Welcome back to another rip-roarin’ review at B-Movie Enema!

For pretty much all my life, dinosaurs were immensely popular. Moreover, they ignited a lot of children’s imaginations. In the 80s, not only were there movies like Baby: Secret of the Legend which came out at the exact age for me to not only want to see it but to also convince my mother to take me to a theater to see it. The same year, 1985, the Dinobots made their bow in The Transformers. Dinosaurs couldn’t have been more popular than that period of time. Later, a new generation would get the start of a looooong series of animated features with The Land Before Time. Even before that, for decades, dinosaurs were used in all sorts of sci-fi movies, especially the lower-budget ones.

But then came 1993.

I would argue 1993 was the pinnacle of dino-mania. You like that? Dino mania? I am 100% sure no one else has ever said that term before, and they definitely didn’t say it 32 years ago in 1993. Anyway, that’s when Steven Spielberg would have one of his very biggest years ever… maybe for any director in Hollywood history. He’d make two films that year. One, Schindler’s List, would win him the Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture. That was AFTER he released the year’s top-grossing film, and one of the biggest box office champs in the history of movies, Jurassic Park. But we’re going to look at the movie that made 1993 truly the greatest year at the box office for dinosaur movies – Carnosaur.

Like Jurassic Park, Carnosaur was also based on a novel. The novel for Carnosaur was written by Australian John Brosnan under his pseudonym Harry Adam Knight. Interestingly, people have spotted several similarities between Brosnan’s Carnosaur and Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. However, normally, the lesser-known book that got adapted by Roger Corman’s New Horizon Pictures would be pegged as the one that copied from the other. However, while I don’t think there were any shenanigans on Michael Crichton’s part, Carnosaur was published in 1984. Jurassic Park was published in 1990.

It likely wouldn’t surprise anyone that John Brosnan was not a fan of Corman’s adaptation of his book. It wouldn’t surprise you either that Carnosaur, upon release in 1993, didn’t get very good reviews from movie critics. There is a happy story to both of those points, though. Brosnan, while not being a fan (at all) of the adaptation, did say the movie helped bring people to his original book. So, that’s pretty nice.

The other thing, about the critics, is kind of one of those legendary stories. On a May 1993 episode of Siskel and Ebert & The Movies, Roger Ebert panned the film, eventually calling it the worst movie of 1993. In one of those great disagreements of Siskel and Ebert’s long partnership (and rivalry), Gene Siskel actually awarded Carnosaur a thumbs up, praising the movie as having a fun, preposterous (“goofy” was Siskel’s exact quote) premise. This revelation from Siskel flabbergasted Ebert, and they had a spirited debate over it during the episode.

What especially charged this spirited debate was what happened a month earlier on the show. In an April episode of the program, Gene Siskel panned the Burt Reynolds film Cop and a Half. He would eventually name that HIS worst of 1993. Ebert awarded that film a thumbs up, much to Siskel’s shock, and praised the young performer starring opposite Reynolds. Funnily enough, in a stunning turn of events that I don’t think they ever did before or after, they each liked the other’s worst of the year.

Alright, back to Carnosaur. The film was directed by Adam Simon. Probably his claim to fame before this movie was co-producing the Stallone film Lock Up and directing the Bill Pullman/Bill Paxton horror film Brain Dead in 1990. There was one person working on the film who is of quite a bit of note, and that is the special effects director, John Carl Buechler. He created dinosaur puppets as well as life-sized models. Beuchler worked on a ton of great horror films. He directed Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood as well as 1986’s Troll. He did special effects for those films as well as Ghoulies, Re-Animator, and multiple A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween films. Sadly, Buechler died from prostate cancer in 2019.

But, now… Let’s get into the sci-fi, horror extravaganza that is best known as THE dinosaur movie of 1993 – CARNOSAUR!

What might surprise many people about this movie is that our lead is Diane Ladd. Yeah, the three-time Academy Award-nominated actress, Diane Ladd, was coming off of two very recent nominations for 1990’s Wild at Heart and 1991’s Rambling Rose to star in a Roger Corman-produced movie about dinosaurs running amok. But that’s not all, my friends. Oh no, she’s not just in this movie and the top-billed person. She’s basically the villain of the movie. She plays Dr. Tiptree. She’s something of a whiz at genetics. She’s basically been off the grid for years. More than that, she’s written into her heavily structured contracts that she remain unbothered, or the company she’s working for, Eunice Corporation, will lose all the patents she’s secured for them.

Her current work is in genetically modifying chickens. Security guards who are going to transport some of her chickens mention something regarding extraneous organic material or unusually large eggs. They don’t quite understand what any of that means or why they should be made aware of the possibility of these things being present with the chickens. One of them sneezes, which also brings up the point that “everyone” has been coming down with a cold at the company.

