The Batman (2022) – Review

Since 1939 the world has seen many different versions of Batman, from the campy classic television series starring Adam West to the Gothic fairy tale of Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, but while Warner Bros. has tried their best to integrate the Dark Knight in the DC Extended Universe and it has not quite panned out yet, and that brings us to the latest incarnation starring Robert Pattinson as The Batman.

In 2005 Christopher Nolan gave the world a more grounded version of the Caped Crusader, a hero existing in a distinctly grittier Gotham City than what had appeared in previous incarnations, but then along comes writer/director Matt Reeves whose own take on Batman is almost as if he looked at Batman Begins and said, “You think that is dark and gritty, well hold my beer.” But exactly how much darker and grittier is this entry? Well, this particular outing could be best compared to David Fincher’s Se7en with its grim and twisted mystery revolving around Batman trying to solve a series of graphic murders all the while trying to figure out his own identity.

 

Dark and gritty or just in need of a bubble bath?

Matt Reeves’ The Batman owes a lot to such Batman comics as The Long Halloween and Hush and with it being the early days of Batman’s (Robert Pattinson) career it also feels like an extended edition of Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One and with an almost three-hour running time it really gets into the meat of Batman’s relationships with James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) and Catwoman/Selina Kyle(Zoë Kravitz), who in this version has a very complicated relationship with mob boss Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), but not only do we get such great Batman villains as Catwoman and The Riddler we are also treated to a rather unique interpretation of The Penguin (Collin Farrell) who in this film is a lower-tier crime boss with his own agenda, and it should be noted that at no point does he commit a bird-related crime.

 

He doesn’t even carry a tricked-out umbrella.

While this movie doesn’t disappoint when it comes to providing truly spectacular action set-pieces, the Batmobile chase in this film is a real showstopper, this story is more about solving a larger mystery and Batman finding his true role as vigilante or hero. The movie begins two years into Batman’s mission to clean up Gotham City but his nightly punch-ups with random street thugs have to be put on hold when a series of high-profile murders grab the headlines with a mysterious figure calling himself The Riddler (Paul Dano), a deranged individual who has possibly watched too many of the Saw movies, is targeting high profile citizens of Gotham. With James Gordon at his side, who is the one police officer not wanting to lock up the masked vigilante, they dive deep into the underbelly of Gotham City only to discover that the rich and powerful are neck-deep in murdered and corruption. Lucky for Batman, his investigation causes him to repeatedly run into the mysterious Selina Kyle a woman who could either save or break this burgeoning Batman.

 

I hope these two crazy kids can work things out.

While the film’s criminal plotline looks like a mash-up of David Fincher’s Se7en and Zodiac the heart of the story is what makes Batman tick and with his identity as “Vengeance” being growled throughout the alleyways of Gotham City as he clearly hasn’t quite figured out his own identity yet, and his relationship with Alfred Pennyworth (Andy Serkis) is also little strained and has not yet become that father/son relationship we are all familiar with. It’s in this area where the film really shines as the story never shies away from its core goal of showing Bruce Wayne as a deeply messed up individual who has yet to become “The World's Greatest Detective” and his growth throughout the course of this movie is something we haven’t really seen portrayed on film before, at least not to this degree. With this entry, Matt Reeves may have given us the darkest version of Batman to make its way to the big screen but that's not what makes this film special, it was his decision to focus on the psychological aspects of the characters over all of the Bat-Gadgets and goofy criminals found in previous versions and this is what makes this one special, basically, if this isn't the definitive Batman movie to date it's pretty damn close.

Barbarian Queen II: The Empress Strikes Back (1990) – Review

One must admire a low budget sword and sorcery movie for having the balls to use a subtitle that referenced a certain classic Star Wars sequel but having watched the film that’s about all I can admire of it, and as sequels go this one barely qualifies as such, and the sole purpose for its existence was in the raking in of Blockbuster rental sales from teenagers who were hard up for tits and ass.

Despite the film’s moniker of Barbarian Queen II, there is nothing connecting this and 1985’s Barbarian Queen other than both films starring model turned B-movie queen Lana Clarkson, in this outing the central character is Princess Athalia (Lana Clarkson) who doesn’t want to become a lady, despite her handmaiden’s insistence on her wearing ladylike attire and having proper royal grooming, all so that she can be married off for strategic advantages. So, what we have here is your typical "I don't want" Disney Princess trope where we have a young woman who wants to escape their old life for “Something more” but in this case, we will definitely be seeing a lot more nudity than what we got with the likes of Ariel or Belle.

 

“Someday my prince will cum.”

