Raptor Ranch (2013)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

Company: Nu Image

Runtime: 88 mins

Format: Imported DVD

Plot: A modern day small Texas community is overrun by vicious prehistoric Carnosaurs and a group of people try to survive the onslaught at a cattle ranch.

Review: I know I said on the Facebook page that I was taking a couple months break from working on the blog over the winter, like I usually do this time every year, but that was before I got my hands on a little diddy I've been wanting to check out for years, Raptor Ranch (also being referred to as Jurassic Dark: Raptor Ranch in some places of the Internet). So consider this a break frommy break, to bring you this Raptor Ranch review.

But first, a little bit of a backstory. I've always loved dinosaur movies, and I especially love dinosaur horror movies, so it goes without saying that the Carnosaur trilogy is one of my all-time top favorite B-Movie series'. Ever since I watched those three for the first time, I've been on the lookout for a great Carnosaur 4-in-spirit movie, one that while isn't technically Carnosaur 4, I could still view it as such in my head. There have been many Potentials over the years, movies like Raptor, which was made by the same people and made up almost entirely of stock footage from Carnosaur 1-3, or The Eden Formula which also used a bit of Carnosaur stock footage. More recently there's even been the found footage Area 407 or the 2013 Asylum 'summer blockbuster' Age of Dinosaurs that while arn't connected to the Carnosaur trilogy at all, are still great Potentials and each of those movies all had me viewing them at some point or another as a 'Carnosaur sequel-in-spirit'.

I can't remember the exact year, but I think it was somewhere in the 2003-2005 range, I started seeing news stories on an upcoming dinosaur horror flick called Raptor Ranch and I was even able to view Production Photos and Movie Stills on the film's own website. I saw it was shot and takes place in a small middle-of-nowhere desert town in Texas (Hey, just like Carnosaur!), I saw that the dinosaurs (at least partially) were done with practical models and props (Hey, just like Carnosaur!) that actually looked pretty reminiscent of the dinosaurs from Carnosaur and even had green-tinted POV shots from the dinosaurs (Hey, just like Carnosaur!), and it seemed to have a pretty dark and gloomy atmosphere from what I could tell (Hey, just like Carnosaur!). Suffice to say, I was uber-excited for this one and kept a very close eye on it. But then it just vanished. All news on it stopped coming out, the website went down, and even the imdb board for it went dead. I kept checking back in with Google on the project at random points over the years, hoping that some new article or website would give even a tiny morsel on what happened with this awesome-looking dinosaur horror movie, but I always came up with nada. Indiana Jones even had better luck tracking down ancient lost biblical artifacts then I did on turning up any mention of this movie or what might have happened to it. That is, until late last year/early this year, I saw it briefly mentioned in an article on Shock Till You Drop about a few upcoming B-Movies of 2013 in which Raptor Ranch was ever-so-briefly mentioned. A blink and you'd miss it namedrop. But it was something. And something, no matter how small, was the most I had gotten on this project in years. Not only that, but it mentioned a 2013 release! This year! Over the year more and more news on the movie started pouring out again – more photos, a plot synopsis, and even a brand new trailer. Yeah, I was pretty damn excited. 

Now here it is, the end of 2013, and technically Raptor Ranch still isn't being released over here in Canada or the U.S., but it has certainly played at some movie festivals and it does have a home video DVD release in other parts of the world in early December, so the day has finally come where I get to sit down and watch this potential Carnosaur 4-in-spirit dinosaur horror movie that I've been waiting all this time for!

Really, I pretty much only have myself to blame that I didn't enjoy it as much as I expected to. Don't get me wrong, I didn't totally dislike it, but it was nowhere near the level worthy of anticipation that I had set myself up for over the years. Right from the opening moments I was kind of doubting if I'd enjoy this as much as I had hoped I would. You see, the movie opens on a woman sitting in the woods getting stalked and killed by a Raptor, with a Tyrannosaurus Rex randomly walking down the street nearby, complete with music filled with attempted tension. The scene could have worked, but any attempt at genuine tension was ruined by a very annoying and out-of-place narration monologue from the main character of the movie that instantly takes you out of the moment of the scene, plus it doesn't even seem like the audio from her narration was mixed in with the audio from the scene very well either, more often clashing with it and being difficult to hear either audio tracks.

