It’s time to go back to the Jurassic Era for another dino-rific review at B-Movie Enema!

1993’s Carnosaur was a massive hit. Okay, well, maybe not as big as Jurassic Park, but still, it was a significant hit for Roger Corman’s New Horizons production company. To say that it was riding the coattails of JP is not even facetious. It had to have. Both were based on books and featured dinosaurs. One was getting a ton of attention because that Spielberg guy was directing it. Sure, it was riding coattails, but it worked. The movie made a modest amount of money at the box office and was popular on VHS and cable television.

So, two years later, New Horizons was at it again with Carnosaur 2, which is the movie we’re going to be talking about this week. Because the sequel was greenlit while the first was in production, John Carl Buechler, the effects artist who made the dinosaurs in the first film, could save what he made and take care of it while they got the script and pre-production stuff off the ground. Michael Palmer wrote a script and took a lot of inspiration from Corman acolyte James Cameron’s Aliens plot. Corman tapped director Louis Morneau, who, if we’re being honest here, is mostly known for making sequels and pretty bad movies like The Hitcher II: I’ve Been Waiting, Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead, and the terrible Bats.

While this may feel a little rushed into production, and it sort of was, there were some decent marks handed to some of the cast. The film stars John Savage and Cliff DeYoung. Savage appeared in some pretty significant late 70s movies like 1978’s Best Picture Oscar winner The Deer Hunter and 1979’s big-budget film adaptation of the musical Hair. Cliff DeYoung was in lots of flicks, particularly in the 80s and 90s, like The Hunger, F/X, Flight of the Navigator, Glory, Dr. Giggles, and The Craft. He was also Brad Majors in the criminally underrated Shock Treatment, the 1981 sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

He also famously got blown up by Diane Wiest in 1983’s Independence Day.

Don Stroud also appears in Carnosaur 2. Stroud has a ton of credits in film and television as mostly a character actor. Maybe most significantly for me, he was Colonel Heller in the criminally underrated 1989 James Bond flick Licence to Kill. Though I guess he’s maybe a little better known for being Father Bolen in The Amityville Horror. Savage, Stroud, and DeYoung are all still working today.

So, let’s see how Carnosaur 2 nearly fucked that up for them!

During the credits, we get to see some of the eggs and stuff open up, very likely pulled directly from the original film. However, I am a tad curious how there is a sequel. It seemed pretty bleak that this virus was going to spread and, eventually, wipe out humanity. That said, this movie begins out in the desert in some sort of facility that has seen better days. A guy is checking out various equipment that is barely functioning. He hears sounds that he can’t quite parse, but soon discovers he’s being stalked by something. That something attacks and kills him.

Elsewhere, two teenage boys are sneaking around the facility and up to no good. The kid has a device that breaks into doors that have those fancy keypads. The kid must have borrowed it from John Connor after he was done with it in Terminator 2. We find out that this facility is a nuclear waste plant. What the kid, named Jesse, is trying to steal is dynamite. While he and his friend are taking that dynamite, another worker catches him. That worker goes kind of easy on Jesse. He understands that this kid is an orphan and, I dunno, probably had a bummer of a life.

It’s possible his parents were eaten by dinosaurs during the events of Carnosaur 1. It’s also entirely possible that what happened in that movie didn’t happen in this movie’s universe. No one has mentioned anything in these early moments about the end of humanity from giving birth to dinos. I mean there’s not even a “Hey, remember when my sister almost died when we learned she had literal dinosaur eggs in her tummy and was about to birth them? That sure was a crazy week, wasn’t it?” Never mind any of that business of the first movie. It’s much more useful to know that Jesse is told by a forklift operator that there’s a button on the forklift controls that opens an automatic door with a pit that goes hundreds of feet into the ground.

Later that night, some sort of animal starts ripping through everyone in the facility, killing them all, but leaving Jesse as the sole survivor.

This movie is barely 10 minutes old, and not only is this a sequel to a movie that was put out to capitalize on the whole Jurassic Park craze for dinosaurs, as well as being greatly inspired by Aliens with the whole sole survivor thing at a facility, but we get a little Predator with the way the dinosaurs hide in shadows and click when they make noises and we get some T2 with the kid being something of a hacker who can get in through doors with his little keycard reader device. Sometimes a movie can exist totally on pastiche like this. That’s fun and can at least tip its cap at the fans of those other movies it borrows ideas from. What the movie needs to make sure to do as well is to have an identity of its own. That’s really what I’ll have to base this movie on over the next 80 minutes.