After learning of the supposed death of Athalia’s father King Tico, presumable in battle, we are introduced to the film’s primary villain Ankaris (Alejandro Bracho), who was the court’s chief strategist and obviously evil asshat, but has now taken this opportunity to seize the throne and demand that Athalia reveal to him the secret of the sceptre, a bit of royal magic that was entrusted to her and her alone. As there is no proof of her father’s death, she refuses to hand over the sceptre and accuses Ankaris of simply planning to loot the treasury and install his cronies into positions of power, but her protestations simply land her in the palace dungeon. Which begs the question, “Was the entire court already corrupt, so much so that not one person would object to the Princess being imprisoned?” Athalia is aided by Anakari’s daughter Tamis (Cecilia Tijerina) in escaping the dungeon but she’s just as evil as her dad and this was simply a ploy to get access to the sceptre.

 

“By the power of Grayskull!”

This villainous plot is foiled, and the sceptre is once again safe from Ankaris’s lust for power, but Athalia is sentenced to death, despite Tamis’ protestations that she was promised Athalia would be her slave, lucky for us the guards taking Athalia to the gallows are all deaf and have no peripheral vision and she is easily able to escape. While fleeing Ankaris’s men Athalia is saved by a passing thief named Zarla (Rebecca Wood) and she is taken to meet her band of forest-dwelling warriors that consist of, surprise surprise, mostly gorgeous women and who are all plotting to overthrow the corrupt kingdom, all they need is a new leader. I wonder who that could be? Lucky for us, all that Athalia has to do to prove her worth is beat their current leader in some impromptu mud wrestling and to be honest, I think most political discussions could be improved with this technique. Faster than you can say “Robin Hood” Athalia and her buxom band of outlaws are thwarting rape and robbery as they move their way up to overthrow Ankaris.

 

Athalia, Princess of Thieves.

Not only is Barbarian Queen II not a proper sequel it’s more a gender-flipped version of Robin Hood than anything else, with Athalia and her merry band laying ambushes for Ankaris’s soldiers and rescuing peasants from rape and murder, and this film even has a Sherriff of Nottingham equivalent in the form of Ankaris’s primary henchman Hofrax (Roger Cudney) but the actor here is clearly no Alan Rickman and like the rest of the cast no expense was spared in finding the worst actors in the industry and every line delivery is as wooden as their swords – how much of this is due to bad dubbing you be the judge – and the fighting itself is about as convincing as a couple of six-year-olds battling it out on the playground with plastic lightsabres. Sadly, what makes this film a real chore is that even at a meagre 70-minute running time it’s still a chore to get through as the plot unfolds at a lethargic pace and as all the characters are fairly unlikable it’s hard to get emotionally attached to anything, in fact, the only character I found remotely interesting was the evil spoiled brat Tamis who seemed to be the only person having a fun time in this poor excuse for a movie.

 

“I demand my bedtime be pushed back to 10:00 pm.”

We are also forced to suffer through a terrible romance between Athalia and her old suitor Aurion (Greg Wrangler), who is now betrothed to Tamis the bratty teen princess, and if there was ever a perfect example of “negative screen chemistry” this would be it, as every moment on screen with this pair is excruciatingly painful to watch. That the character of Aurion is given some kind of redemptive arc here is just such bullshit as he went along with the villain’s plans simply because Athalia had made it clear in the past that she would never marry him, and that makes him an even worse person in my book than that of the moustache-twirling head villain. But speaking of villainy, at one point in the film Athalia is captured again and Lana Clarkson ends up strapped to a torture rack, topless, just as she was in the original Barbarian Queen movie.

 

Was this something Lana Clarkson puts in all her contracts?

Stray Observations:

• The king falls in battle and the court’s chief strategist declares “The power is now mine by right, does anyone dispute this?” But what “right” is this exactly? I know this is a fantasy film but when would the crown go to a military advisor and not someone in the royal bloodline? His simply declaring a coupe after the King’s death would have made more sense.
• I was quite impressed to see the woodland rebel gleefully looting a dead soldier of weapons and jewelry, this pragmatic act is often missed when depicting this time period.
• This band of rebels was formed to overthrow the corrupt kingdom but Athalia Ankaris had barely been in charge for a day. Was King Tico corrupt as well, or was he blind to the machinations of his underlings?
• Athalia berates Aurion who wants to be king one day stating, “I was born to power I don’t need it like you do?” Is she saying you can only rule if you were born to it? That’s not a very inspiring comment coming from the supposed leader of a band of rebels.
• The wood-dwelling rebels look more like fur-bikini-clad cave girls from something like One Million B.C. rather than Robin Hood’s Merry Men.
• Athalia and her band of Merry Women sneak into the castle grounds dressed in monk habits much as Errol Fynn and his men did in The Adventures of Robin Hood.
• This is a fantasy world where barrels of water are strategically placed so that can be overturned at the opportune moment to provide mud for women to wrestle in.