This would be a problem that would go on to plaque the majority of the rest of the movie. Not the audio clashing so much as just what that issue represented – a pretty disjointed movie that just did not seem to flow naturally at all. The entire thing actually felt like an amalgamation of multiple different cuts and reshoots of the same movie. Not sure if that's actually the case, but considering that it took the better part of a decade to be released from it's initial production, I wouldn't be surprised if that was at least partially true. Certainly, it didn't help either that the movie failed to even let you know when a scene was taking place in another location, until after the fact. This was most present in the beginning portion of the movie when it was setting up all the characters: We have the main town that the movie takes place in, this middle-of-nowhere Texan town, of which our main lead lives in, hates, and wants to leave ASAP. Than we have a trio of college kids on a roadtrip to a ski resort somewhere to have fun and get laid (cause nothing says getting laid like being buried in bundles of thick winter gear), and then we have a gay low quality pimp-wannabe/singer and his two young hot ladies that are on a trip to L.A., and the way the movie sets all these groups of people up, and the way their individual introduction locations look, you'd think they all started out in the same town and it's not until they end up all converging in that town later into the movie that I realized that it was all separate locations and towns that these characters and their subplots started out in. The only exception to that was the two FBI characters (one of which is played by B-Movie familiar Lorenzo Lamas, who has gone up against dinosaurs before in the unrelated Raptor Island) that leave the big city (which does get a subtitle indicating where it's to, even though that's the one location that actually already looked different anyway and was easily assumed to be a different place) to go investigate a series of mysterious deaths in this small town. 

There's also weird scene cuts that only work to confuse the viewer, such as this one part where it directly cuts from them running out of a store away from the dinosaurs in the middle of downtown with the power out at night, right to them running through the desert to an abandoned factory during the middle of the day but acting as if it was just a couple minutes later for them. Like I said at the top, stuff like that makes the movie feel very disjointed and like a mish-mash of various different final cuts and reshoots that maybe shouldn't have been edited together in the way they were.

As for the actors portraying these human characters, they covered all the levels of the acting ladder here, some being actually pretty good and enjoyable (like leading lady Jana Mashonee, who actually has never been in any other movie or show according to IMDB), all the way down to just downright painful to watch (most of the others), with a couple of the really bad ones coming across like they were stoned and high while filming. Lorenzo Lamas is passable enough, but he has next to nothing to do since he's missing from most of the movie. He comes across in the first 20 minutes like he's going to be a main character, but then he just drops out of the movie altogether and pops back up at the very end again, having absolutely no impact on anything, which just adds to the uneven disjointed feel I mentioned previously. It's not just the actors' faults though, because quite frankly, they weren’t given a whole lot to work with. The characters they have to play – every single one - are underwritten and just plain unlikable, and none of them actually seem to have been written to act like how real people act. None of them are all that surprised when they find out they're dealing with living dinosaurs, and even after everything starts happening, hardly any of the characters ever even take the whole situation seriously much.

As for the effects work on the dinosaurs, we got both CGI models and practical work, and they tend to range from surprisingly good to really really bad, depending on the scene. For the physical puppets and models, I actually wish we saw more, since they were mostly only used for really quick shots, but what we do get of them I thought looked great (and I kept pausing and doing frame-by-frame looks at them as often as I could). I would understand using them only for quick shots if they work on them wasn't that great, but considering the level of detail in them and how great they ended up looking, I'm surprised we weren’t given longer and better looks at them, especially when it comes to that amazingly well-made T. Rex head model - THAT was the stuff of a Carnosaur movie right there! The CGI models though is where things wavered. Luckily most of the time they too looked surprisingly great for such a low budget affair, but there were scenes and shots scattered throughout where they did not look anywhere near on-par with the rest of the movie. Over all though, I was more impressed then let down. 

