While the original CARNOSAUR was an unabashed cash-in on JURASSIC PARK, the follow-up plays like a lower-budgeted ripoff of ALIENS.
When communications are cut off at a remote Nevada uranium mine and nuclear facility, a team of miltary computer experts led by Jack Reed (John Savage) and Tom McQuade (Cliff DeYoung) helicopter in to check out the situation. There they find all of the workers massacred, with the only survivor
being teenager Jesse Turner (Ryan Thomas Johnson). It turns out that some leftover eggs from an experiment in cloning dinosaurs have hatched, and the resulting pack of flesh-eating Deinonychus, having slaughtered all the mine workers, are now attacking the soldiers. An escape attempt is thwarted
when the helicopter pilot flying in to pick them up is attacked by a dinosaur.
Now stranded, with not only the dinosaurs but an impeding nuclear explosion to worry about, the team attempts to trap and kill the monsters while awaiting rescue. But the group is picked off one by one until only Jack and Jesse remain. An evacuation team arrives to help them, but as the group
attempts to leave, they are attacked by a huge tyrannosaurus rex. Jesse commandeers a mining vehicle to drive down a deep mineshaft. The group escapes just before the facility explodes.
CARNOSAUR II announces its intentions to mimic James Cameron right at the start, with an opening cribbed from TERMINATOR 2 in which Jesse and a friend utilize a homemade electronic device to make illegal use of a computer key-card. From there, Michael Palmer s script passes up no opportunity to
copy ALIENS, from the basic setup (soldiers and a young survivor vs. a monster in a governmental facility facing an imminent explosion) to the details (the ostensible escape craft brought down by one of the creatures). The movie even manages to come up with its own version of the climatic
alien-queen battle, bringing in the T-Rex to substitute for the previously seen 10-foot dinosaurs.
Within these derivative and thus completely predictable parameters, director Louis Morneau and the cast do what they can, but their efforts are further hamstrung by the lack of menacing monsters. John Carl Buechler s dinosaur creations look no more realistic than they did in the first film, but at
least Morneau appears to recognize this, and films their attacks in quick flashes for the first half of the movie. The more the story requires the audience see the creatures clearly, however, the less convincing they become.(Graphic violence, profanity.) leave a comment