Once communications are lost with the nuclear waste facility, the Department of Defense calls in a team to investigate. We meet our team: Jack Reed (Savage), Monk (Rick Dean, who is introduced by telling their female team member about a woman he was railing while also cheating on his wife), Sarah (Arabella Holzbog, the member of the team having to hear Monk’s story), and Moses (Migguel A. Nunez of The Return of the Living Dead fame). This group’s boss is the eye-patch-wearin’ Ben Kahane (Stroud). He’s sending his team out under the orders of Major Tom McQuade (DeYoung). McQuade gives the team the reason why they are being asked to go into the facility. The place is called the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository. It runs with very sophisticated computer systems. It’s had a little bit of trouble getting things online, and now that communications have been totally lost, they had to call in the first team available to assist. It seems as though Kahane’s team is a mercenary or private security team because McQuade calls them civilians, and the facility does not allow for outside civilians to enter it. But McQuade says they are on a tight timetable and needed to hire them.

The point is: this crew is your standard band of misfits, like we’ve seen in Xtro 3 or the aforementioned Aliens and Predator.

One thing that is also clear is that they do not like taking orders from McQuade and see him as a jackass. They might be onto something too. When the chopper closes in on the facility, they can’t connect with anyone on the radio. There seems to be signal interference. McQuade doesn’t seem all that worried about it. He wants to land anyway. He might even be hurriedly wanting to get inside.

McQuade orders Monk, Sarah, and Jack to search the facility while he, Moses, and Kahane go check out the control room. The first team is surprised and, frankly, spooked by the amount of blood in the mess hall, where we previously saw the attack. They also find Jesse in total shock and catatonic. Moses realizes that the system is pretty messed up and will take a while to get back online.

Kahane confronts McQuade because it looks pretty dang certain that there’s more than a problem with the computer system at the facility. Where are all the people who work there? Why is everything in the condition it’s in? What’s so important about this place?

Jack tells Kahane that the mess hall is absolutely trashed. There’s blood everywhere. There is no one else here except this team. Something tore this place and everyone in it up. It seems Jesse is the lone survivor.

The team wants no part of this mission. They want to leave immediately, but McQuade says that they have a mission and he’s in control until they get orders from higher up that say otherwise. McQuade even threatens the chopper pilot, who seems to already directly report to him, Joanne Galloway, that she will never fly again if she extracts them. So McQuade gets his way and orders everyone back to work while Galloway looks after the catatonic Jesse.

In the control room, McQuade sees something on the monitors that is labeled “Dangerous.” Later, Jack goes to see Jesse. He sees that the kid’s backpack has a Dodgers patch on it. He tells the unresponsive Jesse that he had a son who used to be a Dodgers fan. Apparently, Jack, who was hungover the first time we saw him in this movie, has a dead kid for a son. He takes special interest in Jesse.

It’s a real gender-swapped Ripley/Newt situation, am I right? Thanks for injecting some bullshit message into your woke dinosaur movie, 1995! Let me guess, McQuade is going to be some Marty Stu too, right? Ugh… I’m so tired of these movies pushing their agendas and messages with their DEI hires!

Awwww shit. There’s even a black guy in this movie! Fuck!

See how dumb this type of critique is, readers? Just… ugh. Anyway, I went off and did a little performative rage baiting because I’m not gonna lie… Carnosaur 2 kind of sucks. We’re through the first act of this movie, and there’s little to nothing to write home about, review, or even discuss. Is the acting good? Eh, I suppose, simply based on what these guys were given to say. Do we already know that there are dinosaurs in this movie? Well, duh… the movie is called Carnosaur 2. Are we already aware that Cliff DeYoung is the bad guy? Well, yeah. He is Cliff DeYoung.

These characters are constantly needling and belittling each other. They often just spout inappropriate shit. Okay, so maybe Jack is a decent dude, but it’s a lot of banter and testosterone-induced bullshit falling out of most of these characters’ mouths. Also, no fuckin’ dinosaurs! Where are they at? I mean, they killed an entire facility without actually seeing them. In the first movie, we saw dinosaurs fairly quickly and early. And when they weren’t on screen, the movie was at least kind of engaging and interesting. There was that whole infection rate shown on screen. I was invested!

But here, we have McQuade bossing people around, characters saying stupid shit, and not taking anything seriously when it’s pretty fucking obvious this facility is a death warehouse, and dinosaurs attack from off-screen.

Speaking of “off screen,” the team goes into a part of the facility that McQuade said was strictly off limits to them. However, they still go anyway when Kahane says his team was brought in so they can help with fixing the place and cleaning it up, so they should be allowed to do what they were hired to do. That leads to Sarah finding a giant tooth. Off to the side, Kahane is attacked when a dinosaur claw comes up from off-screen and grabs him. He’s dragged around until he’s finally killed… off screen.