Sure enough, there is a giant egg that is considerably larger than the typical chicken egg. It begins hatching as one of the guards is looking on. Whatever hatched from the egg scratches the guy. Other chickens have been put onto a truck at a chicken farm called Purex. The guard at the Purex gate, who is also suffering from the same “cold” as one of the earlier drivers was suffering from, allows a truck out of the plant despite being told not to allow any trucks in and out. It turns out that another large egg with a different creature inside was part of that truck full of chickens.

What’s hatching from these giant eggs is a reptilian creature not too far off from a dinosaur.

Meanwhile, environmentalists are unhappy with Eunice Corporation. Stationed near some excavation equipment to guard it is a watchman who spends most of his time in his trailer getting ripped on booze. When some of those environmentalists were messing around with the equipment, the watchman springs into action with a rifle. He eventually finds a girl who wasn’t able to escape with the others. Her name is Ann Thrush, and she’s played by Jennifer Runyon, who gained most of her fame from being the pretty psychology student that Bill Murray helps cheat at the beginning of Ghostbusters, but she also appeared in the movie To All a Goodnight.

She actually gets a little bit lucky here because the watchman, Doc, calls Ann in as a trespasser, but the sheriff is a little too tied up with the death of the driver that previously had to pull over after leaving Purex and got killed by the dinosaur creature. So the sheriff says to hold Ann there at his trailer, and he’ll collect her when he is able. Lucky for her, again, that Doc is a drunk and passes out, more or less allowing her to escape.

One of the interesting things in these early bits of the movie, as we are introduced to several of our characters, is that we’re not only seeing where they are located and who they are, but we’re also seeing what percentage of infected cells per million they have. I think that is telling us about the infection that is revealing itself as cold symptoms. So that kind of adds a little bit of a ticking clock element as the movie continues because those percentages are going to start ticking upward.

The next day, Doc takes the sheriff to the camp where the environmentalists reside, trying to find Ann. The environmentalists are kind of a mix of hippies, cowboys, Native Americans, and lawyers. Despite seeing Ann, Doc says she isn’t there. The sheriff is irritated at Doc for wasting his time and for being a drunk, but he says he’ll deal with it his own way. She later meets with Doc to thank him for not turning her over to the authorities. They stick up a friendship.

Meanwhile, employees of Eunice Corporation are scrambling around trying to find the escaped creature from the egg that got out and killed that driver on the side of the road. One of the employees, Jesse Paloma, tells the people who are sent out looking for it that they’ll know what they are looking for when they see it. While he talks to those guys on the phone, his daughter sneaks out of the house to go for a joyride with her boyfriend and his friend. The girl and her boyfriend are killed by the small dinosaur, which is later identified as a Deinonychus, while the third person on this joyride is gravely injured by is able to crawl away.

In case you’re wondering, a Deinonychus is kind of similar to the Jurassic Park version of a Velociraptor.

Back in Washington, D.C., the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which, at the very beginning of the movie, we learned about Dr. Tiptree, is rather concerned about what Eunice is up to. They learn about the dead driver who got mauled and killed. What they take particular interest in are the results of some saliva found in his wound. That saliva is something that traces back to Eunice, which is supposed to be working on chickens, not something that can gut people.

On the road, Ann and Doc come across a Mexican guy who has been attacked by the Deinonychus and is slowly, and painfully, dying. Nearby, the two security guys from earlier are sent out to find the creature. They encounter it at first by seeing it in the headlights, only for it to circle back around and attack and kill them. Back at Eunice, Jesse Paloma arrives to give Dr. Tiptree (who is currently at 40% infection rate) a piece of his mind. He’s pretty pissed off about his daughter being mauled by something that he is pretty sure is one of her creations. She leads him into a part of the facility where he gets trapped because she plans to rid herself of his possible whistleblowing by unleashing another of her creations…

A motherfuckin’ T-Rex!

So yeah, it looks like Diane Ladd is up to her armpits in dinosaur experiments. I also find this very interesting that the Jurassic Park series has famously avoided the reality that most dinosaurs likely had feathers throughout its history. The raptors are not really what real velociraptors were like, and they were definitely ones that had feathers. The JP fans and producers will wave their hands of all this feather talk by talking about how the scientists spliced the dino DNA with frog DNA, so that’s why they don’t have feathers. And, here we are, on a much lower budget, and produced by Roger Corman, talking about a movie that brought dinosaurs back through the use of chicken eggs, tying a much closer relationship between dinosaurs and birds than the six Jurassic Park movies did.

Outside, at the excavation site that Doc guards, Ann’s group of environmentalists chained themselves to the equipment. Doc lets them have their fun, warning that he will cut them out with a blowtorch the next morning, that is, if the bobcats don’t get them first. Doc goes to the local diner that is just loaded with infected cells. Doc’s girlfriend is the waitress there. Don’t worry about this girlfriend because we will not see her again in this movie, and she’s easily forgotten by Doc once he falls for Ann. The cook is coughing all over the place, Clint Howard is there, and there’s a couple who are also sitting inside the diner. The woman of that couple is pregnant. Keep that in the back of your mind for later in the movie.

