Movie Monthly: Carnosaur

Hello and welcome to Movie Monthly.  In this review series I'm going to choose a theme for each month and then every Monday I’ll spotlight a movie somehow related to that theme.  Generally I want to use this is a way to focus on lesser known or overlooked films but I’ll also sprinkle in the occasional new release or well regarded classic as I see fit. 

For our opening month I decided to start things off big and so we have Jurassic June, celebrating dinosaur movies for the whole month.  Partially I chose this theme to celebrate the upcoming Jurassic World release but mainly I chose it because there really aren’t that many dinosaur movies.  As such it’s my duty, as a critic, to dig up the strange, interesting, cool, or overlooked additions to this undernourished niche.  With all that said let’s look at Roger Corman’s Carnosaur. 

 

Carnosaur is a low budget science fiction horror film from 1993.  Though it came out in the same year as Jurassic Park it only has a few tertiary relations to that particular blockbuster.  Instead Carnosaur draws from a strange hodgepodge of inspirations that, despite being rooted in the conventions of the ‘80s and ‘90s, accidentally end up making it shockingly current.  Part of what makes Carnosaur so strange is that it doesn’t really have a plot in the conventional sense rather it has a premise.  That premise revolves around the rogue geneticist Dr. Jane Tiptree, played by Diane Ladd as one of the only recognizable actors in the film. 

Tiptree has decided that Earth was never meant for humanity but for the dinosaurs and has taken it upon herself to end humanity.  To accomplish this she’s created a retro-virus which is causes women to fatally give birth to dinosaurs as well as cloning a few dinosaurs of her own for good measure.  The film starts up just as Tiptree is beginning to release her virus on the small town community adjacent to her lab but that’s only part of the story, there’s also a handful of other subplots involving the escape of one of her cloned dinosaurs, an environmentalist commune in the area, and a covert government agenda to push GMOs through congress.

Yes you read that last part correctly, this 1993 film is actually steeped in government mendacity and misconduct for the purpose of furthering GMO agenda.  That’s part of what I mean when I say Carnosaur is shockingly current, the construction of all these subplots and their focuses makes it feel like a film unstuck in time.  The government agenda stuff is actually the most interesting part of the movie and one of the few areas where things really come alive with energy.  It’s framed as something closer to a political satire in these sequences than anything else but given how disjointed Carnosaur is it actually fits decently with the other portions of the film.  What sticks out most about the sequence is just how imaginative and gung-ho the creators are for keeping these titans of government and heads of business as comically soulless.  As the film reaches its climax and the government types have to decide how to deal with the growing outbreak of Dino Fever the film slips into Dr. Strangelove territory with how much those in power are willing to lean into the apocalypse.  It forms this compulsively watchable mash-up of the growing trend of ‘90s environmentalism with the remnants of ‘80s low rent punk filmmaking from folks like Troma.

Putting aside the political satire the rest of the film is grounded in the trends of the ‘80s, which makes sense given the novel Carnosaur is based on was written in 1984.  A big theme of ‘80s horror was taking the mechanical constructions of junky horror from the ‘30s and ‘50s and repainting it with modern film techniques and conventions towards fear, like how Alien is basically a haunted house film or how Halloween is a monster on the loose movie.  Carnosaur takes the latter approach, with the meat of the movie made up of Dr. Tiptree’s escaped dinosaur rampaging around New Mexico as her retrovirus slowly infects more and more people.  Unfortunately this is where the special effects, editing, and music really Carnosaur.  The titular Carnosaur is accomplished through puppetry and never manages to transcend the limitations of that fact, always looking decidedly fake and also pretty small.  That wouldn’t be such a huge problem if the music and sound design wasn’t so cheaply produced.  Everything about the music makes the proceedings come off like a low rent Sega CD video game and the sound design seems to have been accomplished with a mind more towards comedy than horror.  As a result a lot of scenes that should’ve been terrifying end up very cheap and awkward, like a mid-film murder spree where the Carnosaur attacks a group of protesting environmentalists who’ve chained themselves to equipment and can’t escape.

The saving grace of this section is any scene with Diane Ladd’s Dr. Tiptree.  Ladd does a great job in the part, nailing a kind of quiet and threatening mania we rarely see from female villains.  At the same time the effects in these sequence, especially women giving birth to violent fetal dinosaurs, are pretty excellent.  Incidentally if the idea of tiny monsters eating their way out of people sounds similar to Aliens you’re not wrong, Carnosaur is actually very much an Aliens riff, even going so far as to conclude with a battle between a T-Rex and a bulldozer/forklift. 

Carnosaur is not a great film but it is a very watchable one and one that fails from a lack of means rather than a lack of ideas.  Honestly with all the modern day issues and ideas wrapped up in this movie I’m shocked that we haven’t seen an attempt to revive it as a TV show.  It’s also not like Carnosaur was unsuccessful, the original film spawned 2 sequels and 2 spin-offs though I can’t speak to their quality.  In any case I actually recommend Carnosaur if only because I guarantee you aren’t going to find any other movies that combine political satire, body horror, plague outbreaks, and dinosaur action.  Next week we’ll look at another weird mash-up concept: Dinosaurs and Found Footage.