Moses hears the scene over the headset and tries to get information about what is going on. Jesse knows exactly what’s happening and tries running away, mumbling about how “they’re not gonna make it.” As Joanne follows Jesse, Moses shifts his control room chair just a little bit to his left and is immediately face to face with a raptor.

Now… sigh. If you look at that picture above, you might think, “Oh, so that took a few moments for the dinosaur to basically enter the room and approach Moses, right?” Nope. He was just there when Moses turned his chair about 45 degrees to the left. Was the raptor in the room the whole time? If so, where was it? This isn’t quite like the original Alien when the xenomorph was tucked into a nook in the cockpit so it could reach out in one of the great jump scares in horror history and scare Sigourney Weaver. There aren’t really many nooks and crannies to hide a dinosaur of this size. It was just there… the whole time. Moses did not see it in his peripheral vision. Neither Jesse nor Joanne saw it when they were further back in the room with a wider vision of the entire layout of the control room. It just showed up.

This scene isn’t a total loss, though. The raptor swipes at Moses’ face, and then Moses thinks he’s gonna box this beast. That’s pretty funny. I like the idea of a guy trying to box a dinosaur. It’s kind of like Friday the 13th Part VIII when that one kid wanted to box Jason Voorhees until Jason literally knocked his block off. Alas, Carnosaur II is no Friday the 13th Part VIII.

Jesus. I can’t believe I just typed that sentence. What has become of my life?

At least the characters get the right idea. After seeing a literal fucking dinosaur bitch slap Moses around before eating his face off, Joanne is like, “Yeah, nah… I’m getting the fuck out of here.” She gets into the chopper and fires it up with the plan to get everyone out of there. The rest of the crew there has also gotten the right idea after seeing Kahane killed by a dinosaur, which I have to assume they saw with their own eyes. Unfortunately, there’s a raptor waiting in the chopper with Joanne, and it attacks her, causing her to lift the chopper off the ground enough to then make her crash.

Naturally, the chopper then explodes.

I did complain about not seeing dinosaurs for over 30 minutes into this movie that advertises dinosaurs right on its own VHS box and poster. Now it’s going to sound like I’m complaining about how quickly this next portion of the movie is going to move. In the span of about five minutes, three characters are killed in three different locations in and around the facility by three different dinosaurs. If this happened earlier in the movie as the big launching point of the movie, I’d probably dig it a little more, but this sequence feels like it’s trying to make up for a lack of dinosaur action earlier in the movie.

I cannot reiterate this enough… This is CARNOSAUR 2. Even if you didn’t see the first movie, or you didn’t see the cover of the box at your local video store, or you didn’t see any kind of advertisement or poster, you should already know there are dinosaurs. Why hold it off this long to see them? If you saw the first one, then you’d know what to expect. All this mystery and secretive posturing around what this facility has lurking about in the shadows isn’t necessary. We should have gotten to actually seeing the dinosaurs long before this.

But… I digress… I guess.

McQuade does know something was off about this place. He explains there was a facility next door that was doing some funky shit with fossilized DNA. They were testing on it and cloning dinosaurs. McQuade sent in a team and believed they killed all of them, but apparently missed a few. As they were hunting the dinosaurs, McQuade’s team stumbled upon a nest of dinosaur eggs. They did what seemed to be the best possible idea… stashed them at this nuclear waste facility. McQuade thought they were frozen and unable to survive or hatch, but, apparently, they hatched anyway.

Jesse helps hack the systems to get a lay of the facility. He remembers the dynamite he was trying to steal at the start of the movie. McQuade is none too pleased with the idea of getting the dynamite and blowing the place, and the dinosaurs, to kingdom come. Jack and Monk go to get that dynamite to blow up the dinosaurs, but they find something kind of creepy. It appears the dinosaurs have stashed a bunch of junk into one of the hallways to build something of a wall.

Surprisingly, to no one at all, Cliff DeYoung is sinister. He refuses to let Jack and Monk blow the facility up with the dynamite. So, he gets into the computer system and tries locking them in the storage room. He tells them that as soon as they get back with an EVAC team, they’ll be saved. Jack and Monk don’t wait around for that shit and just bust their way out of the room.

As Jack sets the dynamite to blow, McQuade makes his way to our heroes and tries beating them up with a metal rod. Jack and McQuade hear a warning about evacuating the facility due to a containment breach. Jack tries to get information from McQuade, but he won’t tell them anything. Monk is attacked by a raptor but is saved by Jack, and they return to the control center with McQuade. Finally, McQuade lets it be known that this is a facility that stores the weapons-grade plutonium taken out of decommissioned nuclear missiles. They also have dinosaurs here. So… Nuclear dinosaurs sounds like the start of an 80s cartoon show, and I’m kinda here for that.

But everything else in this movie sucks.