I did not care, however, for showing a Raptor and a Rex in their full glory right off the bat within the first 10 seconds of the movie. It felt forced, unneeded, and without that scene the movie would have had an excellently-paced build-up to the reveal of the dinosaurs later in the movie. What they should have done was just give us a quick glimpse of an outline of...something...mysterious in the woods, and then the couple roars in the distance that we get at one point, and then that should have been it until the dinosaurs are let loose later in the movie. Sometimes it's the little changes that can make the big differences in the end.

Now, with some of those things out of the way, including everything that makes up the disappointment I felt at times throughout...this movie is FUN. Perfect? Hell no, very far from it as I've already covered, to the point where parts in that first half of the movie are almost unwatchable, depending on the scene. But despite all those issues the movie still ultimately manages to be fun as hell, thanks in large part to it's Carnosaur-style dinosaur carnage filling up the second half. We have Raptors stalking their prey in the dark, a Rex's head coming down through the roof of a house to eat someone and bursting through the walls to get to the others within, a Raptor breaking into a gas station's outhouse to get to the person using it, Raptors sneaking into the tour bus to get to two teens having sex, and later a Rex going all Jurassic Park on the bus by knocking it over, then upside down, and banging it around as it tries to get to the survivors inside, in addition to a very nice scene of two Rexes stalking the characters through a forest. And that stuff is only a small sample of the dino carnage on display here, culminating in a pretty awesome fight between two Raptors, two Rexes, and a Megalosaurus. Oh, and also toss in a tough badass lead chick with a crossbow as a weapon to fight against the dinosaurs. Once the movie truly kicks into high gear for it's second half, there's not a dull moment to be found, and plenty of action and gore in every single scene.

There's still one aspect I'm still not quite clear on though, and that's the subplot of one of the Raptors being loose all along. There was a Raptor that killed the misses in the beginning, that then started stalking the teens as they appeared in the town, but the movie never explained anything about that. There was never any mention of a dinosaur having escaped before that, nor any mention by the guy who was creating them being worried about one having escaped, and other than the intro scene the escaped Raptor didn't really do anything at all, so I'm not really sure what the deal was with that. The movie also never explains why or more importantly how the guy created the dinosaurs, just that he has. Which I suppose, for me viewing this as a Carnosaur 4-in-spirit movie, actually works kind of good cause I can just assume the guy found some leftover Carnosaur eggs from one of those movies – ha! Actually, speaking of the Carnosaur movies, I got a tad bit giddy when one of the characters names off the dinosaurs and say they're from the 'Carnosaur family'. I know that's actually a real thing, but seeing as how much I'm jonsing for comparing this to the Carnosaur movie series, that was the nice little sweet cherry on top for me. Although for a movie called Raptor Ranch, the Raptors themselves aren’t even really in the movie much - it's mostly just the two Rexes and the Megolosaurus that are the main dinosaurs here, and considering that the characters even say right in the movie that they're of the Carnosaur family, I'm not sure why the movie wasn't just named Carnosaur Ranch and be done with it. Not only would I have liked that Carnosaur connection in the name, but it also would have been more accurate since the dinosaurs of the Carnosaur family make up a hell of a lot more screentime then the Raptors do.

The movie also fully embraces the camp instead of trying to pretend it's not there like so many of these movies do, and at times it actually comes across like more of a comedy than I was expecting. I was expecting a dark, gritty, serious dinosaur horror movie along the likes of the Carnosaur flicks and while we do get quite a bit of that, there was equally as much of it that was played for laughs, including not one death-by-being-stepped-on, but two. I'm not saying the comedy wasn't fun, nor am I holding it against the movie, it just wasn't what I was expecting going into the movie is all.

