#rob kerchner

Even for a movie about a bunch of marines going against reanimated dinosaurs, Carnosaur 3: Primal Species is bad.

When an army caravan is captured by terrorists, they think they've got valuable weapons-grade uranium. In reality, they've stolen something far deadlier: dinosaurs! Genetically altered to be smarter, faster and more ferocious than normal by a mad scientist, the two velociraptors and lone tyrannosaurus’ modified DNA (which contains some human chromosomes) holds the key to curing any number of diseases. A team of marines is sent to capture the creatures before they begin laying eggs.

There’s not a lot working here. The special effects are bad. The costumes and animatronics appear to be the exact same ones used in the previous film so not only do we not get any new dinosaurs, they don’t even have the courtesy of giving us an army of raptors, only two. The creatures aren’t terribly convincing either. I guess they’re ok for the kind of low-budget the crew had to work with, but it’s obviously a bunch of guys manipulating some puppets or some stunt people in rubber dinosaur suits running around. The acting is ok, nothing particularly outstanding, but not cringe-worthy. What I'm saying is, the film's failure can be blamed on the plot, not them. None of this would've happened if every single human being in Carnosaur 3 wasn’t an idiot.

After the sole surviving terrorist is captured by police, law enforcement recognizes him as a terrorist (how?) they decide to handle the situation themselves. “It looks like an airplane crash in here!” one of them exclaims. Pools of blood and severed limbs. That's what you think of when you hear "plane crash"? They quickly become dino chow. After this, the marines are sent in, with live ammunition despite being tasked with capturing the dinosaurs alive. I laughed out loud when I saw what this film’s “monster vision”, a black-and-white inversed filter with some red thrown in to make it look scary. Just what any predator needs, vision that’s significantly worse than its prey’s.

The nonsense keeps piling up from there. Why do the Raptors want to capture people alive and bring them to the T-Rex’s nest? Why do the heroes lure the dinosaurs onto a boat and then drive the boat out to sea and stay on the ship with them? Why do they decide to freeze the dinosaurs using the cooling equipment on the ship instead of using sleeping gas or non-lethal crowd-control type weaponry that would be easily available to them if they asked for it? How do the velociraptors know to cut the elevator cables to dispatch their enemies? Most important of all, how do you manage to make a movie about a bunch of men and women struggling to survive against killer dinosaurs boring? I’ll tell you how, by doing exactly what Carnosaur 2 did, which was rip off a much better film with a very similar plot... Aliens! 

Even if seeing dinosaurs tear people to shreds sounds like good fun to you, Carnosaur 3 is a slog. The movie is predictable, poorly written and doesn’t contain any good kills or moments of gore (maybe one towards the end, but it’s such a bad special effect you can’t appreciate it). The most memorable parts of this film are the plot holes and the pieces of bad dialogue, but it still doesn’t work as a movie that’s “so bad it’s good”. Even at a very reasonable and lean 85 minutes, Carnosaur 3: Primal Species is dull creature-feature junk. (On DVD, September 19, 2014)