 

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings was definitely lacking in that area.

Unless you are hard up for gratuitous amounts of nudity there isn’t much here to make this film worth recommending, not even to even fans of bad movies because it never quite reaches the level of “so bad it’s good” and the badly choreographed fights, horrible acting, terrible attempts at humour - during a rape scene, a peasant woman is told to “Take it like a man” and I have no idea what the fuck that was supposed to mean – and it never overcomes the film’s meandering plot, which seemed to endlessly circle like a persistent turd that refuses to be flushed. Then to add insult to injury there is a complete lack of a point behind the magic sceptre, which the villains spend much of the film trying to find out its secrets, but when the heroes win Athalia tells the cheering masses that true magic is in trusting those that rule and then she simply chucks the sceptre to the crowd below. Seriously, we never get to see this magical MacGuffin in action and its complete pointlessness pretty much sums up this movie.  All I'm saying is that “I have the power of love and trust!” does not have the same ring as “By the power of Grayskull.”

 

"Is it too late to see if She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is available?"

It’s a fact that bad low budget Sword & Sorcery films are a dime a dozen but Barbarian Queen II: The Empress Strikes Back is even harder to sit through than most of those and it's not the cheap production design and shallow talent pool that makes this one particularly bad, what causes this to be an embarrassment entry in the genre can be summed up by the scene where the villainous Holfax tears off Athalia’s bodice, revealing her naked and heaving bosom, and bizarrely declares “What an awesomely disgusting sight” which is a fair measure as to how tonally deaf and terrible this movie was and leaves one pondering “Who wrote this shit?” The original Barbarian Queen was a bad movie, but this “sequel” makes that one look like a work of genius.

Dinosaur (2000) – Review

Back in the late 80s, stop-motion artist Phil Tippett recommended to director Paul Verhoeven a "dinosaur picture" that would take a more naturalistic approach to the subject matter, none of that talking dinosaur nonsense found in The Land Before Time, but years later, with Disney Studios now attached, things took a bit a departure from that original vision.

What is interesting to note is that the Tippett and Verhoeven version was going to be a live-action movie with the use of stop motion animation techniques such as puppets, scale models and miniatures to create the prehistoric world – which makes sense considering this plan was originally put together almost a decade before Jurassic Park and CGI dinosaurs changed the industry – but once those two departed the project and Disney became involved the shift towards animation was almost a foregone conclusion. With Jurassic Park proving what could be done with a computer Dinosaurs was greenlit by Disney CEO Michael Eisner but with one even bigger change than simply making it a live-action movie and that would be, on the insistence of Eisner, of having the dinosaurs talk, which made things a bit tricky as the primary character was a duck-billed Iguanodon and those creatures didn’t have lips.

 

You can’t have a proper love story without lips.

Walt Disney’s Dinosaurs tells the story of a young Iguanodon named Aladar (D.B. Sweeney) who was raised by a kindly family of lemurs after his egg was stolen post-Carnotaurus attack that had driven his herd away. This plot may seem a little familiar as it’s basically that of Tarzan of the Apes only in this case it would be a several ton-sized dinosaur and not an ape-man who would be the central character.  Now, we do get some fun stuff with the gruff but understanding patriarch Yar (Ossie Davis) and his daughter Plio (Alfre Woodard) who decides to raise him alongside her daughter Suri (Alfre Woodard), despite Yar's initial objections. We also get some comic relief from Zini (Max Casella) who is a rather unsuccessful lemur when it comes to finding a mate, sadly, not getting laid is the least of their problems as a meteor hits and turns their island into a wasteland as its shockwave forces Aladar and Yar's family flee across the sea to the mainland.

 

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Extinction.

The rest of the film follows the broad strokes of Don Bluth’s The Land Before Time with Aladar and his extended family joining a multi-species herd of dinosaur refugees that are heading for the communal Nesting Grounds, all the while being pursued by nasty predators and lack of food, but that isn’t the only conflict in this movie as Aladar must also deal with the herd’s brutish leader, a bully of an Iguanodon named Kron (Samuel E. Wright) whose philosophy is clearly that of only the strong deserve to survive, which sets him into conflict with Aladar because this attitude means leaving behind an old Styracosaurus named Eema (Della Reese), her pet Ankylosaurus Url and her equally elderly friend Baylene (Joan Plowright), the only Brachiosaurus in the group. It’s Aladar and his “No one gets left behind” attitude that makes him a great character and a true hero as well, and this is also the key character trait that catches the eye of Kron’s sister Neera (Julianna Margulies), which provides the aforementioned love story.

