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.

We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story (1993)

1993 was certainly an interesting year for Steven Spielberg for not only did he release his more than successful adaptation of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, a movie that brought dinosaurs brilliantly to the modern-day, but he also released the animated dinosaur movie We’re Back a Dinosaur’s Story, which was also about bringing dinosaurs to the present day, only with the more cost-effective method of animation. Now, one of those films would be the winner of three Academy Awards and would revolutionize the movie industry and launch a billion-dollar franchise, while the other entry would decidedly do neither of those things.

Based on author Hudson Talbott's children's book of the same name, We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story tells the tale of four intelligent anthropomorphized dinosaurs and their adventures in the big city in a film that was marketed as the more family-friendly alternative to Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, and to say these two movies could not be more different would be an understatement of epic proportions, as would be their individual effect on the box office. The plot of this particular tale was a rather odd one and quite fitting for children’s books, because things happening in a logical fashion is not something that is normally required for young readers and this is a notion that should be kept in mind when also watching the film, but what exactly is We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story about? After a bizarre prologue, where a young bird in Central Park meets up with a golf-playing Tyrannosaurus Rex, we are told the story of how a ship from the distant future, piloted by a brilliant scientist named Captain Neweyes (Walter Cronkite), arrived back in the primeval era of Earth’s past to capture dinosaurs and bring them forward to modern-day so as to fulfill the wishes of children who dream of meeting real live dinosaurs. Obviously, some alternations must be made before these prehistoric killing machines were allowed to be near children.

 

The Rite of Spring Break.

Turns out Captain Neweyes had developed "Brain Grain" cereal that would increase their intelligence as well as metamorphize them into something that looks less likely to cause small children to collectively wet their pants. Neweyes is aided by an alien named Vorb (Jay Leno) and with his help, they are able to capture four dinosaurs which as a group include a Tyrannosaurus Rex, aptly named Rex (John Goodman), a blue Triceratops named Woog (René Le Vant), a purple Pteranodon named Elsa (Felicity Kendal) and a green Parasaurolophus named Dweeb (Charles Fleischer). Captain Neweyes informs these transformed dinos that once they are in New York City they are to find Dr. Julia Bleeb (Julia Child) at the Natural History Museum, where she will be their guide and help them meet up with children in need, but Neweyes also warns them to beware of his brother Professor Screweyes (Kenneth Mars), who apparently went insane after losing his eye and is now focused on causing mischief wherever he goes.

 

Just say no to drugs, kids.

Their first encounter is with a child named Louie (Joey Shea), who is running away to join the circus, the kid convinces the quartet of dinosaurs that he can help them because the circus is located right across from the Museum of Natural History and he's also confident that a circus manager would be very interested in real living dinosaurs and that could certainly help land a job. Of course, wandering around Manhattan with four rather large prehistoric reptiles isn’t easy and thus the group turn to Cecilia Nuthatch (Yeardley Smith), a young girl neglected by her wealthy parents, and with her help, they are able to blend in with animatronics of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. As expected things go disastrously wrong, Rex overhears many of the kids in the crowd wishing they were seeing real dinosaurs in the parade and inspires Rex to break into a song and dance number and he belts out “Roll Back the Rock” until eventually their wild antics reveal to the crowd that they are, in fact, real dinosaurs.

Question: Why the total freak out? These are cute anthropomorphize dinosaurs who can sing and dance, don’t call the army call Siegfried and Roy.

In a surprise to no one, the circus the manager is revealed to be none other than the evil Professor Screweyes, who is running a horror-themed "Eccentric Circus" located inside Central Park, and he tricks Cecilia and Louie into signing a contract which leads to them being devolved into chimpanzees so it’s up to the Rex and friends to save them. It should be noted that Captain Neweyes and his evil brother do not appear in Hudson Talbott's book, there’s just the alien Vorb who apparently has a thing for making dinosaurs sentient and plopping them down in great metropolitan cities, but what works in a children’s picture book doesn’t necessarily work as a feature film and thus we get the whole “Evil Twin” subplot which takes the story in a rather Ray Bradbury direction and is also resolved in a rather bizarre fashion with Screweyes being swarmed and devoured by crows.