In short, the flow of Raptor Ranch felt very disjointed and lots of the poor editing made some aspects confusing to watch, plus the acting really doesn't help much either and most of the characters are unlikable and don't even act like real people, making the first half of the movie honestly a bit hard to sit through at times. However, once the dinosaur action really kicks into high gear around the halfway mark, the movie throws enough blood, gore, screams, and dinosaur attack scenes our way that you quickly forget about most of that other stuff because it's so much fun to watch, although some of the questionable editing certainly takes you out of the moment quite a few times. I do, however, love that almost all of it took place during the nighttime. So many B-Movies these days take place entirely during bright day scenes, I often find myself longing for the B-Movies of old, where they actually liked taking place in the dark and using that kind of atmosphere to its advantage, and I loved that this movie brought that back.

Even though the finished product is quite uneven and at times frustrating even, if there ever was to be a Carnosaur 4 made now-adays, I would actually really like for it to be along the lines of this movie, just with a bit stronger of a first half, as I felt this movie was quite a decent Carnosaur 4-in-spirit attempt that I can easily see myself adding to my annual Carnosaur series re-watch and just pretending it's part of that series. Now if we could just get a Region 1 DVD or Region A BluRay release for Raptor Ranch, I'll be set for that.

5/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

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The Eden Formula (2006)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

COMPANY: Fantastical Cinema

RUNTIME: 92 mins

FORMAT: DVD

PLOT: Terrorists infiltrate a research facility with the intent of stealing the top-secret Eden Formula, only to accidentally let loose a fully-grown cloned Tyrannosaurus Rex.

REVIEW: Anyone who knows me, or have been following my reviews here on this blog, should already understand that my all-time favorite low budget movie series is the Carnosaur trilogy. In 2001 there was a new movie made titled Raptor, which starred Eric Roberts and was almost entirely made up of stock footage from the three Carnosaur flicks (and badly, I might add), and thus it's often regarded as an unofficial Carnosaur 4 (there are actually some European countries that have it officially, although mistakenly, titled as Carnosaur 4). But for the longest time, I always thought that was it for the world of Carnosaur, and I've constantly been lobbying for a new Carnosaur flick, even if it's done for the SyFy Channel or some other such company.

So you can imagine my amazement when it was brought to my attention that there actually was another Carnosaur movie made in 2006 that completely escaped me! Well to be honest, it's not a real Carnosaur sequel, but much like 2001's Raptor, it was made up of mostly stock footage from the Carnosaur flicks and thus should be regarded as an unofficial sequel as much as Raptor is. So of course I wasted no time at all in tracking down a copy of The Eden Formula to munch down on and review. If Raptor is an unofficial Carnosaur 4, then in my eyes The Eden Formula should be considered an unofficial Carnosaur 5.

Since these kinds of movies are pretty much just made up of footage from other movies, they need to have some selling point to attract interested parties, and that's where the stunt casting comes in; Where Raptor had Eric Roberts, this one improves on that by including Tony Todd (Candyman, Final Destination), Dee Wallace (The Howling, E.T.), and Jeff Fahey (Manticore, Lost), and oddly enough the only one out of that trio who really came across as really all that bad, was Dee Wallace. Jeff Fahey didn't really have to show much emotion to show so that was fine, and Tony Todd just had fun with it all and hammed up his role like crazy (which isn't a bad thing since this is a B-Movie after all, so that just makes it more cheesy and thus more entertaining). He totally stole the show as the too-cool-for-school terrorist leader, while Jeff Fahey and Dee Wallace play the two people in charge of the research facility that's created this Eden formula. The rest of the supporting characters though are pretty brutal in the acting department, which consist mostly of a female cop, an overweight security guard, and then the other members of Tony Todd's terrorist group, whom launches an attack on that research facility with the intent of stealing the scientific breakthrough formula and, of course, inadvertently cause a fully-grown cloned Tyrannosaurus Rex to escape and start causing havoc around Los Angeles, in the gory buckets-of-blood way that only a Carnosaur T. Rex can.