 

Somehow we get a Prehistoric Meet Cute.

Unlike Don Bluth’s animated dinosaur tale this one isn't done with traditional cel animation but with wonderfully rendered computer animated beasts that look as if they’d stepped right out of the history books, with the bonus element of combining live-action scenery with those computer-generated characters to make the film even more immersive, all which went towards making a truly breathtaking movie with some truly stunning visuals. And sure, the movie plays fast and loose with how these prehistoric animals would act as it tries to anthropomorphize them into characters that we can relate to and fall in love with, which is no easy task considering these are giant lizards with rather stoic facial features. A lot of credit must go to co-directors Ralph Zondag and Eric Leighton who did a stellar job at getting us to become invested in this incredible journey and they are well aided in this task by a fantastic voice cast that really brought these characters to life.

 

Welcome to Jurassic Park.

Stray Observations:

• The egg containing our protagonist being snatched up by a predatory little dinosaur is a complete lift from Don Bluth’s The Land Before Time.
• The Pteranodon that snatches up the egg with Aladar apparently travelled hundreds of miles to find food for his young, which is weird considering its nest was located right by the ocean and as fish are the prime diet for such creatures that seems like a rather pointless journey.
• Like many dinosaur movies the filmmakers play fast and loose with time and locations as the Brachiosaurus, Iguanodon and Styracosaurus did not exist during the same time period or place.
• As in The Land Before Time plant-eating dinosaurs are shown to be nurturing and loving creatures that can talk while carnivores are depicted as mute and mindless killing machines.

 

Your typical horror movie monsters.

It certainly would have been interesting to see what the likes of Phil Tippett and Paul Verhoeven would have come up with in their live-action approach, but even Disney’s version was less ambitious, going with talking dinosaurs rather than a more naturalistic approach – many finding that Eisner’s decision to take route undermined all the effort that went into making the dinosaurs look so real – that and the cookie-cutter plot aside Walt Disney’s Dinosaurs is still an eye-popping visual spectacle and whose achievement in the area of computer animation cannot be denied. Later the BBC would create a wonderful a six-part nature documentary series called Walking With Dinosaurs, which would take Tippett’s and Vehoeven’s original concept to its natural conclusion, that all said this particular dinosaur adventure is still an engaging and heartwarming little flick even if a little recycled, and it is a tale that will entertain children and adults alike.

Theodore Rex (1995) – Review

There has been many a Buddy-Cop movie over the years, from the likes of Lethal Weapon and Tango and Cash to less than stellar attempts such as Cop and a Half and Top Dog, that latter pairing Chuck Norris with a sheepdog, but when it comes to Buddy-Cop films there is one film that stands apart from all others and that would be Theodore Rex, a film that was billed as a comedy but was anything but funny. And just how bad did things go? Well, it took a lawsuit and a couple of extra million dollars to get Whoopi Goldberg to even show up on set.

With Theodore Rex, we get a movie that right from start shoots itself in the foot by opening with a long narration that basically explains the entire plot of the movie, as well as who the villains are, which is a strange thing to do in a film that is about a murder mystery, as such this opening should have come with a spoiler warning. “Once Upon a Time in the Future. At midnight billionaire Elizar Kane will launch his New Eden missile to bring on another Ice Age. After mankind is extinct, Kane will reanimate the pairs of all the Earth’s animals he keeps frozen in his Ark and create his vision of paradise,” clearly, writer/director Jonathan Betuel must have skipped that day at film school when they were taught “Show don’t tell” but it gets worse as the narration keeps going on to explain more of the plot, “One hour ago, two workers escaped from New Eden and are racing to tell the police about Kane’s Master Plan.” It’s at this point I started to wonder if we were to be taking notes.

 

“Sir, we're only a minute in and half the audience has walked out.”

We are then introduced to police detective Katie Coltrane (Whoopi Goldberg) a cybernetically enhanced police officer who “plays by her own rules” and she is paired with an anthropomorphic Tyrannosaurus named Theodore Rex (George Newbern) to find out who murdered a local dinosaur – he was one of the whistleblowers but the script really makes none of this clear despite that stupid opening narration – and the reason Rex, who was a public relations liaison with the police, was given this upgrade to “Temporary Detective” is to boost the polling numbers of Police Commissioner Lynch (Richard Roundtree) by this idiotic PR stunt. Of course, this was suggested by Lynch’s aide (Peter Mackenzie), who is secretly working for Elizar Kane (Armin Mueller-Stahl), and he believes that this will ensure that the murder will not be solved in time to thwart his boss’s evil plan. We also have Elizar Kane’s top henchman Edge (Stephen McHattie) working with a local gang of Zap Heads to keep tabs on the cops to ensure that they don’t get too close, and if any of that sounds like nonsensical gibberish to you then you are starting to get a grasp of what is wrong with this film.