 

Something wicked this way comes.

Stray Observations:

• Dinosaurs given the "Brain Grain" cereal not only find their intelligence increased, suddenly being able to read and speak English, but it also physically transforms into more child-friendly looking dinosaurs, yet how increased intelligence alters one's physical form is never explained.
• Captain Neweyes may be a genius from the future but he clearly never read Ray Bradbury’s classic story Sound of Thunder or he would have been worried about what the “Butterfly Effect” would be once you abduct a bunch of dinosaurs from the past.
• Upon seeing four dinosaurs land in the Hudson River Louie’s first reaction is to call them morons for not recognizing New York City. I know New Yorkers are jaded but this is taking things too a little too far.
• Dinosaurs’ roaming freely through New York City isn’t all that new of a thing as the Rhedosaurus in the Ray Harryhausen film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms had a pretty easy time of it.
• A little boy from the streets teaming up with a rich neglected little girl is a complete lift from Salkind’s Santa Claus: The Movie.

 

This is what happens when you ask Santa for dinosaurs.

Steven Spielberg’s We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story has some fun moments and the talented voice cast does their best to elevate what is rather pedestrian material and even the animation is fairly decent, if not at the same level of lushness as seen in Spielberg’s previously produced animated dinosaur film The Land Before Time, and the tacked-on conflict with the two brothers doesn't really make a lot of sense – neither twin is given much in the way motivations – and the creepy circus really didn’t fit in with all the comedic hijinks that preceded it, not to mention the fact that it could end up scaring the crap out of younger viewers.

 

"Guys, you won't believe this but I found the script in this dumpster."

Overall, this animated entry from Amblimation is a kid-friendly piece of fluff whose poor character animation and bizarre writing will find most adult audience members bored and confused while younger viewers will likely enjoy the colourful shenanigans because, hey, they’re dinosaurs and kids love dinosaurs.

Jurassic Park (1993) – Review

Since almost the dawn of cinema, moviegoers have been treated to stories of man’s ongoing battle with dinosaurs, which is rather impressive considering that man and dinosaurs were separated by 65 million years, but the quality of these cinematic entries varied greatly from amazing works by Ray Harryhausen to lesser entries with fins glued to the back of some poor iguana, enter Michael Crichton, Steven Spielberg and the wizards at ILM who would not only revolutionize the dinosaur action-adventure genre but the film industry itself.

If you are invited to a theme park designed by Michael Crichton the best advice I can offer is, "Do not go as you will most likely die." That is just common sense. In 1976 Crichton wrote and directed a science fiction film called Westworld where amusement park guests could live out a variety of fantasies, from the wild west shoot outs to the orgies of Roman World – sadly the movie never let us see that aspect of the park – but as expected things went drastically wrong and the robots in the park soon proceeded to kill the guests. Flash forward to the nineties and Crichton was at it again only this time out it wasn't robots shooting or stabbing the guests of an amusement park but dinosaurs eating them. I’m not sure which one is worse but, regardless, it just goes to show you that park safety has always been an issue with Crichton.

 

This certainly beats robot Yul Brynner.

The concept of Jurassic Park consisted of a wonderful blend of science fiction and that of the classic horror adventure tale with an amusement park showcasing genetically recreated dinosaurs and the following failure of said enterprise due to the mathematical concept of chaos theory, and to say this garnered a little interest in Hollywood would be the understatement of the century as even before Michael Crichton’s book was published several movie studios were vying for the rights until they were eventually acquired by Steven Spielberg and Amblin Entertainment. The basic plot of the book and the movie is that of an industrialist named John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) who has created a theme park of cloned dinosaurs on an island off the Costa Rican coast but due to an “accident” leading to a park employee being mauled by a dinosaur the investors get nervous and requests experts to visit the park to certify its safety.

Note: The dinosaurs in this movie were intended to be done with either large-scale mechanicals or by the traditional method of stop-motion animation but when an enterprising employee at ILM did a CGI run cycle of a dinosaur he changed movie-making forever.