I think the main problem now for the final bit of this movie to work out is trying to stop the facility from blowing up. Either by dinosaurs or some kind of leak, there’s a new tension starting to build. Whatever is causing the problem, it might lead to the nuclear warheads being stored here exploding. Jesse comes up with the idea of crashing the entire system, including the backup system for safety protocols. He figures that if any redundant safety protocols crash, somebody has to notice. Then, they’ll send help, and they can use that for evacuation. Jack likes this idea and comes up with the plan to blow the facility up after they are evacuated to trap the dinosaurs underground.

As Jesse tells Jack his life story about not being able to do anything but hide from the dinosaurs when everyone else was killed, he Deus Ex Machinas his way into getting into the security override system he was trying to hack into just a couple of scenes prior to this. He even says, “I don’t know… I must have accidentally hit something with my hand.” His plan is put into motion, but they need to get to the surface while the various bunches of dynamite hold the raptors on the lower levels. They think they are making their way away from the dinosaurs, but Sarah is attacked by a raptor on top of the elevator our heroes are in, and she’s killed.

With the raptor using the top of the elevator to snatch Sarah, that causes the elevator cables to snap, forcing Jesse, Jack, McQuade, and Monk to work their way back up through the section of the facility loaded with raptors. They kind of run into their own traps for the raptors by setting off the tripwires that are rigged to blow the dynamite. Monk is injured. McQuade and Monk stay behind to give Jesse and Jack time to get away and sacrifice themselves to blow up a raptor. Another tripwire causes Jack to fall off a catwalk.

Jack is injured but not dead. Jesse gets through the facility and gets to the surface. There is an evacuation team waiting on the surface. Jesse tells the EVAC team that Jack is still inside, but they aren’t willing to save him due to, you know, the place about to go nuclear in a few minutes. Jesse re-enters the facility to save Jack, who has broken ribs. On their way out, they run into a T-Rex, but they are able to get into an elevator and up to the surface just in time to be saved by the EVAC team. Jesse has to run back to get the remote to blow the place up, but the T-Rex gets out of the facility and starts eating guys.

But… remember earlier that the forklift operator told Jesse about the special button that opens a door to a bottomless pit? Well, it’s time for that to come into play. Nothing is more exciting than seeing a slow-moving T-Rex face off against a slower-moving forklift.

Jesse uses the forklift to push the T-Rex back… in a four-minute sequence of T-Rex vs. forklift. I shit you not. This scene between Jesse driving the forklift and the T-Rex trying to kill the forklift is a FOUR-MINUTE SCENE. The only way for this to be more boring and unexciting is if the forklift were trying to flip a giant tortoise over onto its back. Remember, the facility was going to blow up… soon!

In fact, the movie told us when Jesse went back in to get Jack that the place was going to melt down in seven minutes. Jesse had to go into the facility. Then he had to find Jack. He had to help Jack with his broken ribs. They then had to run all the way the fuck over there to an elevator, while evading a T-Rex, and get into an elevator. An elevator, I might add, is some sort of freight elevator, which is going to be slow. They ride the elevator up to be saved by the EVAC guys. Then the T-Rex busts out of the facility to eat a guy. The T-Rex and Jess have that four-minute sumo match until the T-Rex is finally knocked into the bottomless pit.

The whole sequence of events I just detailed above started at the 67-minute mark of this movie. Nine minutes later, the T-Rex is dumped on his ass into that pit. THEN(!) the movie has the audacity to tell us that the containment failure is going to take place in T-minus two minutes. That was the longest five minutes in the history of, well… history.

But whatever. Jesse is able to join Jack on the chopper, and they ride off as the facility goes boom.

I honestly have nothing else to say about this. The movie is ass. The first one had the fun of Diane Ladd being an evil scientist lady who gives birth to a dinosaur. It also had Clint Howard. This movie is desperately missing a Clint Howard presence. Technically, there is nothing truly incompetent about this movie. It’s shot as well as it could be. It’s directed fine, I guess. There is some wonky acting, but I blame the script being kind of hokey. The sum of the parts, though, is, like, in the negative numbers. The movie is boooooorrrrrrriing. You can get away with a whole hell of a lot if the movie isn’t boring. Shitty acting? Well, this movie isn’t boring, so it’s worth a watch. A monster that is ass? Well, are the kills at least kinda fun?

Simply put, Carnosaur 2 is slowly pushed over into a bottomless pit by its own slow-ass forklift named Boring.

I don’t know if that even makes sense, but I don’t care. It’s time to get the hell out of here and look to the horizon for, hopefully, a better movie. Next week, we return to the land of New Zealand for another Kiwi delight. Join me as we do zombies down under style with 1984’s Death Warmed Up.