The End of Oak Street (2026) is the most recent “man vs. nature” blockbuster that swaps out modern-day animals and brings in dinosaurs for an extra dose of fun and fear that a bear or a shark can’t really compete with. It’s not the first time, nor will it be the last, that this what-if plot gets made into a movie.
Jurassic Park is easily the winner on how to do the concept well in giving audiences both the sense of wonder and the terror of humans trying to survive among prehistoric creatures. But genetically engineered dinosaurs weren’t just in that Spielberg film from 1993. A B-movie about killer dinos was released into theaters one month earlier.
Carnosaur went for the jugular, literally, with its batch of resurrected dinos. They were hungry for human flesh. Legs were bitten off, heads too. While Jurassic Park had Laura Dern as a lead, Carnosaur starred Dern’s mother, Diane Ladd, as a sinister mad scientist.
If you want a creature feature with a weird government conspiracy and a vicious kill count, Carnosaur is the one for you.
Two Different Dinosaur Movies
Jurassic Park is based on the 1990 novel by Michael Crichton, and it is considered a timeless classic that has given us memorable characters with quotable lines, cutting-edge CGI effects, and that nostalgic score by John Williams. It’s one of those movies where you react with shock if you find out someone you know has never seen it. It’s far more likely that someone has never seen the other dinosaur movie of ‘93.
Carnosaur is loosely based on the novel of the same name by John Brosnan, published in 1984, six years before Crichton’s work. It went on to get two sequels and two spin-offs, but it’s clear within the first ten minutes why this movie didn’t end up stomping into pop culture like Jurassic Park did.
Dinosaurs and Mad Science
Carnosaur begins with mysterious animal attacks near the town of Climax, Nevada. Genetically altered chickens give birth to baby dinosaurs, which rapidly grow and attack the locals. The police are baffled, and things get worse when the women in town get sick with a fever.
‘Carnosaur’ (1993)Credit: New Horizon Pictures
Caught in the middle are Doc (Raphael Sbarge), the overnight guard of an excavation site, and Thrush (Jennifer Runyon), a stubborn environmentalist. How the attacks and illness are connected leads to experiments in a laboratory run by Dr. Jane Tiptree (Ladd). It’s a conspiracy that will trigger doomsday.
The production of Carnosaur was hatched by executive producer Roger Corman, the king of low-budget B-movies, who helped the early careers of directors Martin Scorsese and James Cameron. Corman had also produced 1978’s Piranha as a ripoff of Jaws, so it shouldn’t be all that surprising that he made Carnosaur in anticipation of the success of Jurassic Park.
Prehistoric Mayhem
‘Carnosaur’ (1993)Credit: New Horizon Pictures
Carnosaur was released on May 21, 1993, a few weeks before Jurassic Park hit theaters on June 9. And they couldn’t be more different. That was intentional on the part of Carnosaur’s director and writer, Adam Simon, who talked about the use of graphic violence that he knew wouldn’t be in Spielberg’s movie.
“It seemed to me that dinosaur movies are usually so much about the sense of wonder of the dinosaurs that even if you’re afraid of them, they’re not that gory,” Simon said in an interview with Dread Central. His inspirations? The body horror of Alien and the movies by David Cronenberg.
The Creatures of Carnosaur
‘Movie Magic’ (1994)Credit: Discovery Channel
John Carl Buechler led the special effects team in creating the puppets and life-sized models of the Deinonychus and the Tyrannosaurus rex that have an appetite for humans. There are no actual Carnosaurs, as the title was taken from an outdated classification. And it didn’t have Jurassic Park’s budget, put around $63 million, or the two years of pre-production that were spent on designing the dinosaurs.
According to Simon, the budget for Carnosaur was under $1 million, and scenes from the script had to be cut due to this. In the documentary TV show, Movie Magic, the third episode of Season 1 featured Buechler and his team, where they were given only ten weeks to design and build the creatures for Carnosaur.
While the dinos can look good (and monstrous) in their close-ups, when they move, they look cheesy. The editing helps with the limitations in fast cuts during the grisly attack scenes. When Thrust and her group of environmentalists chain themselves to excavation equipment, they don’t expect to encounter a T.rex, who tears into the group, biting off limbs, leaving Thrust as the only survivor.
The most surprising part of Carnosaur is how dark it gets with the government conspiracy.
Diane Ladd’s Chilling Performance
‘Carnosaur’ (1993)Credit: New Horizon Pictures
Dr. Tiptree’s contempt for people has led her to orchestrate humanity’s extinction by resurrecting dinosaurs to reclaim the Earth. In every scene, Ladd is captivating as the mad scientist. Her acting even garnered a positive reaction from notable film critics, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, on their TV series, At the Movies.
During the segment for Carnosaur, Ebert panned it, but he was in agreement with Siskel, who praised what Ladd brought to the role. Siskel even mentioned Jurassic Park’s upcoming release at the time of the episode. He knew it was going to have “high-tech dinosaurs,” but he wondered if it would have “any humans as enjoyable as Diane Ladd’s character.”
Tiptree’s doomsday agenda is pure shlock. Her lab is more of a supervillain lair, with a laser cage holding in a T.rex. But Ladd pulls back from going over-the-top. She plays Tiptree with a soft-spoken voice and a calm head, as the end of the world is initiated by her prehistoric creations. Her fate is just as bonkers too, yet that can describe everything else in this movie.
The World of Carnosaur Is Bleak
‘Carnosaur’ (1993)Credit: New Horizon Pictures
If the people of the Nevada town aren’t shredded, the women soon become pregnant with the creatures (likely the inspiration that Simon took from Alien).
There is a shady government agency that wants to cover up what Dr. Tiptree is doing: in a bizarre scene, an official is sprawled on a table as he presents genetically altered blueberry pie to a senator for a taste test. There is a showdown between a sheriff and the Deinonychus, and a showdown between the T.rex and a skid loader. However, the grim and shocking ending won’t be spoiled here. You have to see it for yourself.
Sure, Jurassic Park is famous for the CGI effects, as well as countless other trivia facts. It also wanted the dinosaurs to behave like wild animals, not movie monsters. Carnosaur wasn’t as sentimental, fully leaning into the calamity of humans becoming food to prehistoric predators.
Maybe it’s time for a double feature?