To make those pesky investors happy Hammond enlisted paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and paleobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), while his lawyer Gennaro (Martin Ferrero) invited mathematician and chaos-theorist Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) to round out the team, and when they arrive at the island they are shortly joined by Hammond’s grandkids Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim Murphy (Joseph Mazzello) and once everyone is assembled and after a cute cartoon explanation of how the dinosaurs of the park were created, and the group is sent off on a tour of the park.  That almost immediately goes disastrously wrong is expected, as mentioned this is a Michael Crichton park, but it's not by a pesky computer virus as in Westworld but due to disgruntled and greedy employee Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) who shuts down some of the systems so that he could steal some dino-DNA.

 

Needless to say, things don’t go well for him.

What follows is one of the most exciting adventure films ever brought to the screen, with our cast of characters striving to survive on an island full of man-eating dinosaurs, and with this film, Steven Spielberg and company changed the cinematic landscape forever, with Stan Winston's amazing full-scale animatronic dinosaurs and Dennis Murren's breakthrough CGI creations it's hard to fully grasp the impact this film had on the public and the film industry as a whole. That all said, it's also one helluva adventure film with Sam Neil, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum fleeing a plethora of prehistoric beasts, that were as awe-inspiring as they were terrifying, and then we also had John William's fantastic score and sound designs by Gary Rydstrom that were wonderful icing on an already amazing cake.

 

After this seeing film who didn’t want a pet triceratops?

Stray Observations:

• During the opening scene at a dig in Montana Doctor Grant says that raptor means "bird of prey" but it’s actually Latin for the word thief. Maybe someone should check his credentials before letting him on the island.
• Ellie notices some previously extinct plants while on tour but this raises the question “How exactly did they bring plants back? Are we to believe they found mosquitos in amber that drank the blood of prehistoric plants?”
• Hammond's boast that he "Spared no expense" in the construction of the park is quickly contradicted by all the securities that pop up during the course of the movie, in fact, relying on automation instead of human staff is the opposite of sparing expense.
• On the tour they stepped out to visit a sick triceratops but this is a rather pointless plot detour as the reason for its sickness, unlike in the book, is never addressed again.
• Why would almost the entire staff of Jurassic Park be evacuated due to an approaching hurricane but not the guests? You’d think Hammond would at least want his grandkids taken to safety.
• Samuel L. Jacksons continues to prove the adage that it doesn’t pay to be a black man in a horror movie.
• With Grant and the kids lost out in the park Muldoon asks “What about the lysine contingency? We could put that into effect!” which is a contingency plan to prevent the spread of the animals in case they ever get off the island because the animals can't manufacture the amino acid lysine and unless they're continually supplied with lysine they'll slip into a coma and die. But how would this help Grant in the kids? I don’t see starving the dinosaurs being all that useful at this point.
• During the initial encounter with the T-Rex the film makes a big deal about the “impact tremors” a beast of this size makes when it walks but then at the end of the film it arrives to kill the raptors as if it were a dinosaur ninja.
• Alan Grant discovering raptor eggs, revealing that the dinosaurs on the island are breeding despite all precautions, has no actual effect on the plot. In the book, it’s a big deal as it means they don’t have a proper count on how many velociraptors are running around loose but in this movie it’s, at best, a set-up for the sequels.

 

“Don’t worry Timmy, we’ll catch you later.”

Overall, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park wasn’t just a groundbreaking moment in history, which it most certainly was, but it was also an incredibly fun adventure tale that kept the viewer on the edge of their collective seats and with a master filmmaker at the helm like Spielberg, along with his wonderfully assembled fantastic cast, it just doesn’t get much better than this, and sure, any film adapted from a book was going to vary some from its source material, Hammond being a kindly grandfather type and not the asshole found in the book, but when caught up in the magic of the tale the plotting issues and scientific inaccuracy are almost secondary to the awe and wonder of what we experience here.

It should be noted that this film kicked off an ever-increasing franchise but none of the sequels have managed to capture the magic and majesty of the first one

Note: 1993 was certainly an interesting year for Steven Spielberg and Amblin Entertainment as it also saw the release of We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story, a film that was certainly much lighter in tone about its bringing dinosaurs into a modern setting.