Welcome back to Dinosaur Week III, where we celebrate all things dinosaur—my most favorite animals in the world!
The release of Jurassic Park changed the game, ushering in an era of dinosaurs ruling 90's pop culture. People were hungry for this stuff, and everyone and their uncle saw the dollar signs and cashed in on the craze. What resulted is a glut of dinosaur movies that ranged from the incredible to the unwatchable.
So, let's dive into the wonderful world of 90's live-action dinosaur movies that aren't Jurassic Park, and watch me rank some of the best and worst of the bunch!
TAMMY AND THE T-REX
Proof that limitation breeds creativity, Tammy and the T-Rex owes its existence to director Stewart Raffill, who in 1994 was presented with an animatronic T-rex destined for a theme park and decided to make a movie around it before it leaves. I'm not sure if movies have been born from far less.
The result is a wacky (and unusually gory) misadventure where a girl's boyfriend gets his brain transplanted into an animatronic T-rex, and all the mayhem that scenario can conjure. Featuring a veritable encyclopedia of B-movie ideas—brain transplants, mad scientists, unintentionally hilarious gore, horny teenagers—and starring a young Denise Richards and Paul Walker in one of their earliest roles, Tammy and the T-Rex is schlock of the highest order. Still, it's kind of fun watching an enormous T-Rex and Denise Richards pine for each other.
PREHYSTERIA
Who didn't want portable dinosaur pets in the '90s? Prehysteria was a 1993 home video comedy featuring dinosaurs like the T. rex and Stegosaurus, except the size of household cats, running around causing hilarious chaos. As a kid, this scenario would have been a dream come true!
While its appeal has long since waned, Prehysteria is still a nice and cheesy 90s movie that's a lot of fun in small doses. Speaking of, the movie also gets points for the amazing-looking dinosaur puppets, who were not only endearingly cute but were also voiced by the legendary Frank Welker, who you may know more as the voice of Megatron in The Transformers!
THEODORE REX
You would think a buddy cop movie starring a dinosaur and award winner Whoopi Goldberg in the radical 90's would be a recipe for success. But 1995's Theodore Rex is proof that not all recipes are safe for consumption.
For starters, Whoopi didn't want to do it and had to be sued to complete her contractual obligations. Secondly, the movie was plagued with so many rewrites and money troubles that even surprisingly cool scenes of live-action animatronic dinosaurs can't save it.
In the end, it ruined so many careers that even mentioning the name of the movie was taboo to the people in it. A bit harsh considering I think its biggest sin just being terribly unfunny. Theodore Rex's chaotic ambition is something I just can't help but be in awe over.
CARNOSAUR
Finally, we're getting to the meat of things. Carnosaur was an attempt by low-budget movie maverick Roger Corman to ride the wave of the media blitz following some upcoming movie called Jurassic Park in 1994. With nothing but gumption and his zeal for beating Steven freaking Spielberg to the punch, Corman assembled a ragtag team of filmmakers and special effects artists to make his goal a reality in as short a time as possible.
The result was a relatively fun dinosaur gorefest that earned a modest sum in the box office and beat out Spielberg's dinosaur movie to the theaters by almost a month—just as Corman wanted. And it was profitable enough to spawn two sequels and arguably gave birth to the modern mockbuster. Out of all the dinosaur movies here, Carnosaur really doubled down on how dangerous dinosaurs can be.
DINOSAUR ISLAND
Imagine seeing a VHS tape for a 1994 movie called Dinosaur Island, with a badass painted cover by none other than legendary fantasy artist Boris Vallejo himself. You, as a diehard dinosaur fan, pop it into your home player—only to be greeted with copious amounts of nudity, horrendous acting, and the laziest excuses for "dinosaurs" known to man.
But even hindsight does this Z-movie slop no favors. Bare boobs won't hide the fact that a movie called Dinosaur Island features very few dinosaurs, and what little that do appear are either horrendous CGI or laughably bad practical effects (the first full dinosaur the characters encounter is an obvious hand puppet!). How dare you use libido to sell your movie instead of dinosaurs!
If you're into seeing B-movie scream queens running around half-naked (or sometimes fully naked) for a few hours, you might give this more dinosaur heads than I would. And I will judge you for it.
ADVENTURES IN DINOSAUR CITY
Three teenaged friends who are obsessed with a cartoon about dinosaurs are accidentally transported to that show's world—and that's the only sane thing that happens in 1992's Adventures in Dinosaur City, a direct-to-video fever dream that proves geeking out over dinosaurs drives you insane.
The movie is populated with dinosaurs with Brooklyn accents, zany fight scenes involving articulate cavemen (who drop zingers like they're stand-up comedians), and precariously propped up by a convoluted plot even the writers were unable to follow. It skips the failing grade due to the obvious loved poured into the sets and the costumes, which is more than I can say about Dinosaur Island.
DINOSAUR BABES
When the opening credits of a prehistoric movie say it's based on real events, you know you've got something incredible. The title of the movie even buries the lede, considering there's so much more to this dinosaur-slash-exploitation film than "Dinosaur Babes" can ever unveil.
Director Brett Piper brings us this pseudo-documentary about a group of cavemen on a mission to rescue their women from a rival tribe who make ritual sacrifices to a T. rex. Said mission gets sidetracked by lots of dinosaur action and awkward love scenes, but the Big Bad T-Rex looks surprisingly badass, not gonna lie. So does the rest of the special effects (also done by Brett Piper), which brought dinosaurs to antediluvian life using everything from stop motion to full-sized animatronics.
Seriously, try to look for footage of the dinosaurs in this movie—it's like the director made this as an excuse to flex his effects work and just needed the full-frontal nudity to get his foot in the door.
T-REX: BACK TO THE CRETACEOUS
Touted as one of the first IMAX movies made purely for entertainment (apparently early IMAX was mostly documentaries), T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous is a fun piece of dinosaur cinema, done in a time when dinosaurs were starting to be taken a wee bit more seriously. In it, a young girl named Ally is obsessed with paleontology and dinosaurs. When a freak accident causes her to magically go back in time (back to the Cretaceous! *wink wink*), she will come face-to-face with wonders—and dangers—of prehistoric proportions!
As far as dinosaur movies go, this is as inoffensive as 90s movies can get. The CGI dinosaurs were never gonna match the budget of Jurassic Park, but they do the job. This being shot for IMAX 3D, we get scenes where scary dinosaurs like the T-Rex get uncomfortably close to the screen. This must have been fun to watch with 3-D glasses on!
The 1990s were a watershed moment for dinosaurs in media, and I'm glad (and somewhat horrified) to have lived through it! Agree with my ratings? Think I forgot a movie? Leave me a comment and let's talk about it!
I hope you're enjoying Dinosaur Week! Thanks for reading and see you tomorrow for a new post!
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