Back at the excavation site, the Deinonychus shows up and… he’s grown up pretty fast. Seeing that he is a growing boy, that also means he’s pretty hungry. Like, all the time. Maybe the environmentalist group is made up of a bunch of people who might not enjoy eating meat, they themselves are made of meat, and look pretty darn tasty to the Deinonychus.

So, for a movie that has been playing this pretty straight up to this point, I love this scene for being kinda silly. First, the Deinonychus just mosies on up to the environmentalists. He’s not coming in with a bunch of roaring or sound. He’s just stepping up to the all-you-can-eat buffet. Second, the leader of the environmentalists actually throws a peace sign and welcomes him as a “green brother” before getting his face eaten off. People are getting their guts ripped, their legs bitten off, and gnawed. It’s great.

Ann is the only one of the group to survive the attack. She was inside the cab of one of the machines. Doc returned from the diner in time to run the dinosaur off. He brings Ann inside his trailer so she can sleep off the attack. While she looks around at Doc’s stuff, realizing that there might just be more to this drunken watchman, the dino comes back to attack the trailer.

Elsewhere, Doc comes across the security guys’ trucks and claims to Dr. Tiptree that he’s found the creature to gain access to the main Eunice facility. He pulls a gun on her and forces her to lead him into her lab. She recognizes that Doc has the “fever” that everyone seems to be getting. She reveals that she designed this fever.

Before we learn more about what exactly Dr. Tiptree is doing at Eunice Corporation, we transition to the sheriff’s home, where his wife reveals that she, along with their daughters, has had a fever. He tells her to go back to bed, and he’ll bring her some breakfast. As he breaks open the eggs, green sludge comes out. One of the eggs has more than the green sludge, but a little reptilian creature.

Clint Howard returns to Purex, where he hears the chickens making a lot of noise and commotion. It seems as though another Deinonychus has hatched and is munching on chickens. The dinosaur also feasts on Clint Howard’s head.

The sheriff takes the little lizard to the town doctor. The creature has gotten three times as big as it was since morning. His clinic is loaded with patients, all suffering from fevers. Most of whom are women. At Eunice, Dr. Tiptree’s secretary, Susan, requests to leave early because she’s come down with a fever. Tiptree checks her out and has her lie down. Doc wants to know what’s wrong with her. Tiptree says if he’ll be patient, he’ll soon learn.

Tiptree talks to Susan about how her body is currently an evolutionary battleground. Inside her, things are changing. Doc soon discovers that Susan is exhibiting the traits of a woman in labor. Boy howdy was she in labor. She eventually pushes something out before dying. When Doc follows her to the backroom of her lab, he sees what she took from Susan… a giant, gooey, green egg embryo.

Government officials begin investigating what Eunice and Tiptree are up to. DARPA has correctly come to the conclusion that it’s a virus that’s spreading. DARPA takes control and closes off Climax, New Mexico, where the virus has its ground zero. Beyond the quarantine, they are also killing any infected people on sight. That couple that was at the diner earlier? The soldiers in biohazard outfits take her away and kill her husband.

Tiptree reveals her master plan to Doc. You see, she believes Earth was never meant for humans. It was intended for the dinosaurs. She feels guilty for some of the bio-weaponry she created previously for the government. Her plan was to create a virus that would impregnate women with eggs that would hatch dinosaurs. Then, after giving “birth” to the eggs, the women would ultimately succumb to the virus and die. Once the female population dies off, humanity would be incapable of reproducing and would either die off naturally or be eaten by the dinosaurs the women birthed. Humanity would be gone, and the Earth would basically reset to what it was tens of millions of years ago.

In town, the sheriff knows the Deinonychus is in town and goes to confront it. He is able to kill the large Deinonychus that hatched first, but not before he’s mortally wounded. While it kinda sucks that the sheriff has to die, especially since we know his wife and daughters are doomed as well, he does go out like a badass. He shoots the Deinonychus in the chest, basically ensuring its death, but as he hovers over it to put one more bullet in its head, the dino gets a claw through the sheriff’s guts.

DARPA’s makeshift think tank figures out that the entirety of the female population of Earth would be dead in six months, barring any kind of serum/cure for Tiptree’s virus. We learn that Eunice has been working on artificial wombs for years now. In time, they could breed a new batch of females that would save the human race. DARPA’s head, Fallon, comes up with a plan… Social engineering, selective breeding programs, bunkering the top males to be the progenitors of the future of humanity, and, you know what? Perhaps this will breed a better, stronger human race.

