dinosaur | BLOODCRYPT

Paranormal Activity 2: B

Have you checked out the trailer for that Jurassic Park sequel, Jurassic World? Holy shit, man, they’re finally taking it to the next level! You don’t just have a theme park in the making, you have a functioning theme park with tons of visitors (read: more victims). You’ve got some big-ass prehistoric Hainosaurus (which is not technically a dinosaur, learn your paleontology, son). You’ve got some sort of genetically-altered super smartass dinosaur. You’ve also got tame velociraptors.

Yeah, I know, that might sound strange. How can you tame a velociraptor? Well, do you own a dog? Check this shit out: that motherfucker is really a wolf! I shit you not. Genetically speaking, it’s a direct cousin of that fuckin’ beast that ate up Little Red Riding Hood’s stupid bitch of a grandma. And you own it. And you pet it. And you pick up its shit.

Oh, but Richard, you’re saying, that took like, what, ten thousand years for wolves to become dogs! This new Jurassic Park movie doesn’t take place that far into the future! Well, asshole, maybe you might want to use the Google and read up on the domesticated silver fox. It was an experiment done in the former Soviet Union where they selectively bred foxes for tameness, and you basically went from vicious little beasts to pet foxes in just a few generations! Now apply that same shit to velociraptors. It’s been proven (in the first Jurassic Park movie) that those bastards can figure out how to open a door, and that’s when they’re at peak wildness. How many wolves do you know that can open doors? What, like maybe a few of them, at best? I believe I’ve made my point here.

By the time you’re reading this, the movie may have already come out and it might suck a dirty piece of ass. But that’s not my point. My point is that it did something different with the same concept.

Paranormal Activity 2 is basically the same movie as the first one, only it adds a little twist to the end. It’s not as impressive as having HD cameras in the 1980s like the third movie does, but if you liked the first, you’ll like this shit too. If you hated the first, nothing’s gonna change your mind. Me? I liked it. Wasn’t bored for a minute.

But I’m still craving for some kind of an interesting twist to the whole ghost/demon thing. Maybe in the (what are they on now?) next installment, we could learn that the demon is really the hero, and these stupid people have been doing all kinds of fucked up stuff when the cameras were off that we weren’t privy to in the first few movies. Like maybe they were screaming his name while masturbating, and when he’d show up to help them, they’d just laugh and continue to pleasure themselves.

Carnosaur (1993): C+

If, back in 1993, you came out of the theater after seeing Jurassic Park going “meh, that was alright, but I wish there was more dinosaur-carnage,” or “’clever girl’ and then an implied off-screen kill? Weak,” then Carnosaur is for you.

It was released months after Jurassic Park, but that’s totally a coincidence. To even suggest that Carnosaur is a blatant rip-off of the most popular dinosaur film ever is just plain wrong.

See, in Carnosaur, the dinosaurs are bred using viral transmission and chicken DNA, which is radically different from splicing them with frog DNA like in Jurassic Park. Duh. Also, there aren’t velociraptors in Carnosaur, you idiot! The dinos are mostly deinonychus, which are the exact same thing as raptors, only a couple of feet taller. As if this wasn’t evidence enough of Carnosaur’s integrity, consider that in Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs all get loose and start fucking up the humans. In Carnosaur, the dinosaurs all get loose and start fucking up the humans.

Gotta love the premise for this: Some asshole scientist hates people and loves dinosaurs so she plans to use her resources as a geneticist at a poultry plant (not a typo; poultry plant) to resurrect some dinosaurs so that they can take over the planet and eat all the people. What she plans to do with herself, being a human, during the genocide isn’t addressed but Carnosaur isn’t what you’d call a “logical” film.

It’s like a bad, Kevin Bacon-less version of Tremors for people who like dinosaurs.

One thing I have to give this movie credit for is the limited CGI effects. There’s no glitchy polygon-looking dinos feasting on CGI gore like in Raptor Island. They instead have fucking HAND-PUPPET dinosaurs chomping up people. That takes balls! To make a feature-length dino-horror film and have most of the kills be carried out by hand-puppets, and expect your audience to watch, is gutsy and I would actually rather watch Carnosaur any day over the endless clones of CGI-based dinosaur horror films. Sure some of the kill scenes look like an elaborate oven-mitt flapping around on a tarp full of pig guts, but it still looks better than a LOT of B-movie horror gore I’ve seen.

Think about how many other movies could have been improved with the utilization of hand-puppets. Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park 2, Jurassic Park 3, and Schindler’s List, just to name a few.

Stay with this gem if you pop it in because you get to see someone die giving live birth to a dinosaur and an epic T-Rex vs. bulldozer duel complete with prolonged side-profile camera shots like you are watching a game of Street Fighter II and some seizure inducing strobe effects. Spielberg didn’t give you that, now did he?