 

“Mom, call my lawyers, I want to see if I can sue myself off this picture.”

What follows is a hodgepodge of scenes and bad jokes that even the most generous of moviegoers couldn’t call a plot and with most of the comedy, either dealing with Teddy being clumsy with his giant tail and a bunch of your standard fart jokes, you kind of get what is expected.  What's even sadder is that it's not enough that the case our heroes is on never really goes anywhere, not to mention the fact that it's already been solved by that opening narration, but we also get subplots dealing with an urban youth who wants Coltrane to hook up with his dad and a dinosaur nightclub singer (Carol Kane) that Teddy has the hots for and neither of these add anything positive to the proceedings, other than to ensure that the runtime of the film reaches 90-minutes. The only actors to truly escape this disaster would be George Newborn and Carol Kane as they were lucky enough to only provide voice work for the film while the likes of Whoopi Goldberg and Armin Mueller-Stahl were forced to appear on screen.

 

“Here, you can put this rose on the grave of your film career.”

Stray Observations:

• A dinosaur is murdered by an exploding butterfly which could be a nod to Ray Bradbury’s classic dinosaur story “The Sound of Thunder” where a butterfly is accidentally killed by time travellers and the world is radically changed by it, but I’m probably giving this film way too much credit.
• A scientist not only brings back dinosaurs but he makes anthropomorphic versions of them that are then somehow integrated into society, I’d love to see the Civil Rights case that would have let this happen as that would have made for a more interesting movie.
• The script gives numerous references to Coltrane being a cyborg, with such things as having had aggression upgrades, but the film literally does nothing with the idea. Why couldn’t we have had a Whoopi Goldberg Robocop movie, it couldn’t have turned out worse.
• Teddy wants to blend in so he requests a wardrobe makeover that results in him getting a hoodie and sneakers, to which Coltrane remarks “Now you look like a cop” but as all the cops we see in this film are in black leather uniforms this statement is blatantly false.
• Why would anthropomorphic dinosaurs have formed a religion? Elizar Kane couldn’t have created them more than a decade or so ago and that seems like a short time for a new species to develop its own religion.

 

Church of the Latter Day Species.

If one thing can be learned from this movie is that it’s not a good idea to sue your star, you’d think that would be obvious but then again Hollywood is full of idiots, but when Whoopi Goldberg backed out of the production, after a verbal agreement to star in the film had been made, the filmmakers took the bizarre road of suing her which, of course, alienated their lead actor, who during litigation clearly stated to the producers "Just for the record, I hate your guts" and resulted in a performance that was basically done at gunpoint. How did anyone involved think this was going to turn out? So not only did they have a mess of a script, based on a nonsensical premise, they also had a lead actor who hated being there and all involved. Watching the film you can’t tell the difference between the disdain Whoopi’s character has for the dinosaurs around her or the disdain the actress has for simply being there

 

“Each night I pray for an extinction-level event.”

Due to poor test screenings, the film didn’t even get a theatrical release, making it the biggest budgeted direct-to-video film at the time, and though it did make some decent cash from poor parents whose kids forced them to rent it from the local Blockbuster, Theodore Rex will always remain a stain on Whoopi Goldberg’s career and on cinema itself. Basically, if you are in the mood for a fun “So bad it’s good” movie look elsewhere as this one is simply boring and painful to watch and deserves to be tossed into the La Brea Tar Pits.

Dinosaur Island (1994) – Review

When Roger Corman’s Carnosaur made some nice pocket change this legendary B-movie producer turned to Jim Wynorski and Fred Olen Ray to come up with another film that could also cash in on the dinosaur buzz surrounding Steven Spielberg’s colossal hit, but instead of a Jurassic Park rip-off what Wynorski and Ray decided to make was a cavewoman movie, and who can argue with the idea about a film full of dinosaurs and boobies?

