Carnosaur

"The Earth was not made for us, it was made for the dinosaurs. It was scaled to their dimensions. Human beings are ants crawling through their livingrooms."

This movie gets monstrously panned. The near-universal consensus appears to be that it's "crap." But I think it's a decidedly decent film. A horror monster movie is allowed to be a little campy... I mean if you apply no-camp standards to zombie movies then you would decimate the genre. Plus there's the incredible novelty of this being Jurassic Park's horror-themed counterpart. The darn thing made over a million and a half dollars at the box office and Amazon.com doesn't even stock it.

It's very low budget, and low tech, which doesn't perturb me at all. Cat Power and GG Allin get panned for their lo-tech immaturity just the same, and I love them, so I guess it's no surprise I wouldn't be off-put by those same qualities in a movie. At least it's not one of those 1930s films that feels like it's from another world. Carnosaur is low-tech but it's still relatable.

The saving grace of the film is its old-world charm, a stark and minimal early 90s film without the overpowering glitz and glamor that overtake anything released in the 00s. I can't remember the last time I've felt something like this, watched a movie with this kind of aesthetic... I don't know if it was two years ago watching Sci-Fi at 4am or if it was 15 years ago watching 90s horror films on Fox at midnight on saturdays but... it was definitely in the middle of the night.

I guess, for me, the selling point is the fact that I find the notion of dinosaurs roaming across the modern landscape to be absolutely irresistible. The dinosaur here is just a puppet, but I find it scary in its starkness. Jurassic Park is all too real, an adventure film. Carnosaur is filled with dimly lit, bleak horror settings and to see the Deinonychus puppet emerge from these is just... it's a glorious sight. It's not thrilling because it looks real, it's thrilling because it taps into a primal, horrifying dream...

Can't wait to read the novel. Apparently John Brosnan (the novel's author), wrote a complete screenplay for the movie but it was rejected. I have half a mind to try and attempt the writing of a post-apocalyptic novel in which Carnosaur's antagonist's goals reach fruition.