Tags:
Film: Carnosaur III: Primal Species
Year: 1996
Director: Jonathan Winfrey
Writer: Rob Kerchner
Starring: Scott Valentine, Janet Gunn and Rick Dean
Review:
This film starts with a military convoy moving down the road. They are attacked by terrorists. It then shifts to what looks like an oil refinery. We see a group of elite soldiers trying to take down the terrorists there. It turns out the latter is a military exercise. They complete the mission, but not as fast as their colonel wanted them to. He is Scott Valentine.
We then see a convoy of semi trucks that get pull over. There is a terrorist that hijacks them and kills a local police officer in the process. They take the trucks into a warehouse. They believe they have uranium, but when they open the back they find it is refrigerated. They are attacked by whatever is in the back.
A general then calls in the unit we saw earlier. The general is Anthony Peck. With him is a doctor, Janet Gunn. She gives Valentine as little information as possible as it is classified. Valentine mobilizes his unit and they go in.
Before they get there, we see local police officers arrest one of the terrorists. He is gagged in the back of a car due to him talking crazy about monsters. The police officers go into the warehouse where they find blood on the ground as well as the other truck. They go open it up and much like the terrorists; they are attacked by whatever is in the back. We get a glimpse of what it is, a dinosaur.
The Special Forces soldiers go in and they find the empty trucks and the blood. They follow a trail into the warehouse. Some boxes are knocked over on them and they find a body. A Velociraptor then attacks them. A member of their team, Terri J. Vaughn, is killed. Valentine gets separated from his men and has to seek refuge in a room. There is a raptor outside of the door. He hears gunfire and opens the door to find a unit of marines coming as back-up.
He goes back to Peck and Gunn where he learns that these dinosaurs are part of an experiment. They are called carnosaurs as they are mixed with human DNA, which makes them act differently as to how they would if they were naturally born. There are two of the raptors and a Tyrannousrex. The T-Rex is a-sexual and can produce eggs on its own. They do have the dinosaurs sealed at a harbor where there is water on three sides. They just have to find a way to capture them. They need to be caught alive with no damage done to them due to their unique DNA. It could be the answer to curing diseases. This severely hampers what the soldiers can do.
They have the carnosaurs trapped inside of the warehouse so they are setting up a net in order to capture them. This doesn’t work out as they plan, but they do end up killing of one of the raptors. They lose more of their men in the process as the dinosaurs end up on a ship.
Can the soldiers rig this ship to put the carnosaurs to sleep before they are wiped out? If they can’t stop them, what is stopping the carnosaurs from taking over the world? Especially with a discovery they make at the bottom of the ship they are on.
Now I was turned on to this film after watching the two films that preceded it. For this one, I like concept of it. This film does tie in the first one by saying that the carnosaurs are created through genetic tests. They don’t come out and state exactly what happened in the first film, but it is interesting that this film was originally not going to be a sequel, but just called Primal Species and be on its own. This film aligns closer to the second film in the series though due to continuity reasons. I do believe that if genetic dinosaurs that have some human qualities would be a threat to the world if freed. I’m fine with the human DNA to explain why they act like they do. I do think it is a little overplayed that they can’t kill the dinosaurs at first though; it is a plot device to lengthen the film. It turns out that they should probably just kill them, especially after what happens to one of the raptors after it ‘dies’. The film ends in a way that is clinched also, so I wasn’t a huge fan.
The acting is very bland across the board. Valentine shows some emotion, but we don’t get enough character development for me to care what happens to anyone. This film is constructed where we have just a lot of different soldier-like characters to kill off. Gunn looks good and I could see her as a doctor. Justina Vail is slightly interesting and also good to look at.
I will say that there are some good effects and some bad ones. They are all practical, which I liked. There is a little bit of gore in this film that actually looked really good. That kept me slightly interested. The dinosaurs look pretty good as well, despite them being rubber. The way they moved though doesn’t work. I tried to buy in and explain it with the human DNA, but it just took me out of the film. The editing never really built the tension to keep me interested either. I don’t know if this was a pacing problem or just the script in general. The score didn’t really stand out to me either. This doesn’t hurt or help the film.
Now with that said, this isn’t a good movie by any stretch. This the third film in a series that doesn’t do much in the way of continuity outside there are dinosaurs running amuck. There are some good concepts, but they are just poorly executed unfortunately. The ending was predictable. The acting is bland across the board. There are some good effects like the gore. There are also some bad ones like how the creatures move. The editing isn’t good; the film never builds the necessary tension that it needed for a true climax. The score doesn’t help or hurt the film as well. This is very below average film. There aren’t a lot of great horror dinosaur films out there, but this one I would avoid. It isn’t even funny to watch with friends unfortunately.
My Rating: 3 out of 10