With the decision to take the route of a dinosaur picture more in the vein of 1950s The Lost Continent, a film where a small group of people were stranded on an island full of prehistoric creatures, instead of meeting genetically engineered ones ala Jurassic Park, co-directors Wynorski and Ray took a page out Playboy rather than that of Arthur Conan Doyle as this particular dinosaur adventure would be more titillating than thrilling. The main premise to Dinosaur Island deals with army captain Jason Briggs (Ross Hagen) on a flight across the Pacific with three misfit deserters, who will be facing a court-martial when they reach home, the deserters consist of John Skeemer (Ross Hagen), fitted to be this film’s wisecracking comic relief but, to be honest, it’s more a relief when he does shut up.  Next is Turbo (Peter Spellos) the big and dumb one of the group and finally there is Buzz (Bob Sheridan), who is apparently the brains of the trio, though I doubt any of these guys are going up for Mensa anytime soon.

 

A dinosaur with a pea-sized brain can outwit these idiots.

It’s clear from the outset that Jim Wynorski and Fred Olen Ray were trying to make up for the lack of budget by throwing as many jokes at the audience as they possibly could in the hope that it would distract them from realizing how bad the dinosaurs looked, and when these creatures do make an appearance it’s with bad puppets that poorly placed via bad optical effects, but most of the jokes seem recycled from playground fights such as when Skeemer becomes offended by the cavewomen when they insult the intelligence of the male species, and he retorts, “Sticks and stones may break our bones but words will never hurt us” but then the cavewomen are quick to point out that they are all well equipped with both sticks and stones. There you have it folks, the military’s finest being outwitted by a group of primitive Playboy Playmates.

 

“Later we plan on schooling Hugh Hefner.”

When this group of military misfits are captured by the cavewomen they are immediately sentenced to work in the mines by Queen Morganna (Toni Naples), a chore these guys are probably more suited for than any position in the military, but when one of the women spots a “Smiley Face” tattoo on Skeemer’s arm, which matches the one depicted on the tribe’s sacred scroll, they are assumed to be gods that have been sent to end their famine and defeat the Great One, unfortunately, the Great One isn’t Jackie Gleason but a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a particularly nasty one who has been ravaging the cavewomen for centuries. Previously to the apparent arrival of the “gods”, a virginal sacrifice was made to the Great One to keep the T-Rex from entering their village but now with divine intervention on their side things are looking up, that is if these chuckleheads didn’t unload all their remaining ammunition into a poor hapless Triceratops.

 

Didn’t at least one of these morons open a book while in school?

Stray Observations:

• The movie opens with a blonde woman being sacrificed to a monster, much in the way that Fay Wray was sacrificed to King Kong, only in this movie the woman’s top is torn off so her breasts are free to jiggle. This is what one would call progress, I guess?
• Are “heroes” fire round after round into the first dinosaur they encounter but with little to no effect, yet this is just a regular dinosaur and not Godzilla so a few well-placed bullets should have put that creature down.
• Being mistaken for gods and then being exposed as frauds is a plot point lifted right out of Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King.
• We get a shot of a dinosaur howling at the Moon which is a gag lifted from the Ringo Star movie Caveman.
• Preparing the “gods” for battle apparently involves three half-naked cavewomen frolicking together in a pool followed by the “gods” getting a sponge bath. Could someone tell me where you can apply for godhood?

Note: You’d think a tribe of women who despise men would be more into each other than these asshats that washed ashore in this movie.

In Carnosaur a lot of the special effects failings were hidden by having almost all of the action scenes pertaining to the dinosaurs take place at night or in the dark corridors, while in this movie, pretty much all of the dino attacks take place in broad daylight where such a setting is not at all forgiving when it comes to hiding how cheap your low-budget effects look, and I’d bet my life that much of this stemmed from Jim Wynorski and Fred Olen Ray’s desire to hang out with half-naked women, “Who cares if the dinosaurs look like crap, we’ve got boobies to ogle!” Okay, maybe I’m being a little unfair but this film is such a collection of bad sexual innuendos and scenes of softcore pornography, which are only occasionally broken up by a dinosaur attack, that you can’t help but ponder the idea that there may have been ulterior motives when pen went to paper on this project.

 

Cavewomen vs a re-purposed Carnosaur.

It’s clear that a film featuring scantily-clad cavewomen fighting dinosaurs is not to be taken seriously but an almost non-existent budget is no excuse for the terrible dialogue in this film, and any time Skeemer opens his mouth you’d wish one of these nubile cavewomen would shove a spear down his throat, that most of the cast consisted of swimsuit models and Vegas showgirls will give you an idea as to what kind of acting calibre is on display here, and that's not to say that the men in this film are any better because they're definitely not. With Dinosaur Island Wynorski and Ray attempted to make a throwback to the goofy dinosaur movies of the 1950s but the end result was a film with very little charm and even less entertainment value.

