Carnosaur (1993)
Directed by Adam Simon
Written by Adam Simon
Starring Raphael Sbarge, Diane Ladd, Jennifer Runyon, Clint Howard
Release Date May 14th, 1993
Published May 15th, 1993
Carnosaur is a bizarre, incomprehensible mess of a movie. Ostensibly created to capitalize on Jurassic Park, Carnosaur was actually released a month prior to the release of the Steven Spielberg all time classic. Legend tells that Executive Producer Roger Corman heard that Steven Spielberg's next movie was a dinosaur film based on a Michael Crichton bestseller. So, ever the huckster carny, Corman scoured the bestseller list for another book with dinosaurs.
That's when he discovered Carnosaur by John Brosnan and snapped it up. Now, Corman had no intention of actually adapting the book, he just needed it for the optics of making his movie look like Jurassic Park. This extended to the casting of Carnosaur. When it became known that Laura Dern was in the cast of Jurassic Park, Corman wrote a check to get Dern's mother, Diane Ladd in Carnosaur. By this point, he'd chosen a director he was sure could hack up the book and come up with a semblance of a movie.
Enter writer-director Adam Simon. The man who partnered with Corman's wife, Julie Corman, to make 1990's Brain Dead, was just the man to slap together a dinosaur movie where the only goal was to release it before Jurassic Park came out. Mission accomplished. Simon slapped, cut, and pasted Carnosaur into something similar to an actual movie in a remarkable 18 days of principal photography. Diane Ladd was on hand for 5 of those days.
Yes, the behind the scenes story is way more interesting than anything on the screen. Carnosaur is what would happen if you dropped random pages of a dinosaur novel into an A.I generator and asked it to turn that book into a horror movie. It has no inflection points, major motivations are missing, and several plot strands arrive and depart seemingly at random. Scenes exist but they often leave you wondering why they exist.
I'm going to attempt to unpack this plot, if that's at all possible. Carnosaur stars Diane Ladd as Dr. Jane Tiptree, a famed weapons designer now working on designer eggs. What most don't know is that Dr. Tiptree is a mad scientist bent on the destruction of the human race. Dr. Tiptree believes that the Earth belongs to the dinosaur and her goal is to restore the dinosaur in place of man. To do that, she has genetically engineered chickens to give birth to dinosaurs.
But, that's not all. Dr. Tiptree has also created a virus that infects people and causes them to give birth to dinosaur eggs. Well, women give birth to dinosaur eggs, its left highly unclear what the virus does to men despite the director going out of his way to show men being super-gross and spreading the dino-virus to each other by coughing on each other or on the food they are serving to others. Despite that, we only see women giving birth to dinosaur eggs and then dying.
Well, except for Dr. Tiptree who, when her time comes, gives birth to a fully formed tiny T-Rex, rathen than just a gross egg. This scene is so sad. Having done her best to preserve her dignity in this movie, when it is clear that Ladd is laying out a blanket for herself to give birth on, I cried out, NO! Not Diane Ladd! Corman, you monster! Ladd had made it to the end of the movie barely acting a moment in this awful film and when she finally sacrifices her dignity to give birth to a dinosaur, it's the only time Carnosaur achieves any kind of horror. It's mortification, an empathetic sadness on our part on behalf of Diane Ladd, but it does elicit a response.
Diane Ladd is the villain of Carnosaur, I haven't even introduced our 'hero.' Raphael Sbarge stars as Doc, a former doctor turned drunken security guard at a quarry... I think. He has a medical degree on the wall.... I think. Everyone calls him Doc and he seems to know what to do when a woman goes into labor but, it is incredibly unclear what the nature of his character is. We know that his mortal enemy are hippies. Hippy protestors are trying to stop the quarry from digging... something.
