of those films that were merged together.

And maybe that’s why things feel like they’re a little out of control in the movie. Not because of a sense of narrative chaos that is purposeful but because it’s like nobody actually has a handle on how the movie is coming together. The camera was set up. Somebody yelled action and what they got is what they got without anyone saying this is what I want.

Carnosaur is a curiosity. It certainly has some potential but fails more often than it succeeds. This Teemu Jurassic Park is not worth your time.