Prehysteria! (1993) – Review

One can’t help but admit that 1993 was a helluva year for dinosaur movies as not only did it see the release of Steven Spielberg’s groundbreaking film Jurassic Park but also his animated dino-pic We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story and then we also got the first installment of Roger Corman’s Carnosaur franchise, but one film that is often forgotten amongst all these “classics” would be Charles Band’s Prehysteria! a rare family-oriented outing from an offshoot of Full Moon Entertainment, a company known mostly for its low-budget horror movies.  What could possibly go wrong?

After releasing a plethora of horror films for over two decades Charles Band decided it was time to branch out and get some of that Disney money by making “kid-friendly” movies – as fun as they are the Puppet Master franchise definitely had a limited audience – and with Moonbeam Entertainment he could focus on science fiction and fantasy films created for both children and adults. Enter storyboard artist Peter von Sholly who had a concept about miniature dinosaurs and which was an idea that Band thought was be perfect for the launch of his new distribution arm.  Prehysteria! was co-directed by Charles and Albert Band and dealt with a museum curator named Rico Sarno (Brett Cullen) who upon entering a forbidden temple in South America discovers a nest of five eggs, he quickly makes off with this valuable find, with plans to make them a key exhibit in his own museum. Needless to say, things do not go exactly as planned.

 

Raiders of the Lost Olive Garden

Enter our family-friendly cast of characters; widower Frank Taylor (Brett Cullen) who takes his kids, Monica (Samantha Mills) and Jerry (Austin O'Brien) to town, to sell some fossilized dinosaur poop at Rico Sarno’s Antiques & Curios shop, and while there a mix up occurs with their cooler and Sarno's, and the Taylor family soon end up walking off with Sarno’s cooler, which just so happens to contain those stolen eggs. At home, the family dog, who due to economic necessity had its litter given away, somehow hatches the eggs and Jerry is soon delighted to find five tiny dinosaurs in his basement. The dinosaurs consist of Tyrannosaurus Rex, a Stegosaurus, a Brachiosaurus, a Chasmosaurus and a pterosaur, and because Jerry is a big music fan they are named Elvis, Jagger, Paula, Hammer and Madonna respectively. As this is a kid’s movie they decide to keep this amazing find a secret from the adults despite the family being cash strapped and this kind of find would be an amazing windfall for everyone involved, which makes these particular kids more than just stupid they are also self-centred. Now, I’m not saying they should have gone and sold them to P.T. Barnum but any news agency or scientific community would pay big money just to look at these things.

 

“Hey sis, why don’t we see if they can play instruments and form a stone-age rock band?”

The rest of the film deals with the kids trying to hide the tiny dinosaurs from all concerned, with the main threat coming from Sarno accusing everyone around him of stealing the cooler with his eggs, to the point of assaulting his assistant Vicki Vandell (Colleen Morris), needless to say, things get worse from there with their dad finding out about these prehistoric pets, Vicki showing up at the farm to add some love interest and family drama, and then Sarno hiring a couple of goons to steal the dinosaurs. These two idiots make Horace and Jasper from One Hundred and One Dalmatians look like Road Scholars by comparison and is just one more nail in the coffin of this rather unfunny family comedy. The film will eventually stumble to its rather predictable conclusion, with Sarno being humiliated and our heroes back in possession of the dinosaurs, but when the credits roll we are left wondering “Who the fuck cares about any of this?”

Lawyer Note: Sarno is definitely an asshole but despite him obtaining the dinosaurs via dubious means he is, in fact, the rightful owner and all the “Moral Outrage” our protagonists' exhibit does not change this at all.

Stray Observations:

• If this temple was so sacred and the contents so precious why would the native guide even mention its existence to an obvious asshat like Sarno in the first place?
• Jerry is a young kid obsessed with Elvis Presley who ends up with monstrous pets making him a pre-cursor to Lilo and Stitch.
• A fat idiot stealing dinosaur eggs is just a hair away from Dennis Nedry in Jurassic Park stealing fertilized dinosaur embryos.
• The family “acquire” the dino eggs at an Antiques & Curios shop and it’s only surprising that they didn’t also pick up a Mogwai.
• These tiny dinosaurs completely demolish the kitchen but somehow not one person in the household hears a damn thing, is everyone in that house partially deaf?

 

“They're grrrrrreat!”

The only real positive thing I can say about Prehysteria! is that the puppets built for the movie were fairly well constructed and the puppeteers do a pretty good job giving them each a little bit of personality, unfortunately, the few times they are forced to optically composite them into a shot with the actors looks godawful and Charles Band and company should have done their best to just avoid attempting it at all. Aside from the cool dinosaurs, there’s not much to offer any viewer over the age of six and the acting from the human cast ranges from Dinner Theatre levels of bad to Tommy Wiseau in The Room bad. Overall, this family-friendly outing from Charles Band is a bland and quite forgettable outing and that it somehow managed to have two sequels just goes to show you how low the bar is when it comes to direct-to-video movies.