What this movie also improved on from Raptor, other then the stunt casting, are the special effects – sure, it used almost as much stock footage from the Carnosaur trilogy as Raptor did, but it integrated that footage a bit more smoothly, and also managed to create new effects shots as well! Granted, the new practical Rex model doesn't really look like the Carnosaur Rex stock footage much (same basic design, but more thin and seems to be far more cheaply-made, and some shots make it look more like a 2-legged crocodile then it does the Carnosaur T. Rex), and the new CGI version that they use a few times does somewhat resemble the original design as well, but ultimately the body comes across as very disproportionate; the head is fine, but the rest is far too small for that head. In addition, some of the things they do with the CGI model isn't realistic and its just not faithful to the physics of what has been portrayed with the physical models previously (seriously, there is one scene where the CGI Rex is jumping and hoping around like a basketball-playing bunny rabbit), and the worst part about it all is that these new models aren’t even the same color as one another! The Rex footage from the Carnosaur movies have it as a dark brown color while the new, cheaper-looking, Rex model changes from all-green to green with some white, and the CGI model is all-white! It's like the dinosaur version of those old gimmicky Micro Machine car toys where they completely changed colors when you held them up in sunlight or submerged them in water. They do get props from me though for at least putting in the effort to have something more then just stock footage like Raptor did, even if the execution didn't turn out all that great. The thought and effort was clearly there, and that counts for something in my books.

The final aspect that I felt The Eden Formula did better then Raptor is the story. Raptor was pretty much just a re-telling of the first Carnosaur movie, where-as this one actually had a unique plot not yet done previously in the series, with some genuinely surprising twists thrown in here and there. In-part, it's the plot I mentioned in my Carnosaur 3 review as having thought and hoped that Carnosaur 3 was going to do (and it ended up not). Granted, it didn't do it to the degree I would have liked, but at least it's a really nice step in that direction. If you remember from that review, I initially expected Carnosaur 3 to have the dinosaurs rampaging through the city but instead we just got them stalking a warehouse and then trapped on a transport boat out in the ocean. Well this movie does indeed have a dinosaur rampaging through a city for a large portion of the movie, though it only has the one dinosaur instead of a group of dinosaurs like Carnosaur 3 had.

And that brings me to the main thing this movie lacks IMO - the dinosaurs. Sure, we get lots of really good stuff with the Rex, but with this being the first Carnosaur-esque movie to have only the one dinosaur, you kind of feel a void left behind by not including a pack of vicious intelligent Raptors alongside the Rex. Especially with the 'Loose in the city' plot, it would have been awesome to see a pack of Raptors darting about the streets with one or two scenes of them possibly getting into a house or apartment complex or something. Just seemed like a bit of a missed opportunity, especially considering that half of the movie takes place inside of the research facility as Dee Wallace and Jeff Fahey try to escape from Tony Todd and his terrorists. That could have been the perfect opportunity to use some stock footage from Carnosaur 2 and 3 of the Raptors, having those things chase both groups of people through the facility. It at least would have made the scenes taking place in that facility more interesting while the Rex is away munching on people throughout the city.

Another aspect that bugged me a bit, which is something I also had a problem with in the similar-themed movie 100 Million B.C., and that is that despite a fully-grown giant Tyrannosaurus Rex rampaging through the middle of Los freakin' Angeles, nobody at all seems to even notice except the occasional random person that gets eaten; these streets in this movie are more lonely and deserted then those of Silent Hill. So much for Los Angeles having a bustling night life. Hell, not even the main characters themselves seem to be too concerned about the escaped Rex for the majority of the movie.

