If Jurassic Park was Spielberg’s love letter to dinosaurs, then Carnosaur 2 is Roger Corman’s ransom note. Scrawled in crayon, sticky with beer, and held together with duct tape and dinosaur puppets that look like they were stolen from a Chuck E. Cheese liquidation sale, this movie answers the eternal question: “What if Aliens had no budget, no sense of pacing, and everyone fought rubber raptors with dynamite?”
Spoiler: the answer is “Carnosaur 2.”
Déjà Vu-saurus
The first Carnosaur (1993) was already a low-rent, straight-to-video riff on Jurassic Park, released months before Spielberg’s dinosaurs ate the box office alive. It had cheap puppets, gallons of fake blood, and Diane Ladd growling through dialogue about evil genetics. It was bad—but bad with a kind of gonzo charm.
Carnosaur 2 says, “Hold my beer.” Instead of trying something new, it just copies Aliens. I’m not even being metaphorical. It’s Aliens in a nuclear waste facility. You’ve got the wisecracking crew of expendables, the shady military guy hiding the truth, the traumatized kid surrogate, the dark corridors filled with monsters, the “let’s blow up the facility” plan… it’s plagiarism so blatant James Cameron probably sprained an eyebrow raising it.
Except the aliens are rubber dinosaurs that look like rejects from The Land Before Time if Don Bluth had suffered a stroke mid-sketch.
Cast of Carnivores (and Contractual Obligations)
The movie stars John Savage, a man who once acted alongside Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter and is now screaming at velociraptors made of foam latex. You can actually see him negotiating his paycheck in his eyes mid-scene. Cliff DeYoung plays the “government guy with secrets” archetype, delivering every line like he’s calculating how long it will take for his agent to stop returning calls.
And then there’s Jesse, the plucky teen hacker. In Aliens, Newt was a traumatized child who broke your heart. In Carnosaur 2, Jesse is a walking Hot Topic ad who apparently can defuse nuclear meltdowns with Windows 95 and sheer sass. The movie treats him like the second coming of Jesus with a joystick, which is funnier than anything the script intended.
The Dinosaurs: Foam, Latex, and Shame
The dinosaurs are, without question, the real stars. Not because they’re convincing—they’re not. They’re stiff, jerky animatronics and men sweating inside rubber suits, re-used from the first film and decaying faster than a McDonald’s salad. But the movie insists these things are terrifying apex predators, even when you can see the zipper down the back of the “velociraptor.”
The T. rex finale deserves its own paragraph. Picture this: a forklift battling a rubber dinosaur like a Walmart Black Friday sale gone wrong. It’s meant to echo Ripley’s iconic power-loader fight in Aliens, but here it looks like OSHA violations on parade. The T. rex wobbles like it’s drunk, the forklift looks like it’s about to stall, and the suspense is on par with watching two Roombas collide in a living room.
Explosive Plot Holes
The movie opens with a teenage hacker stealing dynamite from a nuclear waste facility because apparently security is optional in Nevada. When dinosaurs start munching workers, communications cut out, and the government sends in… not Marines, not scientists, but a random team of civilian technicians. That’s like sending in Geek Squad to handle Jurassic World.
The crew eventually discovers that the dinosaurs were cloned using fossil DNA, because apparently the government just keeps barrels of velociraptor embryos next to nuclear warheads. Radiation leaks, timers tick down, and the facility is about to explode—because of course it is. It’s like the filmmakers were handed a checklist titled “Generic 80s Action Script” and refused to skip a single box.
The “genius plan” is to use tripwired dynamite against the raptors. Which, to be fair, is exactly what I’d do if chased by men in rubber suits.
Carnage by Numbers
Deaths arrive like clockwork, each one designed to stretch the effects budget as thin as the latex on the dinosaur suits. One guy gets mauled in an elevator. Another accidentally sets off his own tripwire and turns himself into barbecue. A helicopter pilot is killed by a raptor that apparently learned how to hide in backseats like the world’s deadliest Uber driver.
And of course, our heroes constantly make the dumbest choices possible. They run toward the monsters. They split up in dark tunnels. They argue about paperwork while velociraptors are literally chewing on their coworkers’ legs. The dinosaurs aren’t the real predators—the script’s idiocy is.
The Finale: Forklifts vs. Foam
By the end, Jesse climbs into a forklift to fight the T. rex, because if you’re going to rip off Aliens, you might as well do it poorly. The forklift gently nudges the rubber beast toward an elevator shaft, where it falls like a Macy’s parade balloon losing air. Then Jesse pushes a detonator, blowing up the facility in a nuclear-light fireworks show that probably cost more than the rest of the film combined.
It should be epic. Instead, it looks like two drunk dads fighting in the Home Depot parking lot while their kids set off fireworks in the background.
Why It Exists (Hint: Roger Corman)
Let’s be clear: Carnosaur 2 was never meant to be good. Roger Corman produced it, which means the goal was to make something—anything—that could ride the wave of Jurassic Park money. He slapped together the leftover puppets from the first film, hired a cast that would work for scale, and gave the scriptwriters a VHS copy of Aliens as “inspiration.”
The result is the cinematic equivalent of a gas station hot dog: you know it’s bad for you, you know it’s made of scraps, but damned if it doesn’t have a kind of guilty, greasy charm.
Final Thoughts: Fossil Fuel for the Trash Fire
Carnosaur 2 is not scary. It’s not thrilling. It’s not even particularly fun unless you’re drunk, high, or hosting a bad-movie night with friends. But in its own warped way, it’s unforgettable. Where else are you going to see John Savage scream at a foam dinosaur while a teenage hacker saves the world with dynamite?
If Aliens is filet mignon, Carnosaur 2 is a microwaved chicken nugget shaped like a dinosaur—rubbery, cheap, and somehow still around because kids keep buying it.