Note: I’d love to see an alternate world version of Prehysteria! where this film is a straight-up horror film where the tiny dinosaurs brutally murder and eat those who come between them and the kids.

Carnosaur (1993) – Review

When a hot property is in the wings, one that looks be a potential blockbuster, it's a sure bet that legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman will be thinking on how to capitalize on such a product with a cheap quickie of his own, thus when Steven Spielberg was in the midst of making his adaptation of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park good ole Roger took a dinosaur project of his own, one that had been sitting on his shelf for years, and then rushed it into production and from that Carnosaur was born.

Loosely based on the novel by John Brosnan the plot of Carnosaur deals your stock mad scientist type but in this case, one with a rather unique goal, that of planning to exterminate the human race with a lethal virus and then replacing humanity with her own genetically created dinosaurs, and one must admit that as “Mad Science” goes that does have to be one of the more off the rails ideas out there. The mad scientist of this particular piece is Dr. Jane Tiptree (Diane Ladd) a world-renowned geneticist who withdrew from public life to work for the Eunice Corporation where she was given a contract that would allow her three years of non-interference from her bosses, they’d lose the patent rights to anything she came up if they even asked her what she was working on, but her “silence” had drawn concern from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) as they believe someone like her with no oversight could lead to disaster, and they’re not wrong, because faster than you can say “Escaped Monster” bodies starting piling up.

 

“This was no boating accident.”

Storywise Carnosaur doesn’t have much of a plot, or even protagonists for that matter, first we have Sheriff Fowler (Harrison Page) but he’s spends most of the film’s running time scratching his head in bewilderment before eventually getting eviscerated by a mutant dinosaur, then we have environmentalist Ann Thrush (Jennifer Runyon) spouting off “Earth First” rhetoric but aside from vandalizing bulldozers and watching her idiot friends get eaten by a dinosaur, while they are chained to construction equipment, she doesn’t really do much to further what little plot we do have, and finally we have Doc Smith (Raphael Sbarge), an alcoholic night watchmen at the construction site that Thrush and her moron friends are protesting, and out of nowhere he goes from a drunk who can’t shoot straight to suddenly going all “James Bond” as infiltrates Tiptree’s lab so that he can find out why everyone is getting sick and also to discover what’s eating all the locals, but when it comes right down to it he’s about as effective as a fart in a hurricane so I wouldn’t quite put him in the hero category.

Note: As in the films Dinosaurus and The Crater Lake Monster we are shown that the only proper way to fight a dinosaur is with construction equipment.

Stray Observations:

• This movie stars Diane Ladd, the mother of Laura Dern who is one of the stars of Jurassic Park, coincidence? I think not.
• Tiptree states that her genetically modified chickens are a step towards returning the Earth back to its rightful owners, the dinosaurs, which to this Doc Smith comments “It will make for a great theme park” which is another nice nod to Jurassic Park.
• If Clint Howard appears on screen it either means you are watching a Ron Howard movie or a very low-budget horror film.
• People in this movie either sneeze without covering their noses or immediately shake hands with the one that they just sneezed into, clearly, this movie was made pre-global pandemic.
• The climactic battle between Smith and the T-Rex was nearly a shot-for-shot remake of the finale of James Cameron’s Aliens.
• Dr. Jane Tiptree embraces her conviction as she is impregnated by the virus as well, only she doesn’t pop out a dino egg her offspring tears itself out through her belly like a certain chestburster we are all familiar with.

 

“We not only cashing in on Jurassic Park but also ripping off both Alien and Aliens.”

With dialogue like “The last thing we need is a biotech panic about chickens!” you know what kind of film you're watching, and with a mad scientist spouting gibberish like “The earth was not made for us, she was made for the dinosaurs” one can’t be expected to take too much of this seriously, especially when you are talking about Roger Corman film, but even by B-picture expectations this one is a bit of a dog and aside from some cool animatronic dinosaur puppets there really isn’t much here to recommend. Diane Ladd is sort of fun as this dinosaur-obsessed mad scientist but every other character in this movie are simply two-dimensional pieces of window dressing that are here to be either get eaten or spout expository dialogue, though both is often the case. For a “Bad Movie Night” viewing some entertainment can be derived from watching Carnosaur, and the amount of alcohol on hand will determine just how much, but those hoping to find a fun dinosaur picture should look elsewhere.