To top it all off, for the first time in the Carnosaur series (both official and unofficial entries included), the dinosaur does not make the same kinds of noises that it did in every previous movie. One of the things I loved about Carnosaur 1-3 and even Raptor, is that the dinosaurs had some really awesome-sounding vocal noises, but for this one they go with an entirely new soundboard, which isn't nearly as effective or memorable as the dinosaur sounds they used for all the other movies.

The movie on a whole really is not very good, and I probably would never recommend it to anyone. However, for someone who was starving for a new Carnosaur outing, this wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been (i.e. It isn't Raptor). Sure, the final 'polished' product is a pretty uneven mess that can get a bit boring when the dinosaur isn't on-screen, but there was at least some genuine effort attempted with it (even if it did fall a bit short), and there's always Tony Todd's cheesefest performance and some great gooey gore at the hands...err, jaws...of the escaped Rex to keep you riveted to the screen, plus there are some laugh-out loud lines of dialog to entertain you along the way (“I think we're gonna need a bigger bucket.”, “Ok, so in hindsight maybe creating a giant T. Rex wasn't the best of ideas.”).

If it was just Carnosaur 1-3 and then this, I probably wouldn't be nearly so kind to it. However, since its following on the heels of Raptor while trying to accomplish the same thing, I'm just happy that it's at least much more enjoyable then that one was. Until the next movie comes along that decides to use stock footage from the Carnosaur movies, this one will tide me over quite well for now.

5/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

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Raptor (2001)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

COMPANY: New Concorde 

RUNTIME: 81 mins

FORMAT: DVD

PLOT: A small town Sheriff and a Wildlife Officer look into some grisly murders and discover that not only is a dinosaur on the loose, but it came from the nearby Government laboratory and they go to investigate, but only end up making things go from bad to worse as they accidentally cause all the Carnosaurs...err, I mean dinosaurs... in the lab complex to get loose.

REVIEW: I had really wanted to see Carnosaur 4 get made for the simple fact that I thought Carnosaur 3 was easily the weakest in the series and would have liked to see the series go out on a higher note. While Carnosaur 4 was never made, another movie was brought to my attention in it's place: Raptor. Made by all the same people and acts as kind of an unofficial Carnosaur 4 (apparently they couldn't get the Rights to the title, for whatever reason since it was made by the same company and people, however it's even regarded as Carnosaur 4 in parts of the world). As soon as the DVD arrived in the mail, I couldn't wait to pop it in and check this Raptor out and get started on a review, fully excited to get back into the world of Carnosaur.

Oh boy. This movie is bad. Even by my very low standards.

First off, there is no new dinosaur footage in this movie - every single scene with a dinosaur in it is just stock footage from one of the three Carnosaur movies, and while that stock footage was integrated pretty well in the first half of the movie, the second half was botched all to hell, combining shots from each movie together into the same scene, despite the fact that they don't match up at all. One part has a famous Tyrannosaurus vs Construction vehicle scene that this series is known for...except it's made up of footage from both Carnosaur and Carnosaur 2, despite the fact that the construction vehicle used in the first movie was different then the construction vehicle used in the second, but this movie treats them the same, so you'll see a shot of the Tyrannosaurus Rex and vehicle fighting, cut to a reaction shot of the person, then cut back to the Tyrannosaurus Rex and vehicle fighting again...except now the vehicle is suddenly a different one, even though it's supposed to be the same. The second half of the movie is filled with that kind of stuff. Up until that point, I actually didn't mind the use of stock footage as, understandably, the props and suits had gone into disrepair and couldn't be used in a 4th movie, and said stock footage was integrated pretty well. Hell, they even got an actor from the first movie back for this for a few scenes, just so they could re-use his death scene (although he is considerably older here then in the re-used stock footage, but it's the attempt and effort that counts). But then the second half of the movie comes along and does the above-mentioned horrible botching every step of the way and it just gets gross. There are quite a few scenes where we see someone get attacked, but then we cut to stock footage from one of the Carnosaur movies and suddenly it's a completely different person being chomped down on by the dinosaur in place of the one we were just seeing, and in a completely different location then the one the character was just in. It really made no sense whatsoever and was some of the most horrid use of stock footage that I've ever seen (in one scene from Carnosaur 3 used here, we see life boats and a life preserver hung on the wall...yet the characters in this movie are in the middle of an underground basement-level of a Government facility in the middle of the desert...). To further the point, when the dinosaurs start running amok in the facility, the Government sends in not one team, not two teams, but three different, unrelated, teams of Black Op soldiers to deal with it, so that they can use footage from both Carnosaur 2 and Carnosaur 3, where the government/military characters were dressed wearing different uniforms. And one of these teams is dressed in...rain jackets. Yes, rain jackets. No explanation is given in-movie at all for sending in three unrelated teams, nor why one team is dressed in rain jackets despite the fact that it's not raining outside.

