Carnosaur II

Carnosaur II; Science-fiction action, USA, 1995; D: Louis Morneau, S: John Savage, Cliff De Young, Ryan Thomas Johnson, Don Stroud, Arabella Holzbog

A secret underground laboratory, situated somewhere in the desert, managed to clone living dinosaurs, Raptors and Tyrannosaurus Rex, but the lizards killed all the scientists and members in the facility. Worker Jack Reed and his six friends arrive via a helicopter to the location to fix the computers, but quickly discover the horror secret. Surrounded by dinosaurs, the team is looking for a way out of the facility because their helicopter is destroyed, but until the rescue team shows up almost all are going to die, but a bomb was planted to destroy the monsters there.

That the dinosaurs have a future in the cinema was discovered way back in the black and white era, with such films like "Kong" and "The Lost World", but in most cases these fascinating lizards were unfascinatingly and disappointingly set-up in cheap stories, among them in the B-movie sequel to "Carnosaur". "This is just like some bad horror film!", says one female member of the team at one point in the film, which is still rather exaggerated, even though "Carnosaur II" is an average and standard fantasy film. The first dinosaur, a Raptor, shows up some 34 minutes into the film (a man in a costume), and, as a small treat, one giant T. Rex in the end (a 20 foot tall, but stiff puppet) fighting a bulldozer, yet since the effects are limited they show up only for seconds in the film, whereas the fast editing and "greedy" budget makes it seem as if they are more being hidden than they are being shown. This is a real B-film, but it did not exploit all the possibilities as some other B-movie masters that still managed to be creative and insert a bigger quality in the process.

Grade:+