“They found a way to bring back dinosaurs.”
“Right. And I’m Bigfoot, and she’s the Loch Ness Monster.”
“You can call me Nessie.”
CARNOSAUR is a delight, don’t get me wrong. It will absolutely be included in the Bargain Bin at some point. The film gets a lot of flack for being a shameless JURASSIC PARK ripoff, which makes perfect sense when looking at it from a distance. It is a low-budget movie about genetic experiments to bring back dinosaurs released the very same year that JURASSIC PARK came out. It has “mockbuster” written all over it. And yet, CARNOSAUR was actually based on a novel by Harry Adam Knight, which was released in 1984, six years before the publication of Michael Crichton’s original JURASSIC PARK novel.
CARNOSAUR 2, on the other hand, actually IS a mockbuster. It just happens to be a really good one. The plot is ALIENS, beat for beat. It is not subtle. A team is sent to investigate the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository after communications with its employees have gone cold. They find it abandoned. Everyone is dead except for one kid. The facility has been overtaken by dinosaurs and now the stranded team needs to find a way to escape. The only difference between this and ALIENS is that it’s on earth, the monsters are dinosaurs, and instead of a little girl the lone survivor at the facility is a teenage boy.
Having said all that, this movie is so much fun. The filmmakers are acutely aware that they’re doing an ALIENS riff and they’re having a blast and a half doing it. Miguel Nunez, star of everything from RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, FRIDAY THE 13TH: A NEW BEGINNING, and LEPRECHAUN 4 to SCOOBY DOO and JUWANNA MANN, plays the obligatory guy in a chair. When he gets cornered and a raptor takes a swipe at him, he looks genuinely offended, says “It’s on now” and smacks it back. It’s not even played that much like a campy beat, it’s like he’s genuinely gobsmacked and enraged that this dinosaur would start something with him. We've also got Oscar nominee John Savage and the dad from DR. GIGGLES doing his best Carter Burke.
Some of the banter works better than you would think, too. More than anything, though, it absolutely delivers on the promise of low-budget dinosaur carnage. It even has that over the original, which gradually built its prehistoric threat over the course of the movie.
One of the great things about watching a dinosaur horror movie from the years immediately post-JURASSIC PARK is that the gore always comes as a surprise. And there is definitely some gore in this film. Characters you get surprisingly attached to get their arms gruelingly torn from their body. These are some hungry, hungry dinos and they make some messy work of their food.
I also get an interesting kind of glee out of the “find and replace” swapping of aliens with dinosaurs. Operating on that logic, of course the raptors would be the “warrior” creatures that our heroes fight through most of the movie, and the T-Rex would be the “big one” saved for the final confrontation at the very end. And it works. It absolutely works and even if they're all the same creatures re-used from the first one, the T-Rex somehow genuinely looks better in the second film. If you’re in the mood for a dinosaur creature feature on an all-meat diet, CARNOSAUR 2 is the one you want on the menu.