And it's a real shame too, because apart from that stock footage debacle, this movie actually had some potential. It's more or less a remake of the first Carnosaur movie, but minus the dino-birthing disease and with more likable lead characters (the Sheriff is actually played by none other then Eric Roberts, oddly enough, though even saying that he's phoning it in may be giving too much credit). And IMO, this movie actually worked the mad scientist angle better then the original Carnosaur. Here, the guy (named Dr. Hyde if you can believe that) was actually making intelligent dinosaurs at the request of the Government to use in overseas warfare in a project titled Jurassic Storm, but then he decided to go rogue and wanted to instead sell them to the highest foreign bidder, but before he can get that far they break loose and start causing havoc first in the nearby small desert town, and then in the facility itself.

To flesh out Eric Roberts' Sheriff character, he has a teen daughter (played by a porn star that looks almost as old as him) that sets him on the path of figuring everything out, as she and her boyfriend get attacked by the escaped Raptor and results in her getting hospitalized and the Sheriff wanting revenge on whatever attacked her, which leads him to the nearby government facility. To aid him along the way is a Wildlife Control Officer (played by a stripper, who has since gone on to star in many movies of this elk). At first they think the creature may be an escaped cougar, which is a subplot not in the original Carnosaur movie but is in the original Carnosaur novel that the series is based on, so it surprised me they included it here, and a surprise that is more then welcomed. If the movie had continue to follow the path of the original book, even the stock footage may not have seemed so bad for me because that book was pure awesome. Adding to the cast, just over halfway through we get two teams of Black Op military characters, and then a third team shortly after that. Most, like in Carnosaur 3, are just background cannon fodder and don't even have names or more then one or two lines of dialog, but there is a couple that are given personality and they're pretty fun to watch, especially the hard-as-nails swear-loving Boston-native leader of the 'Black Team'.

Also in it's favor is lots of good gore (granted it's all from stock footage of the other movies, but they could have gone near-goreless like the third movie did, so props have to be given there), and surprisingly they got James Horner to do the music. What kind of giant ass favor he owed these people, I'm not sure, but it was good to see his name there because the music is one of the movie's strongest points and is really befitting of a much better movie then the one the music ultimately ended up being for. Often times I'd zone out of what was happening on-screen and just listened to the awesome music.

There's honestly not a whole lot more to say, since most of it is just a clip show of the previous movies, which I've already reviewed. If this movie had been filmed using the actual props and costumes of the previous movies instead of horribly badly-integrated stock footage, it actually would have been a really good Carnosaur 4 or Carnosaur remake, as a lot of the actual plot itself was pretty good.. Unfortunately the use of stock footage to the degree they use it, especially in the second-half of the movie when all the dinosaurs take over the facility and all those random Special Black Op teams are sent in, as well as some of the newly-shot story aspects that had to be there in order to have the stock footage scenes make sense, really brings it down to not even being enjoyable on a so-bad-it's-good level, as it's just too damn distracting and really takes you out of the movie, instantly making you think of the better Carnosaur movies.

2/10 rooms in the Psych Ward
 

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