It’s amazing how fast humanity just dives right into Nazi shit when faced with a problem, isn’t it?

While DARPA makes its plans, Doc has his own plan. He wants to know if there’s a cure. If she isn’t going to give over the information about where her cure is willingly, he’ll start shooting her precious dinosaur eggs. She relents, revealing there is a cure and gets it for him. However, she ends up leading him to the T. Rex. As the T. Rex chases after Doc, Tiptree realizes her time has come, and she goes into labor, giving us the greatest gift of them all: Three-time Academy Award-nominated Diane Ladd giving birth to a dinosaur in a Roger Corman movie.

Seriously… Knowing that an actress of Diane Ladd’s caliber was going out giving birth to a dinosaur egg in a Roger Corman movie was so great, it overshadowed the thing I should have been more excited about – Doc having to escape a badass Tyrannosaurus Rex! But do you know why this overshadows this? Because while the other women are laying eggs, Diane Ladd rips open her own stomach and gets to see her baby dino’s face before she dies.

Hell yeah!

Alright, now that she’s gone, the T. Rex has gotten out of the Eunice place because it head-butted its way through the wall. Doc returns to his trailer to find Ann infected with the fever. The good news, though, he has that cure from Tiptree. Doc tells Ann about all he’s learned. Realizing she has nothing to lose, Doc injects the serum into her. While they take it so they can live, the soldiers go into the town doctor’s clinic and kill everyone in there, including the doctor himself. Ann and Doc use the excavation equipment so she can escape and for him to fight the T. Rex. That is also pretty awesome. Ann even turns back to save Doc when the T. Rex tips his claw doohickey over. She gets some good licks in on the T. Rex but knocks herself out from the impacts of her crashing her construction equipment into the T. Rex, causing Doc to get into her claw doohickey and eventually gut the T. Rex, killing it.

Now, you might think we’re headed for a happy ending. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Doc gets the military on his radio. He tells them where they are, and when they arrive, they shoot Doc dead. They torch his trailer, killing Ann and destroying the only jar of the antidote to the virus as the place goes up in flames.

After last week’s debacle of a movie that has so much to say about it, but basically no way to actually parse what the plot is, it’s such a relief to be back to a movie that just has a simple to follow plot featuring a mad scientist, some dinosaurs, and a virus that makes women give birth to dinosaur eggs. Look, simplicity matters. The greatness of Roger Corman shines through once again. Yeah, I know he didn’t direct this movie, but, as a producer, Corman still had a great deal of say over anything he did after his directing career was over.

Carnosaur is a great example of the types of early 90s video store stuff. The only difference here was that it got a release into theaters because of all the dino mania surrounding the upcoming Jurassic Park release. It even got into theaters before the movie that would forever change dinosaur movies, and how we think of dinosaurs in popular entertainment forevermore (sans the feathers of real dinosaurs).

Honestly, I think the one thing you can say, Carnosaur has a legacy for is that it’s the last movie made about dinosaurs in the old way. This was the way that, for 40 years up to 1993, was how you made these types of movies. If you didn’t make a dinosaur movie with stop motion animation, you made it like how Carnosaur was made. This was the final movie featuring dinosaurs from Corman’s day before Spielberg changed the game forever.

Yes, Carnosaur has sequels, and yes, we will be looking at those down the line, but those have a completely different vibe than this one and look completely outdated because Jurassic Park changed so much about how movies were made (not just the dinosaur movies).

I also think the one thing about this movie that separates it from so many other cheap-o, direct-to-video, or direct-to-cable movies that Corman would have been making at the time is that it’s clear this movie has source material. This isn’t just some crazy guy’s original script. I have no idea what the exact plot of the original book is, but it does feel like Carnosaur (the movie) has ideas that came from something that existed before it. It feels like there is a plotline to take some idea that there is a mad plot to bring dinosaurs back through DNA and chickens. Now, the movie certainly has a version of environmentalism that is perverted by a mad scientist who wants to give Earth back to something she thinks is “better” than humanity. That feels of its time that likely would not be in the book, but, like I said, I don’t know.

What I do know is that I very much liked Carnosaur. I stand with Gene Siskel, God rest his soul. Everything from Diane Ladd giving a really pretty good performance to the dinosaurs looking pretty good through solid practical effects to the bleak ending to the crazy ass plot of impregnating women with eggs that will hatch dinosaurs and leading to the end of humanity. No notes, 10 out of 10.

Next time, we have a horror movie that has some cult fandom around it. You will occasionally see someone walking down the street or talking in a YouTube video wearing a shirt featuring the poster art for this movie. So, I think it’s something we should take a look at for ourselves to see if it does live up to some of that cult classic acclaim. Come on back next Friday for a review of 1980’s The Unseen.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got my own baby to push out after eating a shit ton of Taco Bell earlier.