Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Sorry, my heart just wasn't in this one.

In the summer of 93 a movie came out. A movie about dinosaurs. A movie about dinosaurs with effects that would rival anything that had come before it. That movie went on to become of the most most talked about movies of the year, and quite possibly one of the greatest movies ever made. That movie was NOT Carnosaur.

No, not by a long shot.

While Laura Dern was working with the likes of Steven Spielberg, Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neil on Jurassic Park, her mother, Diane Ladd, was slumming it in this attempt to cash in with the likes of that one guy who went on to do a few episodes of Voyager and that chick who was in Charles in Charge.

For those of you unaware of the 'story' in this nearly 15 year old movie, it goes something like this: Mad scientist genetically modifies chickens to resurrect dinosaurs in the hope of wiping out mankind. Meanwhile, the night watchman falls for a hippy and tries to stop the mad scientist. In the end, everyone dies.

Yeah, it's actually a little less straightforward than all that, but you get the idea. Actually, that might be the movie's biggest problem...the plot. It was far more complicated than it needed to be. A simple monster on the loose story would have sufficed. Instead, there's at least a half dozen underdeveloped subplots.

It would have been much simpler to make a movie in which Doc and Thrush come together to thwart the Evil Scientist and her army of dinosaurs. Hell, I'd watch that. Instead, we're treated to an hour and a half of unexplained captions, characters doing things for no reason, and, hell, characters who EXIST for no reason. The sheriff ads nothing to the plot. Why bother with him? Why spend so much time with him?

Wait, I've got it. The whole thing should have been about the scientist breeding dino DNA into the chickens to increase their size, and therefore increase the amount of meat. That would have been much simpler than the whole 'evil lady wants to destroy the world by creating dinosaurs' thing. Hmm...someone SHOULD make that movie, actually. It's got sci-fi original written all over it.

I really have no interest in rating this one. If I did, I'd give it 4 something somethings out of 10.